March 2022

Electronic Musician

Record * Produce * Perform

Electronic Musician2 min read
Varied Approaches
In music production – as with many other creative endeavors – there is more than one way to skin a cat. There's is no definitive right or wrong way to compose or record a great track. That's something I couldn't help pondering while reading this mont
Electronic Musician1 min read
Electronic Musician
Editor-in-Chief Si Truss simon.truss@futurenet.com Content Director, Music Scott Rowley scott.rowley@futurenet.com Art Editor Steve Dawson steve.dawson@futurenet.com Production Editor Jem Roberts jem.roberts@futurenet.com Editor at Large: James Russe
Electronic Musician2 min read
New Gear Arturia Update Pigments And Polybrute
Arturia has rounded out 2021 with a pair of significant updates which bring some eye-catching new features to two of the company’s flagship synths. First up, Pigments – Arturia’s multi-faceted software ‘power synth’. Having already gained an additive
Electronic Musician1 min read
Slate Digital Promises To Go Beyond Ableton Live’s Ott Preset With The Mo-tt Dynamics Plugin
The OTT preset found in Ableton Live’s Multiband Dynamics plugin has become a modern music production staple, offering users a surefire way to make their tracks explode from your speakers and sound larger than life. Now Slate Digital is promising to
Electronic Musician1 min read
Ssl Launches Big Six Superanalogue USB Mixer
SSL has introduced a beefier version of its SiX compact console called – appropriately enough – Big SiX. This ups the ante by offering a 16-channel mixer, and blends features from the classic large-scale SSL consoles with more contemporary niceties s
Electronic Musician1 min read
Vcv Rack 2.0 Launches With Vst Support And More
VCV Rack is a wonderful thing – an open-source Eurorack-style modular soft synth with a great community behind it. Now we can celebrate the arrival of version 2, which offers a new UI, a dark mode for those light-night patching sessions, an improved
Electronic Musician2 min read
The First Wireless Headphones For Music Creation
Making music while monitoring through wireless headphones has traditionally been viewed as a bit of a no-no, with the latency introduced by the usual Bluetooth connection being too high to make it feasible. Quality can suffer when you ditch the cable
Electronic Musician1 min read
Reason’s New Midi Player Effect Can Generate Basslines In Seconds
Reason Studios has launched a new MIDI Player Effect for the company’s DAW – the Bassline Generator. Focused on helping you to create low-end parts as quickly as possible, this enables you to generate a bassline just by setting a few simple parameter
Electronic Musician1 min read
Sonible’s Smart:limit Promises Automatic Loudness – Without Sacrificing Dynamics
Loudness is a controversial subject in music making, particularly when it’s seen to be prioritized at the expense of dynamics. However, Sonible’s new smart:limit plugin is designed to remove the worry from peak limiting, promising to help you find th
Electronic Musician4 min read
PSPaudioware Saturator
The newest addition to PSP’s software lineup, PSP Saturator, is designed to add warmth, drive and grit to sounds through analog emulation. It includes eight saturation shapes for varying tonality, three signal sculpting engines, band processing, a pa
Electronic Musician9 min read
The Pro Producer’s Guide To Sidechaining
Sidechain compression is the process of using an external signal to trigger the threshold of a compressor. The rise in the popularity of French house in the noughties thrust the technique into the spotlight, and you can clearly hear the effect being
Electronic Musician1 min read
Four Classic Sidechain Compressor Plugins
FABFILTER PRO-C 2 $179 FabFilter have garnered a reputation as one of the best effects developers around, and Pro-C lives up to that reputation with great-sounding compression modes and a ton of flexibility. Its program-dependant attack and release c
Electronic Musician13 min read
Bonobo
Two decades into his career and Simon Green’s Bonobo is still reaching previously unexplored heights. Having debuted with the downtempo, trip-hop vibe of Animal Magic in 2000, his multi-layered sample-based approach to production has enveloped jazz a
Electronic Musician3 min read
Pop Synth Master Steve Winwood
For a period in the ‘80s classic rock and blues master Steve Winwood explored making records where he played all the instruments, enjoying great commercial success during that time. On albums like Arc Of A Diver (1980), and Talking Back to the Night
Electronic Musician5 min read
Minor Pentatonic Scale
Scales! Music teachers are always banging on about how important they are, and with good reason too, as they’re the keys that unlock a vast number of musical mysteries. Yet that doesn’t mean that you have to learn all of them right off the bat – when
Electronic Musician3 min read
Digidesign Turbosynth
