Music Tech Focus

Editor At Large Andy has an MA in Music Technology and has been writing about it for 25 years. He has launched and edited several magazines in the subject and was Editor of MusicTech for four years. Naturally, he has far too many synthesisers. Dave i

You are holding a very special issue of MusicTech, 100 per cent dedicated to Ableton Live. Whatever your experience with the software – whether you count yourself as an expert, or are coming to the software for the first time – you will find great ad

Welcome to MusicTech’s Ableton Live 2019 Focus! This is a special issue completely dedicated to your favourite DAW and in it, we have a dozen workshops and several features, all designed to improve your Live music production. The focus in this partic

£599 STREET Contact AKG/Sound Technology | soundtech.co.uk Given that you can pick these up for less than half the price that they cost when we reviewed them, you can see they’re very much aimed at the high-end mastering market – £600 is still a lot

The list of labels Jonas Rathsman’s name has graced includes some of the most respected in dance music. Imprints such as Solomun’s DIYnamic, Damian Lazarus’ Crosstown Rebels and Anja Schneider’s Mobilee – all renowned for their melodic, hypnotic and

£399 Contact Novation | global.novationmusic.com One of two entries for Novation this time around, and it’s fair to say that the UK synth manufacturer has been so busy that it could have had three, including the original Circuit. The Mono Station ver

Slicing audio is a vital part of the sampling workflow. Even though we can time-stretch audio quite freely, the process of slicing it gives us different ways to dig deeper and manipulate the material. This can be something as simple as slicing and re

PART 1 Usually, when people talk about recording vocals in Live, they focus on warping (time stretching), which is undeniably a big part of what Live’s about. But let’s discuss some other aspects of working with vocals, including recording, editing,

PART 2 In the first part of our Live vocal tutorial on p40, we discussed different ways to process and organise vocals in our studio productions. Now we’re talking about how to do it live – translating our vocals to the stage while keeping everything

Field recording is an artform in itself. It can be about capturing immersive, lengthy chunks of natural sounds – the ambience of a specific time and location – or grabbing raw material to recycle into short samples for your music productions. I made

Drum Buss was one of the new audio-effect devices introduced in Live 10, and is designed as a one-stop solution for your beat-processing needs. It includes distortion, compression, equalisation and transient shaping. It also has a very cool Boom cont

Guitar pedals are showing up in electronic-music setups all over the place. While there’s a minimal beauty in the classic computer/controller/interface setup, there’s a glorious mad-scientist kind of excitement to having synths, pedals and cables str

Here, we’ll show you how to use Simpler exclusively as a loop playback machine. For our demo, we’re using Live 10, but if you’re using Live 9.5 or above, you’ll be fine. The first task is to load some audio into Simpler, dragging over a clip from ano

As electronic musicians, we have the best of all possible worlds. We can work with the limitless possibilities of computers and software, and we have the restrictive but engrossing workflows of hardware synthesisers and other devices. Hardware’s enjo

There are times when music production, especially when it comes to mixing, seems like some weird kind of medieval black art, left over from the days when men in lab coats toiled over warm valves in a place called a ‘recording studio’. One of the most

Return tracks are present in all versions of Live and they’re incredibly useful, so it’s worth paying closer attention to them. It’s also good to appreciate that they can be used for sound design and to host content that you might not expect to go in

If you read our review this issue, you’ll know that Ableton has released a public beta of Live 10.1. Who knows, by the time you read this, it might have had a final release. Probably not, though, as Ableton can be cautious. 10.1 introduces fixes as w

€499 Contact Arturia | arturia.com, sourcedistribution.co.uk You want every classic synth worth its salt ever made? Plus a few other keyboards that have reached classic status? What do you mean you don’t have limitless money to spend on the real thin

FREE UPDATE Contact Ableton | ableton.com Ableton has released the public beta of Live 10.1 – it’s available now from ableton.com. A point-one release isn’t always newsworthy, but Ableton has history when it comes to adding features to free updates –

£149 Contact Native Instruments | native-instruments.com Is it really over four years since I reviewed the Komplete Kontrol S-Series Mk1 keyboards? This was a revolutionary series of controllers that really did start to blur the lines between hardwar

£249 Contact iZotope | izotope.com I Zotope has updated its Nectar vocal-production suite to version 3, with a tasty new GUI and intelligent mixing features that bring it in line with Neutron and Ozone. On the surface, many of the modules remain the

