First up and chronologically ordered, the amazing upgrade to my favourite sequencer, now as I've stated many times on these pages the job of the sequencer is to allow you to make music, it is an interface between your creative ideas and your creative output. It needs to be as seamless as possible. In reality the interface shouldn't feel like an interface, it needs to be intuitive yet powerful enough to capture your ideas. Having spent many years learning various sequencers, both hardware & software, it's a real joy to report that the upgrade to Logic Pro was painless and relatively cheap and more importantly so ridiculously powerful & intuitive that it's a real joy to use. The Channel Strip settings are a stroke of genius and the ease of adding extra Aux, Bus and Rewire inputs makes my creative life so much easier. The media, loop and preset library is again simplicity itself and creating / saving your own customised settings so simple it's almost a joke. Sidechaining is now also easier than ever which makes for tight, fat, professional sounding mixes. I'm also digging the new Compare function which for me is a real Godsend.I love creating my own sounds, it adds an obviously personal level of detail to a track. Most of my own sounds (but not all) usually start from a preset that is then fairly heavily edited. It's just how I tend to work. Get a sound that's somewhere close to what you want then make it exactly what you want. This maybe a simple case of adjusting the characteristics of the sound itself, passing the sound through some mind disturbing effect units or depending on exactly what sound I'm after - building a sound from scratch. It's here where a good Compare function comes in useful. Logic Studio has that nailed. One click allows a quick before and after comparison - essential for a soundsmith. Save your new creation as a Channel Strip setting and it's available in the new media browser only one click away. Genius.
All in all it's a great upgrade, there's lots more to it but I've gotta cover three of the baddest Soft Synths known to mankind yet so excuse me while I slip into something more comfortable and lay these monsters out on general display.
All I can say to start with is Native Instuments! Stop now you're scaring me!
Those crazy creative Germans have done it again. Not content with launching the careers of thousands of Minimal musicians with the insanely inspirational Reaktor and it's Nuskool plugin (the sound of which has systematically destroyed dancefloors from Ibiza to Brazil and beyond), their rapidly growing Soft Synth catalogue has three absolute monsters that I'm now the lucky & proud owner of:
FM8
Massive
Battery 3
I think FM8 has stolen the title of My Favourite Synth, this prestigious award used to belong to the ES2 (closely followed by Rob Papen's Albino) but I can honestly report that FM8 is the synth that I find myself going to again and again. It's received rave reviews in the tech music press and after using it for only a few days I can already see why. Try it - you'll like it. NI offer demos of most of their synths and once you start playing them you'll be hooked. When Yamaha released the DX7 it was a milestone in Synthesiser history. Only a few synths are good enough to be called classics, the DX7 was one of them. I remember the first time I heard one (in a little music shop in Bingley, West Yorkshire, England) it sounded like no other Synth I'd ever heard. It was the sound of 80's synthesis. Up to that point analogue was God. After the DX7 was released FM synths became the new "must have" sound. An interesting fact here - FM synths became so "fashionable" and analogue synths so "old hat" that I remember seeing a Roland TB-303 for sale in the same small music shop for £35. I was the proud owner of a Korg MS-10 which I couldn't even swap for a guitar effects pedal (and I tried!) both these classic synths now change hands for hundreds of pounds. Technology eh? Everybody wanted the clean FM sound. Analogue was tired and old and fuzzy sounding, the synths were notorious for going out of tune (as they warmed up), drum machines suddenly used "Samples" to make their sounds. Whatever next?
But "fashion" has always been the same, and as in all things fashionable it's a cyclic phenomena. Technology on the other hand always marches on and the new FM synthesis offered by NI is so far ahead of it's ancient cousin it's frightening. When NI released FM7 it caused quite a stir, FM8 is no ripple on the pond, it's a tsunami. One of the weak points of "old" FM synths was their lack of "warmth" (a yearning for the halcyon days of analogue - which of course led to the analogue sound becoming fashionable again - do you see a pattern here kittlings?) FM8 has no such shortfalls. It does all the things the DX7 and its offspring's were capable of but then shows us that nearly 30 years on FM synthesis has grown into something almost unrecognisable.
Oh yes it does "Warm". It does "Fat" it does all the things you want a synth to do. It also reads all the old DX7 (and later models) soundbanks so should you want to sound like a Bronski Beat revival band you can. But it also generates sounds you can't even begin to describe, sounds that twist and undulate then rip the bass cones from your monitors and shred the shirt on your back. Stupidly fat leads, ridiculously rich pads, effects that spin your cerebrum into a gibbering monkey mind mess.
FM synthesisers are notoriously difficult to program and edit, not so NI's latest offering. They offer an accurately named "Easy" morph mode in which you can tweak and twist recognisable parameters (timbre, harmonics, attack, decay, release etc) and a mind meltingly complex "Expert" mode where you can modulate those sine waves and algorithms till your eyes pop and you have a beard as long as Noah's.
All in all 10 out of 10. NI we salute you! :)
So grab yourself the demo and see what you think, better still let me know what you think, I'll cover Massive and Battery in the next post, until then, happy creating Kittlings!
Hasta Luego
Peace
Migz
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