April 2023

Electronic Musician

Record * Produce * Perform

Electronic Musician1 min read
Auto-tuning For The People
Amid the big awards, performances and celebrity gossip at the recent Grammy Awards, you'd be forgiven for having missed the fact that Antares founder Dr Andy Hildebrand picked up a technical award for his achievement in creating Auto-Tune. It's an ab
Electronic Musician5 min read
New Gear
Pittsburgh Modular have revealed a new semi-modular paraphonic analog synth that they're describing as a “complete, modern, modular instrument that allows us to explore beyond the boundaries of a traditional analog synthesizer.” Taiga is a desktop sy
Electronic Musician1 min read
Soundghost's Granular Scatter Plugin Transforms Ant Sound Into An Ambient Soundscape
Soundghost has released a new effects plugin called Scatter that's designed for creating granular soundscapes, shimmer reverbs and scattered sonic textures. Scatter processes audio into tiny recorded loops, or grains, that are combined and repeated t
Electronic Musician1 min read
Spitfire Audio's Albion Colossus Brings The Sound Of Hollywood Blockbusters To Your Daw
Spitfire Audio have announced the release of a new sample library. Albion Colossus is described as their “most epic library yet”, and is said to be a “gargantuan, all-in-one toolkit” for blockbuster scoring. Albion Colossus is a continuation of Spitf
Electronic Musician1 min read
Buchla Release Updated Music Easel Keyboard
Buchla has announced the release of an updated version of its LEM218 touchcapacitive control keyboard. The third iteration of the 218 Lunar Excursion Module, named after the spacecraft that first delivered astronauts to the moon, features a revamped
Electronic Musician2 min read
Roland's Fp-e50 Is A Portable Digital Piano With Zen-core Synth Sounds
Roland is back with another portable digital piano, and this one - the FP-E5Q is bringing the company's ZEN-Core synth engine along for the ride. ZEN-Core is Roland's flagship synthesis system - the one used in the likes of the Jupiter-X and Fantom w
Electronic Musician4 min read
Rhodes V8/V8 Pro
This month, Rhodes announced that they're getting into the software game, bringing to market a version of their latest electric piano model, the MK8. Touted to contain over 30,000 samples across 100 velocity layers, the V8 and V8 Pro show that Rhodes
Electronic Musician6 min read
Extreme Effects
Contemporary music production is the culmination of decades of techniques and technological advancements, and much of what we now do in our DAWs exploits techniques that were developed long ago using very different equipment. That said, much of what
Electronic Musician2 min read
Six Of The Best Freeware Plugins For Extreme Sounds
Mac/PC - AU, VST, VST3, AAX Free distortion plugins are pretty abundant, but this example from Creative Intent includes both a rich saturation stage and its own unique phase distortion algorithm. Throw in a variable saturation curve, resonant low pas
Electronic Musician9 min read
NOSAJ THING & SUNNY LEVINE
Known for creating ethereal, synthbased instrumental hip-hop albums such as Drift, Home, Fated and Parallels, Jason Chung (AKA Nosaj Thing) has slowly moved towards a singer-songwriter aesthetic, reflected in both his own releases and vocal-based pro
Electronic Musician4 min read
THE ART OF SYNTH SOLOING Celebrating Jan Hammer
This month we explore the player who defined how the synthesizer became a lead instrument in jazz-rock, rock, funk and other styles of music:_Jan Hammer. He single-handedly defined the technique and vocabulary of pitch-bending, and stood toe-to-toe w
Electronic Musician5 min read
EASY GUIDE Mixolydian mode
The Mixolydian mode - sounds very exotic, but what is a mode anyway? If you think of your average digital radio, it might have a DAB mode, an FM mode and an auxiliary input mode. So you could say that each mode represents a different version of the r
Electronic Musician2 min read
BLAST FROM THE PAST Linn 9000
Roger Linn's name is revered in electronic music circles, and for good reason - he has an uncanny ability to predict what musicians need before they themselves know, and delivers it in spades. His LM-1 Drum Computer was the first to combine user-prog
Electronic Musician6 min read
Elektron Syntakt
$999 elektron.se In the early 2010s, Elektron were known as a brand responsible exclusively for deep, high-end gear. The likes of Octatrack, Analog Rytm and Analog Four were up there with the best hardware instruments on the market, but prices for ea
Electronic Musician3 min read
Cherry Audio GX-80
$59 www.cherryaudio.com - We'd love a hardware ribbon controllerto go with it! Who wouldn't? According to the fine folk at Cherry Audio, one of the most requested instruments for re-styling in software is the ‘70s iconoclastic synth from Yamaha, that
Electronic Musician3 min read
Audified Linda IronVerb
$99 www.audified.com - Limited advanced editing parameters on offer Linda IronVerb (ALT, AAX, VST3) is an algorithmic reverb and the second plugin developed by Audified in collaboration with mixing and mastering engineer Martin Linda. The reverb feat
Electronic Musician2 min read
IK Multimedia Tone X Capture
$288 ikmultimedia.com Many guitarists spend hours experimenting with pedals, amp settings and core cabinet-miking zones to produce a tone that suits. With the advent of top-flight amp/cab simulators, and dexterous effect-chain modeling in software (n
Electronic Musician3 min read
Modalics Beat Scholar
$84 www.modalics.com - Deeper drum sound designers are out there For those not rhythmically inclined, beat-programming can often be an arduous process. While some opt for a robotic, metronomic approach, those who crave the type of humanity and improv
Electronic Musician2 min read
Arturia MiniLab 3
$105 arturia.com - Not necessarily worth an upgrade, if you already own a MiniLab MkII MiniLab 3 is the latest incarnation of Arturia's 25-minikey MIDI controller keyboard. Available in black and white versions, it has the same footprint as the MkII
Electronic Musician9 min read
Atau Tanaka
An electronic music setup covers anything from a simple MIDI keyboard with a laptop and headphones, to a huge modular setup, and beyond, we all know the deal as musicians. But none of this applies for Atau Tanaka, a Japanese-American artist who in pe
Electronic Musician10 min read
Modern Drum Effects
As technology marches on, drum processing is another everevolving field. Once, engineers may have made their way with a stereo pair of microphones above the drum kit, as well as a smattering of EQ and compression, but today's modern music demands a l
Electronic Musician1 min read
Kit List
Atau Tanaka takes us through some of his setup MacBook Pro 13” 2020 running Cycling ‘74 Max “My MacBook Pro is an Intel Core i7, with 32GB of RAM, and 2TB of storage - I keep about 20 years’ worth of material on that machine. And because it's a studi
Electronic Musician1 min read
Further Listening
ATAU TANAKA LIVE AT IKLECTIK Atau: “This is a live recording made at Iklectik in London, using my system with the Myo and Max. It also exists as a video, but we got a really high quality recording of that gig, and it was a real pleasure to be able to
Electronic Musician3 min read
Audiotent Nitrate
from $55 Amazing set of 107 expertly-crafted presets for Knifonium - Knif Audio's whopper monophonic vacuum tubepowered synth. They've rolled up their sleeves and got elbows deep in the guts of this one, pulling out monster basses, fierce top lines,

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