February 2022

Electronic Musician

Record * Produce * Perform

Electronic Musician1 min read
Making Room
When we discuss 'studios' in these pages, it's usually in the context of the gear they contain, or the techniques being applied within them. Of equal importance though, despite being less frequently discussed, is the space itself; the room(s) in whic
Electronic Musician1 min read
Electronic Musician
Editor-in-Chief Si Truss [email protected] Content Director, Music Scott Rowley [email protected] Art Editor Steve Dawson [email protected] Production Editor Jem Roberts [email protected] Editors at Large: James Russ
Electronic Musician8 min read
New Gear
You might think that you know how EQs work, but Eventide is claiming that its new SplitEQ plugin operates in a “fundamentally different” way to traditional equalizers. At first glance, it might look like a standard eight-band parametric EQ, but then
Electronic Musician4 min read
Audio Damage Other Desert Cities
Over the years, Audio Damage has cut a path with some professional, forward-looking plugins, including the graular synthesizer, Quanta, and the algorithmic reverb, Eos. The developer's newest release, Other Desert Cities, is a six-algorithm delay. In
Electronic Musician3 min read
The All-important Control Room
It’s essential to get your control room right first, then sort out your recording rooms. If your monitoring environment is rubbish, how can you expect to make good judgements on the sounds you’re recording in other rooms, let alone try to mix and mas
Electronic Musician3 min read
Build Your Perfect Home Studio
It’s never been easier to whip up greatsounding tracks, particularly if you’re into electronic or heavily sample-based music. Every DAW on the market today ships with an extensive collection of ready-made loops, hits, pads and riffs, not to mention a
Electronic Musician2 min read
Home Studio
1 The first step is to use a mic and a spectrum analyzer to see what an even bass response looks like. Put your best condenser mic a couple of inches away from one of your speakers and use your DAW or a synth to send a sine wave test tone at 500Hz to
Electronic Musician4 min read
Noise In The Recording Space
All the treatments discussed for the control room apply equally to the rooms we want to actually make noise in. Let’s be honest: you’re never going to achieve a large, neutral, ambient space in the average home, so unless you have a full-on church ha
Electronic Musician9 min read
Room Acoustics In Depth
While we’ve just covered some acoustic basics and DIY options so far in this feature, room acoustics is such an important subject that it deserves its own, more in-depth piece – and other solutions. That’s simply because the space you play and record
Electronic Musician10 min readMusic
Kurtis Mantronik
Kurtis Mantronik likes to keep moving. Born in Jamaica, he then moved to Canada before joining his mother in a New York apartment in the late-’70s. He spent 11 years in the UK and eventually made his way to Johannesburg, South Africa. (More about tha
Electronic Musician3 min read
Clavia Nord Modular
These days, everyone wants to be seen playing a modular synthesizer – whether they know what they’re doing or not! Yet twenty years ago, the electronic music scene was a very different place. Samples ruled the airwaves – either looped and chopped or
Electronic Musician3 min read
Tony Banks – Prog Rock’s Masterful Composer and Arranger
It takes restraint to play only what’s needed for a song, and to compose, accompany, and orchestrate without the need to shout, “Hey look at me!” These traits form the foundation of Tony Banks’ style and his work with Genesis. In Keyboard Magazine’s
Electronic Musician4 min read
Horn Articulations
Of all the tasks when creating music on a computer, one of the trickiest things is programming realistic brass parts that sound plausible. Luckily, recent developments in sampling and virtual synth technology have made things a lot easier, mainly tha
Electronic Musician4 min read
Sp-404 Mkii
$590 roland.com + Velocity sensitive pads invite immediate playing+ Plenty of effects to add new flavors to your samples+ New DJ mode expands functionality even further+ Skip Back Mode is handy for not losing those late night ideas - Sequencer still
Electronic Musician5 min read
Absolute 5
$576 steinberg.net + Comprehensive collection+ Over 130GB of highquality expansions+ Sensible HALion/HALion Sonic combo+ Ace Groove Agent/Backbone pairing - No edition that includes every Steinberg expansion- You may need a bigger hard drive Although
Electronic Musician5 min read
Fusion Vintage Drive and Fusion Stereo Image
$186 solidstatelogic.com + Fusion’s brilliance in plugin form+ Natural, convincing recreation of analog saturation+ Simple, effective stereo manipulation+ Intuitive visualization of stereo image - Window resizing Solid State Logic’s mastery of analog
Electronic Musician4 min read
Matrix Mixer
$670 ericasynths.lv + Rugged with an all-metal design+ 254 memory slots for presets+ All ins and outs are buffered - Lots of empty front panel space (although that could be used for scribble strips!) Erica Synths’ Matrix Mixer is a step toward making
Electronic Musician2 min read
Rift
$147 minimal.audio + Flexible bipolar distortion architecture+ Further processing via Feedback and Filter modules+ Well implemented, powerful modulation+ Excellent preset library - None Rift is a new distortion plugin from Minimal Audio and alongside
Electronic Musician2 min read
MiniFuse 2
$470 www.arturia.com + Compact with small+ desktop footprint+ Solid sonics+ Extensive and useful software bundle+ Includes MIDI I/O+ 5 year warranty - USB hub only suitable for low usage devices MiniFuse is Arturia’s super compact audio and MIDI USB
Electronic Musician2 min read
T-1 Algorithmic Sequencer
$599 torsoelectronics.com + Euclidean algorithm for more sequencing options+ Sturdy aluminum housing for live use+ Intuitive design, great hands-on feel+ Connectivity for MIDI, CV, computer+ Wireless Ableton Link synchronization - Sequencer-only, no
Electronic Musician3 min read
Limelight
$200 512audio.com + Specifically voiced for broadcast+ Warmth+ Simplicity itself+ Lightweight+ Good value - Boominess when close miked- Swivel mount obscures filter switch- No internal pop filter 512 Audio is the new sibling of Texas-based Warm Audio
Electronic Musician3 min read
Cuboid
$36 Seven granite-tough construction kits, packed floor to ceiling with chunky progressive house building blocks. Among the finely sculpted stems you’ll find all manner of wall-shaking bass tones, breezeblock drum kicks, snares and tops. And a grab b
Electronic Musician2 min read
Beef
$40 caelumaudio.com + Well spec’ed saturation and bit crushing modules+ Innovative noise modulation effect+ Global wet/dry mix+ One knob style Preset mode - No individual bypass for each module - Fixed signal flow Beef is the latest plugin from Caelu
Electronic Musician3 min read
Exciters
Easily the most flexible and configurable exciter on this list, Vitamin is a workhorse plugin that can perform precise enhancements. There are five distinct bands that can be manually divided across the spectrum using the crossover controls. Each has
Electronic Musician10 min read
Melodyne 5
In the eyes (and ears) of the general public, vocal pitch manipulation is often regarded as cheating and symptomatic of modern mass-produced pop – but that kind of criticism is lazy and often ill-informed. Like with CGI in movies, people only get up
Electronic Musician3 min read
Regal
How many 303s does a man need? For Gabriel Cassina, best known under the stage name Regal, the answer is not one, but four. Or one and three clones, that is. Unsurprisingly, there’s an acidic tinge to his hard-headed techno, which has been released o
Electronic Musician2 min read
Bring The Noise
One definition of music is “organized sound”, originally coined by composer Edgard Varèse. Varèse said that “to stubbornly conditioned ears, anything new in music has always been called noise,” and also posed the question for us all, “What is music b

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