Though Digidesign is no more (having been swallowed up by Avid), the name is still synonymous with hard disk recording thanks to the industry-wide saturation of its flagship product Pro Tools. Yet Digidesign’s beginnings were somewhat humbler, starti
Electronic Musician7 min read
M
$2,499 waldorfmusic.com Germany’s Waldorf has been around since the 1980s, rising out of the ashes of Wolfgang Palm’s famed synth company PPG. PPG and Palm found success with the various ‘Wave’ synths which used the newly commercialized technique of
Electronic Musician4 min read
MPC Studio
$269 akaipro.com Akai’s MPC Studio joins the MPC range, which comprises the MPC One, MPC Live, and MPC X. The Studio is a USB MIDI device that connects to a computer and controls the included MPC 2 DAW software – the other MPCs can also do this, but
Electronic Musician2 min read
Axis
$281 fluidaudio.com Axis is a new phantom-powered cardioid condenser from US brand Fluid Audio. Fluid is best known for its monitors and have produced some nice designs over the past 10 years. Now, with monitor headphones and the Axis mic added to th
Electronic Musician4 min read
Mercury-4
$39 cherryaudio.com Roland’s Jupiter series is often held aloft as one of the most important synthesizer lines of all time. There’s good reason for that, of course, with 1981’s state-of-the-art Jupiter-8 igniting the potential of keyboard analog synt
Electronic Musician5 min read
Sq80 V
$224 arturia.com During the long lost days of the 1980s, sampling technology went from an experimental concept to an indispensable part of music production. The only problem was, all the really elaborate samplers came with a caveat; did you buy a Fai
Electronic Musician2 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
FAST Verb
From $7.99 per month collective.focusrite.com Focusrite launched its plugin arm The Collective earlier this year with a trio of FAST-branded plugins aimed at making bread-and-butter mixing processes quick and accessible. Those first three plugins cov
Electronic Musician3 min read
Bohemian Breaks
From $7.99/month Really great drum break crate from the well-traveled sticksman, Piero Perelli. Across 200+ loops the Tuscan-born tub-thumper delivers a wonderfully seasoned showcase of deep, deft playing, across a variety of styles – making this pac
Electronic Musician2 min read
Taip
$69 babyaud.io Baby Audio's Taip (VST, VST3, AU, AAX) is a new plugin that uses AI to deliver its tape emulation. You won’t find typical tape machine options such as speed, tape type and bias. What you have instead are more creative settings (Glue, W
Electronic Musician5 min read
Cutting-edge Mixing Effects
Technology is constantly evolving, mixing plugins continue to push the envelope. While some companies take pride in emulating 1960s compressors, those who embrace digital technology are looking way into the future. Gone are the days of three-band con
Electronic Musician4 min read
Fantasy EQ
Modern EQ features make adjusting the balance of audio more intuitive and versatile than ever. Approach mixing with a multidimensional view of EQ. Broad and surgical curves, static and dynamic bands, the best EQs on the market provide all the options
Electronic Musician2 min read
Delay: What Makes Us Tick
Delay is a natural and real-world occurrence and helps us gauge space size and distance. Ever clapped in a cave or a valley? The time it took for the sound to bounce off the walls and then return to your ears is exactly that. Its primal nature has ma
Electronic Musician1 min read
Three Of The Best
IZOTOPE Neutron 3 $150-$500 iZotope’s AI channel strip package comes in Essential, Standard and Advanced versions. With several power-packed modules that can be strung together or used as individual plugins, there’s a lot going on here. Tools like th
Electronic Musician2 min read
Enter the Multiverse
We are all familiar with the digital multi-effects that model modern and historic amps and effects of various manufacturers. A Line 6 Helix can emulate almost 100 amps and over 200 effects. An AxeFX hovers around 200 amps and 2000 cabinets, in additi
Electronic Musician1 min read
Paleman’s Top Tips
I don’t view this as a moral thing (ie restriction is morally better than indulgence)but I’ve noticed over the years that a lot of works that are sonically clear, or unique, have come from an artist choosing to work with a limited set of materials or
Electronic Musician3 min read
Free Samplers
Based off the commercial TX16Wx Pro sampler, this sampler is pretty sophisticated on its own account, letting you load and zone multiple samples, edit their waveforms and even record your own samples into it. Other features here are two analog-style
Electronic Musician3 min read
Paleman
Back in the early ’10s, the dark, cerebral sound of early dubstep compelled a generation of forward-thinking producers to reconstruct club music in innovative forms. Calum Lee was at the heart of this scene, producing warped, bass-heavy rollers that

Electronic Musician

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