EMIX is the magazine for reviews, features & interviews on the latest music technology and media, iOS apps, movies, photo/video and high-tech gadgetry.

Editor MARK JENKINS has written major reviews, tutorials, interviews and features for MELODY MAKER, NME, SOUNDS, MUSIC WEEK, MUSIC TECHNOLOGY, SOUND ON SOUND, MAC FORMAT, MAC USER, FUTURE MUSIC, KEYBOARD PLAYER (UK), KEYBOARD (USA), VIRTUAL INSTRUMENTS and many of the world’s leading media and high-tech publications, as well as several books on music technology.

In the magazine you’ll find reviews, features and interviews on;

* Musical Instruments

* Music Software and iOS apps

* Video and Photo hardware

* Portable Media Players and Audio devices

* New and back-catalogue CD & DVD releases

* New cinema releases and concerts

* Stage and Studio Equipment

Xmas Gifts from Digital Winter

The recent DIGITAL WINTER event in London featured plenty of new hi-tech ideas perfect for the holiday season.

From Octa comes the Monkey Kit “tablet positioning system”. More sophisticated than an ordinary tablet stand, this flexible “tail” allows your iPad or similar tablet to sit on a table, on a desk, curled under a mattress so you can view while in bed, hang from a shelf, or sit in almost any position you can imagine.

The Monkey Kit from Octa.com

A heavy-duty sucker make sure the tablet is firmly attached and the solid construction of the tail means it’s stable in almost any position.

Octa also makes a smaller “fishtail” version for desktop use and the product’s available in loads of retail stores as well as direct from the company’s website.

http://www.octa.com

Maxell has been promoting lines of wireless Bluetooth speakers for Christmas. The BT03 in various fetching colours – my review sample was an eye-catching baby blue – is lightweight, compact, but packs a punch. Charge the speaker up via USB then pair it to your smartphone or other playback device with a simple click, and you have enough volume to fill a room.

Maxell’s BT03 Bluetooth speaker

The BT03’s playback time on a single charge is impressive – I got around 10 hours out of it – and the speaker’s small enough to slip in a pocket so your smartphone can become an outdoor entertainment device when you’re on your travels. Price is typically under £40 and the model compares well with products like the Jawbone and MiniJamBox at sometimes two to three times the price.

If you need even more compact size Maxell’s Mini Bluetooth at under £30 could be the solution – producing 2W of power you could strew a few of these around the room and get solid sound coverage. Again available in a range of colours, my review model in icy white matched well with MacBook style products.

Both ranges  of speakers are available from a wide selection of online and high street outlets, more information from Maxell’s website.

http://www.maxell.eu 

DIGITAL WINTER 2013

London’s DIGITAL WINTER new product event as usual previewed a whole slew of exciting media technology.

CYGNETT showed padded cases, Bluetooth keyboards and accessories for the iPad, iPhone and other smartphones.

PHILIPS showed new computer monitors.

MAXELL showed Bluetooth rechargeable speakers, and storage devices.

OCTA showed the clever “Monkey Tail” positioning systems for all sorts of tablet devices

AYEGEAR launched their hoodie-style multi-pocket jacket.

Much more detail and pics to come…

New iOS Music Apps

2013 has been an amazing time for iOS music apps, quite apart from the long-expected launch of the iPad Mini and iPad [4] which give the device even greater potential as a musical instrument.

My recent book “iPad Music” (Taylor & Francis Focal Press, USA) summarises the huge range of hardware options available for the iPad. Some of these are still awaiting updating following the introduction of the new Lightning digital dock connector.

As regards apps – some highlights have included the eventual appearance of Auria, the 24-channel multitrack recorder, and of PPG Wave Generator, the latest from Wolfgang Palm the designer of the Wave keyboards played by Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Jan Hammer and Gary Numan.

Wave Generator harks right back to the days of the earliest PPG hardware designs while at the same time offering wave sequencing abilities similar to those of the recently released AniMoog app. Moog launched AniMoog for the iPhone, and had some competition in the form of Cube from VirSyn, which has translated well from the Mac to the iPad.

More detailed reviews of Wave Generator, Cube and other apps to follow…

REASON PREMIUM EDITION software

Propellerhead Reason Premium Edition

Mark Jenkins looks at a powerful sequencer package and its new keyboard sounds.

Choosing a sequencer is a major undertaking in the process of moving over to computer-based music, and whether you go for Cubase or Logic, Mac or PC systems and loop or timeline based software will make a major difference to the way you work on your next compositions or arrangements.