€149 Contact UVI | uvi.net If you’re anything like me, your chosen DAW or sample purchases will include numerous drum kits, some of which are engineered to copy the classics. But where UVI hopes to tempt you is with a vast collection of drum sounds t

£149 Contact FabFilter | fabfilter.com Like so many of FabFilter’s other plug-ins, the original FabFilter Pro-L limiter had become a staple of our mix and mastering sessions. Not only did each of its limiting algorithms sound superb, but the graphica

£499 Contact Audient | audient.com Audient’s designer David Dearden has been in the console business since the 1980s and co-founded Audient a couple of decades ago to focus on big analogue consoles, while the rest of the market went digital crazy. As

£69 Contact Sonnox | sonnox.com Adouble-tracked vocal can help bring a song to life and give it a professional-sounding sheen, but it requires a great deal of time and patience from both the singer and the engineer, and, in some situations, you may o

Price £34 Contact Loopmasters loopmasters.com Taking its influence from a range of classic blues styles, this pack from Loopmasters contains just over 1GB of 24-bit audio in a choice of formats, including 56 sampler patches. You’ll find some surprisi

Price $29.99 Contact Beta Monkey Music betamonkey.com This library from Beta Monkey Music features 60s and 70s rock ’n’ roll and Motown drums performed on a booming, vintage Ludwig Black Oyster drum kit, with 285 loops and fills ranging from a groovi

Price £29.95 Contact info@loopmasters.com loopmasters.com Latin Afro is a collection that offers up the soulful sounds of Latin America, with 377 WAVs or Apple Loops and 533 REX2 files. The pack is essentially made up of 14 construction kits, but the

Price £29.95 Contact Loopmasters loopmasters.com Acoustic Blueprints is a new pack from Loopmasters that’s jammed with a plethora of plucked-instrument loops, including acoustic guitars, electric bass, mandolin, slide guitar, ukuleles, dulcimers and

£99 Contact M-Audio or InMusic | m-audio.com or inmusicbrands.com The quality of USB microphones is increasing all the time, with more being released that are good enough to go into the studio. M-Audio’s Uber Mic promises a hell of a lot for its £99,

Price £34 Contact info@loopmasters.com loopmasters.com Psytrance has been around for many years, but it’s not that often that we see a quality psy sample pack cropping up. This latest from Loopmasters is looking to fit the bill, with 343 loops and 72

Price £174 (on sale at £59 on some websites) Contact sourcedistribution.co.uk Eventide’s Blackhole reverb plug-in was originally released in 2012, although its algorithms date back even further, to the company’s DSP4000 and H8000FW hardware. The plug

£134 Contact Propellerhead | propellerheads.se The highlights of Reason 10 were the cosmetically similar, but sonically very different, synths: Europa and Grain. Europa had such an impact that the Props have also decided to release it as a separate A

Price £41 (Amazon) Contact via website mixcder.com Active noise-cancelling headphones can be good for pinpoint mixing, the theory being that the less that comes in from the outside world, the more you will hear in your mix/inside world. They used to

Price £14.99 Contact Sample Magic samplemagic.com Berlin Techno Sessions is a new pack from Sample Magic that aims to capture the dark analogue sequences, driving drums and pulsating subs of after hours Berghain. There’s over 600MB-worth of 24-bit au

Price $30 download $15 One month access to whole site Contact Groove 3 groove3.com Adam Pollard, aka Multiplier, joins forces with Groove 3 for a new tutorial that’s packed with 50 videos of tips and tricks using Live 10. With a one hour and 56 minut

Price £29.95 Contact info@loopmasters.com loopmasters.com Latin Underground is a new pack from Loopmasters that sees purveyors of Columbian dance music, DJ Wady and Dvit Bousa, crafting a lively collection of Latin-infused tech house grooves. There’s

Price £18 Contact ModeAudio modeaudio.com Grid Racer from ModeAudio taps into the continuing rise of 80s retro-inspired synth music with this cool collection of video-gamey, neon-tinged loops, tail samples, drum hits and MIDI files based on 15 constr

£2,998 A PAIR Contact ADAM Audio | adam-audio.com The smallest monitors in ADAM Audio’s S-range certainly deliver more across the board than you might expect given the size. These feature a two-way nearfield design, with a seven-inch woofer coupled w