The inside story behind their classic albums
Kilohearts Phase Plant Synth Masterclass
IK Multimedia UNO Drum In-depth Review
Adding Feel & Groove Programming Tips & Tricks
More!
NEW GEAR
Focusrite buys Adam Audio, bringing studio monitors into its range Focusrite’s range of products contains audio interfaces, MIDI controllers and synths – but studio monitors are conspicuous by their absence. We can see the logic, then, in the company’s acquisition of Adam Audio, a respected specialist in this field. This represents the Focusrite Group’s first acquisition since it went public in 2014 – it already includes Novation and the Amplify Brands – and as Founder and Chairman Phil Dudderidge explains, the purchase is part of a wider company strategy. “I am delighted that we have an important new addition to our family of brands,” he says. “For the Focusrite Group, the creation and recording of music is everything. With a vision to create the most holistic creative experience for recording professionals and musicians alike, choosing the right high-precision studio monitor brand is key. Together with Adam Audio we can achieve so much more, removing the technical barriers that frustrate artists seeking to record and reveal their true sound.” We're told that, while Adam Audio will share knowledge and resources with Focusrite, it will continue to be business as usual otherwise. "The A7Xs and S3s have become standards in recording spaces across the globe," says Focusrite Group CEO Tim Carroll. "Even so, I know the team have no interest in resting on their laurels. We need to ensure they receive all the support they require to continue raising the sonic bar."
Casiotone comeback! Popular with families and used by countless garage bands who couldn’t afford anything else, the Casiotone range of portable keyboards was a fixture in the early ’80s. Now Casio is introducing a revamped line-up of Casiotone models for the next generation of players. In many ways, the CT-S200, CT-S300 and LK-S250 are cut from similar cloth to their predecessors, with each offering a wide range of built-in sounds and rhythms (400 and 122 respectively), plus 50 patterns in Dance Music Mode. You also get USB MIDI and a rechargeable battery. Thanks to the slimline chassis, weight has been kept down to six pounds, and there are 61 full-size keys. Portability is aided by the inclusion of a carry handle. Expect to see the new Casiotones in stores later this year – get ready for a new generation of keyboard enthusiasts. Prices are $109 for the CT-S200, $139 for the CT-S300, and $159 for the LK-S250.
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FEEL COVER & GROOVE FEATURE
FEEL & GROOVE
Work your stale, grid-drawn MIDI notes into a real, meaningful musical phrases with our guide
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hat’s the difference between everyday sound and music? We’re surrounded by sounds over which we have no control: traffic noise, environmental sounds, overheard conversations and, of course, the music we encounter when walk into shops, cafés or restaurants, or when cars drive past with their stereos cranked to maximum. But what is it that separates the auditory experiences we classify as ‘sound’ from those we’d categorize as music. A popular definition of music is ‘organized sound’, whereby anyone writing or playing music takes control over the sounds they make and, in that control, order and ‘organization’, random acts of noise-making become deliberate, planned and, therefore, music. For others, that definition doesn’t go far enough; this guide will build on that definition to explore why it is that listening to and playing music can cease to be just a listening experience to become something which captures a wider collection of our senses. Whenever you tap your foot or nod your head in time to a groove, you don’t just hear it, you feel it. And ‘feel’ is the word we’ll be exploring this month, discovering that it contains an unusual magic.
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Understanding Rubato Rubato is a musical term which describes ‘pulling’ a performance in and out of time, to provide a more emotional, sympathetic effect
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We’ve recorded three parts into this track. A main piano figure playing running eighth notes, and an accompanying strings part, which has been split into higher and lower instruments. Here’s the piano performance with strict quantize. Most of the emotion is lost to metronomic timing.
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Here’s the piano as it was recorded live. It’s so tempting to quantize a part when you hear it playing like this, as some notes are early and some are so obviously late. However, it’s in that ebb and flow that musicality lies.
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This sounds better, but we’re not yet hearing Rubato. At the end of each four-bar section, we want to hear the piano ‘pull back’, arriving a little late on the down-beat of the fifth bar before picking up the pace again.