Reason has always been seen as a loop-style sequencer; it never had the same tape-based approach as Logic or Cubase, but put a lot more emphasis on providing very flexible racks of instruments which could be programmed exactly as you desired before starting a composition.

That’s why the main display of Reason never looked like an elaborate tape machine as did those of Logic and Cubase. No, Reason in operation looks more like a 19-inch rack of studio equipment and synth modules, with the actual composition area reduced to a very small display across the bottom of the screen, if present at all. So why is Reason of any interest to keyboard players?

Well, the different approach to its screen layout doesn’t prevent Reason from creating some very complex compositions, and in its latest incarnation, Reason Premium Edition, there are four new instrumnt packages included of which two are completely keyboard based. Reason Pianos records three different pianos from multiple angles using six sets of microphones, while Abbey Road Keyboards was recorded on location and features electric keyboards such as pianos and Mellotrons. Reason Pianos plays through a software module known as the Combinator, so let’s take a look at this and some of the other modules available in the package.

Rack ‘Em Up

As mentioned above, Reason’s screen display takes the form of a simulated 19-inch rack of sound generation and effects units, and you can add these and push them around on the screen to arrange your rack any way you want. The sound generation modules including analog-style synths and sample players, effects units include delays, reverbs and distortion, and controllers including step sequencers and simple tape-style sequencers. The Premium Edition also includes Reason Drum Kits,  set of sampled sounds known as a ReFill, and Reason Electric Bass, which includes the sounds of eight different bass guitars. It’s possible to save a whole setup along with any composing you’ve done, so the appearance of the system is completely customisable from one job to the next.

As with a real 19-inch rack, the system has to be wried up at the back depending on what controllers you want to link to what sounds sources, and what effects you want to use to process them. Spinning the display around causes the virtual patch cables to flop around in an entertaining manner, but as soon as they’ve settled down you can quickly connect or disconnect any modules you require, and of course many of them operate in stereo or with multiple channel which can be patched in different directions.

So for example you could play your new Reason Pianos sounds through a phaser module and an echo delay module directly from your master keyboard, while running drums from a tape-style sequencer through a bit of reverb, and bass guitar from a repeating step sequencer adding some auto-wah and flanging effects.

There are lots of other synth-style modules to choose from with wacky names like Thor, Subtractor and Malstrom, including one referred to as “graintable” which is really a wavetable synth with much more control over the content of the basic waveform, plus basic analog synths, the drum machines ReDrum and Dr Rex, samplers including NNXT and NN19 which can load anything from sound effects to orchestral instrument sounds to loops, and various sequencers and arpeggiators to control them. In terms of effects there are vocoders so you can use your voice to modulate keyboard or other sounds, compressors, equalisation and much more, and of course there’s an overall mixer to finally balance the sounds.

Install and Enjoy

Reason Premium Edition arrives as a set of DVD’s which will install on Mac or on PC’s including Vista operating systems, and some of the sounds are available in 24-bit or more compact 16-bit versions, so you don’t have to install both if you want to save hard disk space. There’s no dongle, but you do need to license the package on the internet for continued operation, and recommended systems are Intel Pentium 4 2.4GHz with 2GB RAM on a PC, or Intel Macs with 2GB RAM, though lower specified systems will work also. 

In Version 4 of Reason, which is what you’re getting in the Premium Edition package, the tape-style sequencer is “fully grown and matured” as they say, and rather than a simple strip of events now presents a multitrack display of every instrumental part. The styling is somewhere between that of Cubase and Ableton Live, allowing the use to get at MIDI events and edit bar-by-bar, or change volumes and effects levels at will (or automate them). Its step edit mode presents a piano roll display vertically down the left hand side, and bar graph displays of velocity and other parameters along the bottom, just like most other tape-style sequencers. The only problem is that if you open the sequencer display up to fill a very large part of the screen, then you can no longer see the 19-inch rack modules which are Reason’s main point of appeal, but there’s no getting over that on a single display – maybe a dual monitor setup would help.

 But what type of keyboard player would enjoy using Reason? Well, in its earlier incarnations the package was very much oriented towards loop-based dance music and experimental soundscapes, since the sequencers were rudimentary and the emphasis was very much on the synth modules and very extensive sound processing. But now the sequencer is quite complex – a halfway house between Cubase and Ableton Live, both of which are capable of long and complex compositions as well as more spontaneous, jamming-style work – and the Abbey Road Keyboards, piano, drums and bass packages are available as part of the deal, then Reason is looking like a more direct contender for Cubase, Logic and other more studio-oritned composition packages.

