January 2017 Magazine Contents

Can this California company’s first summing mixer reach the high standards set by their outboard processors?

Built from reclaimed Hammond organ parts, the Scanner is an unusual electro-mechanical effects unit that sounds as classy as it looks!

Arturia’s MatrixBrute combines everything the company know about synthesis into one hugely ambitious machine.

The humble TB303 has proved notoriously difficult to recreate in software, but ABL3 comes far closer than most.

Blue’s newly updated range of studio mics offers stylish looks and great sound for a very reasonable price.

Boss’s well-conceived switching system brings the convenience of a multi-effects unit to your collection of individual pedals.

Named after Binson’s Echorec magnetic-drum echo machine, the Echorec aims to squeeze all that unit’s essential character into a standard-sized pedal.

Guitarscapes is built on a foundation of electric and acoustic guitars, plus mandolins and pedal steels. Sometimes the sources are obvious, but more often they’re not.

With remote control, USB audio interfacing and the sublime sonic performance for which Grace are known, the m108 doesn’t disappoint!

iZotope say that Neutron not only has the processing power to address all sorts of mixing issues, but the intelligence to help you identify them.

Yes, Kii Audio’s flagship monitors are expensive — but then they might just be the best loudspeakers in the world...

The Monologue may be a cut-down version of the Minilogue, but it offers a few features its polyphonic big brother can’t match.

KRK’s established V-series monitors have long been popular in the project studio, and now they’ve been given a major overhaul.

The name Lunastone may not sound so familiar, but this Danish company have an excellent provenance...

With clever new tempo-mapping features and low-level Melodyne integration, time and pitch are now putty in the hands of Samplitude users!

Peavey’s smart new range of PA speakers is punchy, robust, and easy on the pocket!

Many companies have offered rack-lighting products over the years, but this elegant British-made light employs super-bright LED strips rather than conventional bulbs.

Rigid Audio’s Synferno is a Kontakt-based construction kit library, offering 1200 24-bit loops organised into 300 preset ‘kits’ with a bass, synth, ambient and groove loop within each kit.

Ribbon mics have long been associated with a subdued high-frequency response — but this classy example bucks the trend.

Sonokinetic bring their idiosyncratic approach to sampling to the woodwinds section.

All-round percussionist and jazz vibraphonist Frank Ricotti has enjoyed a stellar career as a composer, arranger, band-leader and session player, appearing on countless records and film scores. Spitfire Audio’s Ricotti Mallets features our man playing straight hits, rolls and glisses on marimba, glockenspiel, crotales and xylophone.

Steinberg update Cubasis 2 with real-time time-stretching and a “carefully redesigned user interface”, which amounts to a flatter, cleaner design that’s a little crisper and more pleasing to the eye than previous versions.

Ueberschall have built up an impressive series of titles based around their Elastik Player front-end. The bulk of these follow a construction-kit format offering collections of genre-specific music composition broken down into their constituent loops...

UA’s latest updates add new compressors, delays, voice channels and virtual bass amps, as well as refreshing a few familiar faces.

Addictive Pro adds more complex oscillator configurations, a better effects implementation and a hot-rodded arpeggiator, but has surprisingly dropped the very useful four-track looper of the original Addictive Synth.

Room simulation on headphones usually stops being convincing as soon as you move your head. Not so with Waves’ new Nx...

We show you how to share MIDI files with Live.

Armed with nothing but an Atari, a pair of S950 samplers and his faithful TB303, Fatboy Slim took the charts of the late 1990s by storm.

Automated conforming and re-conforming tools for Pro Tools HD help keep audio and video together. Find out how...

Don’t take Cubase’s dedicated MIDI Drum Editor for granted — it’s a gem!

Dolby Laboratories have been leading the development of surround-sound systems for four decades, but over the last year or so they have been piloting an intriguing surround system in a famous UK night-club...

LA-based producer Eric Valentine (Queens Of The Stone Age, Slash) recreates the guitar sound from QOTSA's unique 2002 album, Songs for the Deaf. We look at every link in the chain from tuning and guitar choice through to amp settings, pedals, mic selection and post-processing.

Electronic, heavily processed and sample-based, 22, A Million was a radical departure for Bon Iver — and from normal recording and mixing practice...

Get your tracks ready for the world with Sonar’s mastering-friendly options.

How do Reaper 5’s new VCA Faders complement the existing group and linking facilities?

Turn your DAW’s aux sends into wet/dry blend controls that won’t raise the overall level of your signal.

We dive deeper into Synchro Arts’ powerful pitch-processing and audio-alignment software.

Our engineer battles the clock while keeping the artists at ease, to capture seven tracks in a single weekend.

Learn to subtly vary the tone of Studio One’s headline soft synth, and you’ll add interest to your sounds.

Set yourself up for success with custom templates in Logic Pro X.

In Ableton Live, I used to use a plug-in to split a channel so that I could do multiband processing. I’m now using Cubase Pro 8.5 and it doesn’t seem to work...

I have a Nord Electro 4HP keyboard, which I’d like to run seamlessly through guitar pedals in real time and in stereo. The signal distorts quite badly at higher keyboard and pedal volumes. Can you suggest a device that would remedy this?

I have heard somewhere that you should avoid having your tweeters centred vertically in the room — is there some truth in it?

I want to teach myself to solder properly for some DIY audio electronics projects, and more mundane tasks like mending cables. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

I’ve often run into musicians who seemingly have a terror of recording with computers — some of whom seem to have become convinced that a hardware option will make life easier for them...

What’s the biggest threat to your studio livelihood?

This month's releases: Bruno Mars • Clean Bandit featuring Louisa Johnson • Cheat Codes & Kris Kross • Amsterdam • James Arthur • Classic Mix: Celine Dion ‘My Heart Will Go On’ (1997)

When Sound City Studios closed its doors in 2011, it had been a legendary rock & roll recording venue for over 40 years. Now the premises have been taken over by a producer and sound engineer whose aesthetic is even more retro and analogue-based than Sound City’s.

Working ‘in the box’ is all very well, but what happens when the box breaks?

At both the production and consumption ends of music, analogue is making a comeback.