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We can accentuate these moments, pushing the notes leading up to the end of each four-bar phrase late, before then judging the rate of ‘recovery’ of the notes afterwards to get our phrase back in time. We adjust each note manually to achieve this result.
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We add two more touches. The first is to adjust velocities where necessary, to make sure the phrase flows even more musically. And secondly, we build a rallentando at the end, creating a series of tempo steps to slow down the end of the piece.
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So let’s look to capitalize on the musicality of the phrase whilst eradicating the bits of timing which are sufficiently ‘out’ as to prove distracting. We start by selecting a 45% Quantize strength for the notes, which pulls them nearly halfway between their played position and ‘perfect’ timing.
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© Virgin Archive
TANGERINE DREAM 22
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By Danny Scott
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nyone who takes a serious look at the history of electronic music, will, at some point, come across Tangerine Dream. Formed in 1967, they were one of the bands that undeniably helped steer music towards its experimental, electronic future. In the late-60s and early-70s, there were several, shifting line-ups, but everything seemed to pivot around the band’s driving force and ‘frontman’, the late Edgar Froese. They enjoyed underground success with albums like Electronic Meditation (1970; recorded by Froese, Klaus Schulze and Conrad Schnitzler) and Atem (1973; this was the second album to feature what is widely regarded at the classic line-up of Froese, Christopher Franke and Peter Baumann), which John Peel made Album of the Year. Their music also caught the attention of a young British hippy called Richard Branson, who’d recently set up his Virgin record label. Virgin had just signed Mike Oldfield and was about to enjoy worldwide success with his debut album, Tubular Bells. Tangerine Dream had found their spiritual home! The deal with Virgin allowed them to make maximum impact on what was still a fledgling electronic music scene, and the period between 1973 and 1979 became known as TD’s ‘Virgin Years’. Remarkably, the band’s first album for Virgin, 1974’s Phaedra, made the UK Top 20, rubbing shoulders with the likes of The Carpenters and the Bay City Rollers! It’s this era that has been chronicled and celebrated by the recently released and rather lavish 16 CD/2 Blu-Ray box set, In Search of Hades: The Virgin Recordings 1973-1979. Alongside remastered versions of the albums, there is a selection of unreleased Phaedra outtakes, some 5.1 mixes, a German documentary that hasn’t been available since it first went out in 1975 and several live shows, including Coventry Cathedral in 1975. Tangerine Dream are still around. Sort of. It contains none of the original or Virgin Years members, of course – Edgar Froese was the only constant until he sadly passed away in 2015. The other two main members of the Virgin Years
line-up were Christopher Franke (a member from 1971-87) and Peter Baumann (1971-77). Franke now works in the soundtrack industry in the US, while Baumann released several solo albums and founded the Private Music record label. Like Franke, he’s now based in the States and has just released a new collection of tracks called Neuland, recorded with another former TD member, Paul Haslinger. We managed to track down Baumann to his San Francisco studio and asked him about the box set, playing live shows in cathedrals and the ‘relaxed’ recording sessions for Phaedra. According to the various versions of the Tangerine Dream story, it seems that you joined the band by accident. Is that actually how it happened? Yes, totally! A complete accident. I was at a concert and I ended up talking to this guy who turned out to be Christopher Franke. I told him that I was playing in a band, but I didn’t find the music exciting. It was a covers band… playing English and US rock covers. I told him that I wanted to find something that was more experimental. He seemed quite excited by this and made a note of my address. Several days later, I received a letter asking me to come to a rehearsal. His band was looking for a keyboard player. Analog technology… A letter! Ha ha! This was decades before mobile phones. In fact, I didn’t even have a normal phone. None of us did. Musicians didn’t make much money back then! When I went along to see them, I was worried that they thought I was some kind of master keyboard player. I wasn’t! I grew up with classical music because my father was a composer and, yes, I understood classical music, but I wasn’t a fantastic classical musician. There was no need for me to worry. When I arrived at the studio, I said, “OK, what are we playing? What’s the song?” Edgar said, “I don’t know what we’re playing. We’ll start something and you can join in with us.” Christopher was
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INTERVIEW
A 16 CD box set celebrates the German synthpioneers’ much-lauded Virgin Years. Peter Baumann was part of that Virgin line-up and he reveals the secrets behind those classic electronic albums. “There was no preparation. We just switched on the synths, smoked a joint and made some noise!”