The Propellerheads website has some excellent demos of Reason in action, so it’s worth checking out to see whether its style of working would suit your temperament. Certainly if you enjoy sonic exploration, chaining effects together in random orders just to see what they’ll do, then the fascination afforded by playing with Reason’s rack and its virtual patch cables can be endless. And if you’re into more conventional composition – well, the package has now been tamed a little by its inclusion of a more conventional sequencer and a wider library of more bread and butter sounds, so may well be your solution of choice even if you’re not all that daring.   

Reason’s Premium Edition is currently priced at 499 Euros and can be ordered directly from the company’s website. Versions of Reason 4 and upgrades from earlier versions are also available.

http://www.propellerheads.se

M-Audio Pro Keys Sono

M-Audio Pro Keys Sono 88 £319 /ProKeys Sono 61 £259/ KeyStudio 49i £179

MARK JENKINS with a new studio and stage piano that’s an audio/MIDI interface too…

 

M-Audio have for some years been leading innovators in the fields of computer-compatible keyboards and audio interfaces, and it didn’t take long for their series of small, plastic-keyed studio-oriented products to bloom into a full range of professionally styled controllers. As a user myself of the big hammer-action KeyStation Pro88, which I’ve found by far the most impressive and economical of all the larger controller keyboards available on the UK market, I’ve kept a keen eye on developments from the company, and of course they’re ringing the changes as far as possible with new combinations of facilities and price points.

There are really four main musical tasks an electronic keyboard can potentially carry out at the moment – make noises, play or edit sounds on your computer, and act as a MIDI and an audio interface into the same computer. Well the big KeyStation Pro88 doesn’t make any noises, while M-Audio already offer two stage pianos which have no audio interface. The idea of the Sono range is to restore the audio interface abilities, while retaining the built-in sounds and omitting many of the slider and rotary editing controls so as to create the most compact products possible of their type.

We’re looking here at the Sono88 which has a full seven and a quarter octaves of weighted piano action keys, but most of the comments will also apply to the 5-octave, synth style Sono61. Although both models do have competition – in the case of the latter, from Korg’s very similar K61P for example – they have certainly encapsulated M-Audio’s aim of making them as compact and lightweight as possible. The 88 for example can be picked up in one hand, weighing only 8kg (I had to put it on the old bathroom scales, as I couldn’t actually find that figure anywhere) and is powered up from your computer’s USB socket. An external power supply (with either a DC or a USB plug) can also be used, but isn’t provided; most of the manual is on a CDR too, but you are given a USB cable and a generous software package, of which, more later.

Rear of the Year

The rear panel of the Sono88 is comprehensively equipped – apart from that USB socket which carries both power from and audio to your computer, you’ll find the socket for the optional power supply, a MIDI Out which you’ll use if you’re playing modules on stage, audio inputs in the form of one XLR (microphone) and one jack socket plus an RCA phono pair of auxiliary audio inputs (for a source such as a CD player, for which there’s no volume control), and a socket for an optional sustain footswitch. Two stereo headphone sockets are sensibly placed on a front panel and will be handy for a teacher and student situation.

On the top panel are volume controls for the audio inputs (with overload lights), direct monitoring of the audio inputs (not through your computer) and for the internal sounds, master volume slider, seven buttons to select internal sounds plus Reverb and Chorus, Edit and Data Up/Down buttons (which double as semitone Transpose buttons, no octave transposing initially since you have 88 keys available), and nice rubbery pitch bend and modulation wheels. Everything’s laid out very accessibly, though many functions are “hidden” including a complete set of 128 General MIDI sounds. From the top panel buttons you can access Grand Piano, Bright Piano, Electric Piano, Organ, Strings, Clavinet and Choir, and can layer any two of these by holding two buttons together. So though many other sounds are available, the success of the Sono88 is very much going to stand or fall on the quality of these basic sounds (which you can return to at any time by pressing the Piano Reset button).

So what are the internal sounds like? The basic Grand Piano is described as a “premium stereo-sampled Steinway” and it’s pretty impressive. The low end is sonorous and there’s very little evidence of artefacts like artificial looping. At the high end the Grand Piano sound is very thin and precise, but how often do you play as high as C7? The Bright Piano is extremely bright and I can’t really imagine what it’s sampled from – some Kawai pianos have this brightness but maybe not to the same extent. Electric Piano is more readily identifiable – it’s meant to be a Fender Rhodes and captures the sound well, though without any of the distinctive overdriving when you play harder, and nothing imaginative is done with the Modulation on this sound, which is a vibrato completely unconnected to anything any genuine Fender Rhodes has ever done. Similarly with the Organ sound, this is a Hammond imitation with a good deal of rotary chorus in place, and the Mod wheel doesn’t do anything imaginative like speeding or slowing the rotary effect.

