Page 41 - Full Issue News Today

Buying A Vintage-inspired Microphone Most of us will only dream of owning a collection of vintage valve mics such as this!Photo: Hannes Bieger Everyone loves classic microphones, but few of us can afford them! We survey the hundreds of modern recreations on the market, and explain what to look for when you’re choosing one for your studio. Now that original Neumann and AKG valve microphones have become unaffordable, modern manufacturers have stepped in to fill the gap, offering clones and vint...

Ableton Live 11 Live 11 introduces new features, improves some old ones, and throws in some exciting new rack devices for good measure. As Ableton Live’s release version finally goes to 11 in its 20th year, what improvements, refinements and additions does it deliver? There’s no major visual overhaul as we saw in the upgrade from Live 9 to Live 10, and it’s hard to tell Live 11 visually from its predecessor unless you know where to look. But this visual similarity hides some significant s...

PMI breathe new life into a classic dynamic EQ design.

HD Instruments ZoneMatrix The Key Range tab, showing all eight Zones. The Scene‑changing buttons are always accessible. ZoneMatrix’s GUI takes up a lot of screen space, leaving only a small scrollable area for instruments in the rack. To display all instruments as normal, clicking the KSP button (here circled in red) will show or hide the ZoneMatrix GUI. ZoneMatrix transforms a single instance of Kontakt into a multi‑instrument performance environment. Back in those hedonistic pre‑pan...

The physics of loudspeakers have hardly changed in a century — but DSP and material science have come a long way, and the Pulsar takes full advantage.

Logic: Using Auto Sampler Heres how to make the most of Logic’s Auto Sampler. Logic’s Auto Sampler utilises the technology Apple acquired from Redmatica, a small company that produced some amazingly sophisticated tools for automatically creating and looping samples. Not all of the original Redmatica’s features have made it into Auto Sampler though; one memorable feature not included is the ability to hook up an external synth, then have Auto Sampler step through automatically to the nex...

4MS Spherical Wavetable Navigator 4MS Spherical Wavetable Navigator: 26HP, +12V 185mA, ‑12V 30mA. Let me begin by paraphrasing the late, great, Douglas Adams: the Spherical Wavetable Navigator (henceforth SWN) is deep, really deep... It seems the words most commonly heard in 4MS R&D meetings could be ‘...and it could do this as well’. The SWN is a fairly big 26HP six‑voice module capable of creating slowly morphing drones, polyphonic melodies, evolving sequences and a vast range of ri...

Auddict Angel Strings Vol 1 & Vol 2 Sample Libraries Auddict’s innovative orchestral strings library marks the legacy of a top London studio. Back in July 2017 I reviewed the thunderous Drums Of The Deep library issued by the young London‑based company Auddict. Since then this productive outfit has released a host of orchestral‑flavoured sample collections along with the intriguing PercX instrument, which impressed SOS reviewer John Walden in May 2020. Outside of the sample libra...

BDE, or Big Distortion Engine for long, is the second plug‑in from producer and engineer Jordan Swift.

Erica Synths Syntrx The Syntrx is not a clone, but its inspiration is clear. Can it recapture the spirit of the legendary EMS Synthi? It’s a fact — the EMS VCS 3 and its portable cousin the Synthi AKS are among the most revered synthesizers ever built. Released at the tail end of the 1960s, the Synthi was quickly adopted by progressive musicians like Brian Eno, Pink Floyd, Jean‑Michel Jarre, Hawkwind and Tangerine Dream. Its unconventional interface and distinctive pin‑matrix patch...