Electronic Musician

The new ELECTRONIC MUSICIAN is a “must have” resource for anyone who makes music, plays music, and shares music. Every issue includes "gig tested" product reviews on music gear, tons of how-to's, and interviews with today's stars revealing the secrets of their songwriting approaches and audio-production concepts.

Electronic Musician • Vol. 35 No. 12

NEW GEAR

MOOGMENTUM RECAP

SOFT OPINIONS • In the monthly glut of plugin processors, the most groundbreaking often seem to be the vocal minority

THIS MONTH IN SOFTWARE • As the cavalcade of software continues, we find that business is booming, and not necessarily in the good way

ESSENTIAL DRUM DESIGN • Celebrate all that’s great and good about synthesizing drums from scratch with our huge collection of tips for building electronic kicks, snares, hats and percussion aplenty

We ❤ drum machines

Electronic drum sounds in sound design

Layering synth drums with samples

Three simple steps to synth snares • Sound designing a synthesized snare doesn’t have to be labor-intensive. Here’s a perfectly serviceable example created in three quick steps…

Beefing up sampled drums • In this track, our drum rhythm is constructed from various acoustic drum samples, but more power and weight are added when we blend these with synth drums

Getting your drums in tune

DOs & DON’Ts

Adjusting kick drum pitch and length • Synth kicks sound infinitely more integrated into a track if they are in tune and are the right duration

Looking for the perfect kick

DAVID MORALES • Brooklyn-born DJ David Morales was present at the birth of house music and went on to remix and produce some of the biggest acts of the ’80s and ’90s. Danny Turner sits down with him to look back at four decades behind the decks…

Adding Sonic Variety To Your Synth Solos Part 1—Filter Fun • Don’t just play notes; play with the sound during your solos

Diatonic chord substitution • Swapping a certain chord for another at the right time to keep our progressions interesting—but which chords will work best?

Roland Alpha Juno • An unassuming bargain synth that, with the help of one strange preset, helped to define an entire musical genre

MC-707 • The latest reincarnation of Roland’s groovebox range promises DAW-less track creation. Time to strep out of the box

Round the back

Loopcloud 5 • Loopcloud is evolving quickly. With version 5, the sample storefront adds DAW-like features, plugins, editing tools and more

JU-06A • Roland revamps its Juno-inspired Boutique with a new arp and expanded sound palette. Time to plug back in…

Boutique business

Orbis • Spitfire Audio’s team have selected 3,000 sounds from David Fanshawe’s recorded archives and sculpted them into this ‘World Synthesizer’

Neutron 3 Advanced • Does this third-generation channel strip plugin really take us one step closer to the dream of the fully-automated mix engineer?

The Sculptor module

CRAFTsynth 2.0 • Can Modal’s latest synth build on the success of its self-assembly predecessor?

MODALapp Software Editor

Adam Betts Live Breaks & Beats

MASSIVE X • In part 1 of a deep dive into Native Instruments’ new powersynth, we’ll explore its oscillators and modes

PARALLEL COMPRESSION • Let’s focus on parallel compression: what it is, what it does, and why you simply must make use of it!

New York Drum Compression • Programmed drum parts and loops can get lost in a mix as new parts are added. Parallel compression is an alternative to merely turning faders up

QUICK TIPS

Parallel Compressor Vocal Considerations • As your arrangement changes in weight and...