HOW-TO MAGAZINE
THE ART OF SYNTH SOLOING
Why Stop At Vibrato?
Explore some exciting additional functions for your Mod Wheel By Jerry Kovarsky
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ast month, we looked at the ways we could use the Pitch Bend controller to enhance your sounds. Here, we'll explore adding some secondary functions to our Mod Wheel/Vibrato controller mechanism to add more dimension to your lead synth sounds. Before We Begin… There's no law stating that your Mod Wheel/ joystick has to be used to introduce vibrato to a lead sound. Many players like to create vibrato using the pitch bend mechanism; rocking it back and forth like a guitar player’s finger on a string. This frees up the other
controller to do things like filter cutoff, bringing in various effects, and fading in other oscillators, to suggest just a few ideas. For the sake of this article, I’m going to assume that you’re using an LFO to modulate the pitch, and bringing in the depth of that pitch modulation via your controller. But why stop there? Subtle Secondary Settings An easy secondary function to add is to use the mechanism to also slightly increase the speed of the LFO as you move it further. I like to keep this subtle, so I only use a small value. Either on the LFO page of your instrument, or via a
Fig. 1. Using Spectrasonic’s Omnisphere, you can assign an LFO to modulate the amp level, producing tremolo. This is added to the vibrato also being brought in by the Mod Wheel.
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Modulation Matrix, assign your Mod Wheel/ Joystick to modulate LFO rate (assign it to the LFO that is being used for vibrato). If you want to make your lead sound emulate a real wind instrument, try adding some amp modulation along with the vibrato. Routing an LFO to amp level will produce a tremolo effect, where the sound fades in and out (see Fig. 1). Don’t go too far: you want to hear the volume “pumping” a little bit, but you don’t want it to ever completely disappear. I tend to use the same LFO that is producing the vibrato effect, but you are not limited to that. Perhaps you want to try a different LFO waveform (triangle instead of sine) running at the same rate, or try the same shape, but running at a slower speed. You should also explore a negative modulation value, which inverts the effect. In the same spirit, you can add a slight amount of filter modulation, using the same LFO. Try modulating the filter cutoff, plus add just a slight amount of resonance modulation as well, but not too much. Instead of modulating the Filter Cutoff with the LFO, try routing the Mod Wheel directly to the cutoff so you can manually open it a little bit as you increase your vibrato. If your synth has more than one filter, try setting the second one to Hi-Pass, Band-Pass, or Band-Reject and sweep it manually along with your vibrato. If you are using an FM-based lead you can route the Mod Wheel to a modulator level to brighten the sound in the same way (see Fig. 2). Digging Deeper I have plenty more ideas when you want to go further. Set up a synced oscillator sound,
REVIEW
IK Multimedia
UNO Drum $250 ikmultimedia.com
By Si Truss
Si is editor of Future Music and Electronic Musician magazines
Strengths + + +
Crunchy, hybrid sound engine complemented by analog drive and compression Parameter automation and performance tools allow for complex sequencing Decent amount of sonic variety
Limitations - - -
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Single mini-jack output for 12 sounds is a pain Poor battery life Hardware feels cheap compared to its closest rivals
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The Italian brand follows up last year’s UNO Synth with a super lightweight, ultra-compact beatmaker, but would you want to hit the road with it?
