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Antelope Audio VEQ-432C Antelope Audio recreate a cult mastering equaliser for their unique AFX platform. Outboard gear intended for high‑end mastering has to meet particularly stringent design criteria. It must be entirely free from unwanted distortion and noise. It must be optimised for stereo use, with both channels perfectly matched. It should have switched or stepped controls, for precise recall, with ranges appropriate to the job in hand. And, of course, it needs to sound amazing. The...

Acustica Audio Sienna What can the dynamic convolution experts bring to the world of headphone monitoring? I use a lot of Acustica’s ‘dynamic convolution’ plug‑ins, but my interest was piqued when they told me of their plans to launch a filter‑based headphone correction system with dynamic convolution emulations of monitor speakers in real studio control rooms. Called Sienna, this suite of four related plug‑ins (AAX, VST 2 and 3 and AU, Mac OS 10.9 onwards and Windows 64‑bit) a...

Norand Mono Masses of modulation and an innovative sequencer make the Mono much more than just another monosynth. The 303 paradigm is so well established now, one glance at the familiar synth‑up‑top, sequencer‑down‑below table‑top cigar‑box is enough to conjure memories of smiley faces, warehouse raves, dungarees, bucket hats, and... wait was that really 35 years ago? Anyway, Mono, from the new French company Norand, certainly doesn’t hide its influences. But neither does it attem...

iZotope Spire Studio 2nd Generation Portable Digital Multitrack Recorder iZotope’s clever Spire Studio is back and better than ever! In the June 2018 issue of SOS we took our first look at iZotope’s Spire Studio, a gadget used in conjunction with an iOS/Android tablet or phone to drag the Portastudio concept into the 21st Century. Spire Studio is a portable eight‑track digital recording system, complete with effects, and you can record via its built‑in omni microphone or via a p...

Logic Pro | Advanced MIDI Manipulation: Part 1 Apple Logic Pro X Tips & Techniques We demonstrate how flexible Logic Pro’s MIDI processing tools can be. In 1983, the second most successful computer networking protocol was born. Unlike those that underpin the Internet, the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) was not created by an academic offshoot of the military wing of the United States, but by a consortium of synthesizer manufacturing companies led by Dave Smith of Sequential...

Erica Synths Black Sequencer Erica’s Black Sequencer combines ambitious functionality with some of the best knobs money can buy. The Black Sequencer has been a long time coming. You get the impression that Erica Synths had some challenges to get over while wanting to release the most extraordinary sequencer they could possibly manage. I’ve had one from since about a month before the official release. From that time to now, a month after release, I have had numerous firmware updates from...

Audiobro Modern Scoring Strings Audiobro faces the future with an all‑new divisi strings collection. If you search ‘best orchestral sample libraries’ on the Internet it’s a racing certainty that Audiobro’s LA Scoring Strings (LASS) will score highly in the rankings. The brainchild of composer Andrew Kerestzes, LASS has consistently been rated as a leading product since its release in 2009, a significant achievement considering the advances made by orchestral sampling in recent year...

United Plugins QuickBass QuickBass offers a user‑friendly way to tailor bass guitar sounds to fit your mix. As its name implies, QuickBass is designed to let you tailor your DI’d bass guitar sounds quickly and effectively. Essentially, what we have here is a channel strip that’s optimised for bass guitar. It offers EQ, simple yet flexible compression, saturation and doubling. It supports the usual plug‑in formats on Mac and Windows operating systems at up to (in fact, beyond!) 192kHz...

Yamaha DTX6 Yamaha’s new DTX6 range is a force to be reckoned with. Historically, Yamaha and Roland have shared the crown in the field of electronic drums, but the more recent introduction of Alesis into the frame and a relative paucity of new offerings from Yamaha has seen the latter fall beneath the radar somewhat, with only the entry‑level DTX402 range and DTX Multi12 in their current catalogue. The fantastic EAD10 (reviewed in SOS April 2018) did, perhaps, give us reason to believe Ya...

Our mix guru shares his tips for keeping clients happy.