Strings are good – a rich, thick ensemble sound – while the Clav is a bit dissapointing with no real guts, which I can write with some conviction as Stevie Wonder comes on the TV wresting some amazing effects from his original Clavinet D6…finally the Choir, which is basically a softish female choir, again missing an opportunity to put in something really striking like a version of the Mellotron male choir sound which was plastered all over the early albums of the Moody Blues, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and many others.

Soft Options

You shouldn’t really need to install software to use the Sono either with a Mac or a PC (Windows/Vista) as it’s Class Compliant, but you’ll have to load the included CD to read the flipping handbook…otherwise you’d have no clue about accessing the GM sounds or many of the programable functions. Unfortunately after reading the handbook you’re not much the wiser either, since accessing these sounds involves holding Edit Mode and Fsharp6 then “white keys between G5 and B6”. None of these keys has alternative labelling, so finding new sounds is something of a stab in the dark. You can re-configure the Data buttons to step up and down through all 128 GM sounds instead, but then they no longer work as Transpose buttons. And you can select MIDI channels, modulation type from the Mod wheel, Local Keyboard On/Off and many other hidden functions, but without printing the relevant page from the handbook you’d be clueless as to where they lie. Hopeless on stage then, but easier to access if you have fired up the Sono88 in conjunction with your own computer software or with the provided package including Ableton Live Lite V7, which is a capable enough, rather loop-oriented stage and studio sequencer. The supplied drivers also make it possible to route the Sono88’s MIDI and Audio inputs and outputs in various ways, so you can play the internal sounds more freely, record them on your computer, record audio through the Sono88 or any one of a number of other configurations.

So you could imagine using the Sono88 in two major settings – either in the studio interfaced to your computer, or on stage playing its internal sounds or those from connected MIDI modules. Let’s look at the studio situation. The Sono88 needs a good wide desk to set it up, but needs almost no depth as it’s barely deeper than its own keys. The keyboard feel is good, in fact it’s extremely firm and heavier that that of some genuine wooden weighted keyboards. The rubberised Pitch and Mod wheels feel great and the placement of connection sockets is sensible. How you interface the Sono 88 to your own software or that supplied with it is up to you. The keyboard provides almost no facilities for editing soft synth sounds as do some of the other M-Audio products like the KeyStation Pro88, but you could usefully assign one parameter of interest – like Filter Cutoff or Release Time – to the Mod Wheel.

On stage, the Sono 88 has the advantage of being lightweight, compact and apparently well constructed, with quick access to the basic sounds of pianos, organ, strings and choir. But if you’re playing connected modules it doesn’t have fast access to keyboard splits, MIDI channel changing and so on. The smaller Sono61 model is identical, but with a semi-weighted 5-octave keyboard and five sounds (no strings or choir, but the full GM set is still there), while the synth weighted four-octave KeyStudio 49i has just the sampled grand sound in 20-note polyphony, with software to give a full GM set of sounds on a computer.

In Conclusion

M-Audio continue to ring the changes on the available facilities and price points for controller and stage keyboards, and have plenty of competition in their attempt to do so, leading to the inevitable conclusion that you’ll have to think very carefully before making a purchasing decision in this area. To want a Sono88, you have to need a good stage piano sound, but not to need fast access to many other sounds unless you’re at home with your computer, and to want audio interface capabilities while in the studio while not needing any significant edit controller facilities for soft synths.