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aving spent several decades focused on software, MIDI devices and mobile peripherals, Italian outfit IK Multimedia made its entry into the world of analog instruments with last year’s UNO Synth. While that instrument was impressive, there was no getting around the fact that the hardware itself felt a little ‘cheap’ – its lightweight, plastic construction, rudimentary keyboard and simplistic control surface belied the rich, weighty monosynth contained within. With this follow-up groovebox, that dichotomy between build quality and feature set is, if anything, more prevalent. The hardware itself is largely the same as that of the UNO Synth; the plastic chassis is identical, albeit in white, with an identical row of seven rotaries flanking a fairly basic calculator-like screen. Again, all other control is handled by an array of front panel ‘buttons’ built into the plastic top panel, which offer little tactile response. The main difference here is that the two-octave ‘keyboard’ of the synth has been removed, making way for a 16-button X0X-style sequencer and grid of 12 trigger pads. As with its predecessor, the UNO Drum is disarmingly lightweight, which gives it a slightly toy-like feel, but does mean it’s easy to transport. That portability is added to by the fact that the UNO Drum can be powered by either a USB connection of four AA batteries. In our tests, however, battery lifespan has proved to be pretty poor – using a fresh set of alkaline AAs, the low
battery indicator began flashing after only 25 minutes, although power lasted for around an hour and a quarter in total. The budget nature of the hardware is more of an issue here than with the synth for two reasons. Firstly, the UNO Drum arrives at a slightly higher price point – it’s around $50 more than the Synth was on release. Secondly, it faces stiffer direct competition, notably from Arturia’s excellent DrumBrute Impact, another analog-powered drum machine that, at the time of writing, is selling for a similar price to the UNO Drum. Comparing the hardware of the two isn’t particularly favorable to the UNO; with its chunkier plastic body and abundance of pads and rotaries, the Impact feels significantly higher-end. The other hardware issue here – again, something Arturia’s machine does better – is the lack of I/O. Connections here are exactly the same as the UNO Synth: USB, MIDI in/out (via included adapters) and 3.5mm audio in and out ports. While a single audio output is fine with a monosynth, running 11 drum machine voices through a single mini-jack output is a bit of a pain. That said, the inclusion of an audio input is a nice touch, allowing for additional inputs to be run through the internal compressor. Fortunately, the hardware itself isn’t the whole story here. As with its synth predecessor, the UNO Drum is more powerful than it initially appears and, in several areas, is more fullyfeatured than many other drum machines at this
REVIEW
Korg
Volca Nubass $280 korg.com
By Si Truss
Si is editor of Future Music and Electronic Musician magazines
Strengths + + +
Great-sounding filter Does a killer 303 impression Accents, slides and transpose are great for inspiring riff ideas
Limitations - - -
We're not convinced the Nutube tech adds very much Lacks the paraphonic sequencing and detune of the original Volca Bass Drive and saturation are rather subtle
Korg’s latest offering boasts a mini vacuum-tube oscillator, but is this synth all mouth and no trousers?
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or their price and size, Korg’s original trio of analog Volca instruments were all fairly revolutionary at the time. Six years on though, it’s definitely the Volca Bass that has aged best. With its three paraphonic oscillators, gnarly filter and slide-equipped sequencer, the original Bass remains an excellent source of genuinely meaty analog synth tones at a winning price. Now Korg has brought us an update of sorts – the Volca Nubass – making use of some eye-catching new technology. The Nubass gets its name from Korg’s Nutube tech; a modern take on the classic vacuum tube using a fluorescent display. Here, this is used to produce the main oscillator as well as add saturation to a sub oscillator. This marks the main difference in setup between the Nubass and its predecessor. Whereas the original Volca Bass had three oscillators that could be played and tuned independently, here both the oscillator and sub track have the same pitch, with a single tuning rotary providing +/- one octave of range for both. As with the oscillators of the Volca Bass, the main oscillator is switchable between square and saw waves. The sub oscillator, meanwhile, has volume and saturation level controls.
The filter here is a transistor ladder low-pass with cutoff and resonance controls. At low resonance, it’s smooth and great for rounded, subby basses. With the resonance cranked, it becomes aggressive – perfect for brash club sounds. As with the previous Volca Bass, there’s both a simple envelope generator and LFO providing modulation. The EG has controls for attack and decay, plus a switchable sustain stage. Unlike the previous Volca Bass, however, the envelope generator can’t be routed to the VCA. The LFO, meanwhile, can be switched between triangle and square wave shapes, has controls for rate and modulation depth and can be routed to filter cutoff, amp or oscillator pitch. The LFO has a sync option too (actually a retrigger setting rather than standard tempo sync – ie, with sync on, the LFO will retrigger with each new note played). This goes some way to make up for the lack of amp envelope, since the LFO can effectively be retooled as a very basic AD envelope generator. The attached step sequencer features both accent and slide functions too, which both help to add movement and variation to basslines. Accents can be applied to individual steps, with three levels available for each step,
“While the sub oscillator saturation does add something, the effect is subtle”
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COVER MASTER FEATURE CLASS
PHASE PLANT Recreating iconic synthesizer architectures with Kilohearts’ revolutionary new modular soft synth
By Francis Preve Francis is one of the world’s most prolific sound designers. Find out more at francispreve.com
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very so often, a small developer will release a groundbreaking product with minimal fanfare and within a few months, early adopters spread the word so passionately that the product becomes a game-changing hit. Ableton began as a tiny start-up with an oddball DAW in 2000. Xfer Records released Serum in 2014 and within a year, it became one of the most influential softsynths of the past decade. Kilohearts’ Phase Plant is currently poised to have a similar impact on the synthesis world. By taking the core concepts of modular racks and combining them with an Ableton-like interface, Phase Plant delivers on the promise of a fully configurable synthesis architecture with few compromises. There are four oscillator options: Analog, Sample, Wavetable, and Noise. Multi-mode filters, EQ, and multiple distortion types then sculpt their output. Modulation tools run the gamut from DADHSR envelopes, customizable LFOs that double as step sequencers, sophisticated random generators, and MIDI tools for velocity and aftertouch. But unlike most other soft synths, you can have as many of these elements as your CPU can handle— and the full version comes with over 30 effects that can be applied on a per-voice basis. For many producers, it’s hard to know where to begin, so over the next few pages, we’ll look at a few classic synth architectures that can be quickly designed within Phase Plant.
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TECHNIQUES
CREATIVE GATING We run a full diagnostic test on the humble gate, and discover that its capabilities run deeper than you think
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9000
ates – also known as ‘noise gates’ – are one of those wonderful pieces of music technology which were developed for one purpose but have since been completely reimagined. A gate features a Threshold level, and unless the sound passing through a gate reaches that level, the gate remains closed, effectively ‘silencing’ the part playing through it at times. This was extremely useful in the days when recording channels were inherently ‘noisy’ (such as tape), to ensure that the latent sound of hiss was shut off and was only heard when the part recorded to each track of the tape reached a certain volume. These days, the use of gates on individual tracks of a mix isn’t required in nearly the same way, but this hasn’t killed off the technology. Nowadays, the humble gate – in both hardware and software forms – continues to find favor. The function of a gate can go beyond merely opening and closing based on volume threshold. Let’s suppose you have a sustained pad sound in your mix which you’d like to make less ‘flat’ and more rhythmic. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll be able to achieve the desired result using your MIDI keyboard alone, as most pad sounds feature long attack and release times, which lack the percussive qualities necessary to produce a rhythmic performance. But using a gate, you can easily do this, by employing a sidechain trigger. If you set up a percussive sound on another track and select this as the sidechain ‘target’ for a gate inserted as an effect on your pad part, the sidechain input will open whenever the percussive source is detected. If you program the desired rhythm for the percussive part, this will super-impose that rhythm onto the pad sound, opening it to be heard with each percussive note, and closing it in the gaps. To hear a basic example of sidechain gating, have a look at and listen to the walkthrough on the next page. Effectively, then, gates enable us to control the volume of any sound. Mostly commonly, the gate acts as a kind of ‘binary switch’, either allowing a sound through (to be heard) or closing a sound down, to silence it. However, more sophisticated gates allow for more control, adding parameters to allow for more creative uses than mere ‘open or closed’ options. FabFilter’s Pro-G gate, for example, allows you to vary the volume threshold, so that ‘closed’ gate treatments don’t necessarily mean silent ones, as well as looking at the function of attack and release times to further modify the sound being gated. This month we’re also looking at ways to achieve gating-style effects without actually employing gate plugins, and as we’ll see, your DAW’s audio editing tools offer a great place to start.
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