If you fall into this category (even if you need to get down on the floor and draw one of those big Venn diagrams to find out that this is the case), then the Sono88 will suit you very nicely, thank you, and if not, you might want to do the diagram all over again and see if one of M-Audio’s other models will very happily meet your needs…

M-Audio ProKeys Sono88 £319.00

88 keys weighted

Grand Piano, Bright Piano, Electric Piano, Organ, Clav, Strings, Choir

128 GM sounds + drums and percussion

Reverb and Chorus effects

Layer mode

40-note (maximum) polyphony

Built-in USB audio interface;

 2-in/2-out audio interface

 16-bit/44.1kHz (CD-quality) audio

 XLR microphone, 1/4″ instrument and RCA inputs

 1/4″ jacks for stereo line output

 Dual front-mounted headphone jacks

 Hardware direct monitoring

Assignable modulation wheel and voice volume control

Pitch bend wheel

Transpose +/- buttons (can also alter octave, transpose,

    program, Bank LSB, Bank MSB, MIDI channel or master tune

Edit Mode button

MIDI Out from USB (keyboard acts as MIDI interface)

Audio and power via USB

Class-compliant MIDI (requires no additional drivers)

Low-latency drivers for high audio performance included

DC power socket

Sustain pedal jack

MIDI Out jack

On/Off switch

Piano Reset button to restores settings to piano sound

Optional Accessories;

Power Supply 9V DC 500mA

SP-1 Sustain Pedal

www.maudio.co.uk

Ueberschall Score FX

Ueberschall ScoreFX

MARK JENKINS looks at a new software package specifically aimed at film soundtrack design.

This review is all about sound, not music. If all you’re interested in is notes on a page, then Ueberschall’s ScoreFX is probably not for you. But if you’re writing pop or rock music which might make use of unusual sound textures, or if you’re composing for films or theatre or have any other reason for wanting more unusual sonic textures in your music, then it’s a rather fascinating package.

 

ScoreFX arrives as a Mac and PC compatible DVD with some 7GB of compressed content on it, capable of installing as a stand-alone instrument or as a plug-in for VST, ADU, RTAS or DirectX format software sequencers. So you can play ScoreFX sounds from your computer or laptop and controlling keyboard without needing any other software running, or can use the package as a sound source within the Cubase, Logic and other popular sequencers. While the software can be installed on your system disk, the library can be located on an external hard disk without any problem, and runs for two days before needing to be registered on the internet.

 

Produced by Ilya Kaplan, a Canadian Composer and musical sound designer working in the field of TV and Film drama, animation and documentary, the ScoreFX engine manifests itself as a rather plain silver and greenish rectangle called the Liquid Instrument, which also runs other packages from Ueberschall including among many others, Bass Guitar and Drums packages. Once you have one Liquid Instrument, you can run any assortment of Liquid library files through it. ScoreFX comprises four files offering between them Beds, Kits, Accents, Vocal Bits and Rhythms; each one loads up to offer 10 to 20 categories, each category including a dozen or two dozen sounds. So the total complement is 954 Accents, 198 beds and 362 Rhythms arranged in 28 Construction Kits, and ranging from very short percussive sounds to very long background effects.

Sound of the Crowd

Describing this quantity of conventional sounds is difficult enough, but when the entire content is intentionally abstract we’re facing an uphill struggle. Suffice it to say though that Ueberschall’s chosen method of categorising sounds is pretty effective. You can go for “Concern”, “Mysterious”, “Pleasing” and many other categories, finding many variations upon each description. Every sound appears in visual form as a tiny waveform arranged in a column to the right of the name descriptors, and can be auditioned by clicking on a small Play button. Each waveform can then be dragged into a third column representing MIDI notes on a vertically presented keyboard, at which point it becomes playable from your keyboard.

 

So what sort of sounds can you now access from your keyboard? “Anticipation/Tension 03” sounds like a looping burst on a panpipe, given a metallic edge as if being banged against an oil drum. “Not Safe 08” sounds like a tabla loop processed through a synthesizer filter, while “Vocal Bits” is a bending male “aaah” with a long looping echo. “Kaduk 01-25” are all wailing Eastern vocals, while “Dark 04” from the “Beds” category is a smooth, low drone which could easily find a place in any sci-fi or vampire movie.

So we’ve looked at how easy it is to select ScoreFX sounds and assign them to your keyboard, but the package has a lot more to offer hidden beneath the surface. It actually runs using a processing engine created by music software company Celemony for use in their vocal pitch shifting package Melodyne. As a versatile digital pitch shifter, the Melodyne engine is capable of re-editing ScoreFX loops in minute detail, pitch shifting entire loops or section of loops to change their length or the tempo of any time dependent element.

Hum A Little Melodyne

The Melodyne engine wasn’t familiar to me, but couldn’t be easier to use as it turns out. Switch to the Editor display and loops are divided into sections on a matrix, and any section can be pushed up and down the matrix to change its pitch. You can also change the length of sections, but they can’t be overlapped since it’s a monotimbral playback system. But taking a drum pattern already existing in ScoreFX, and turning it into a melodic tuned percussion loop more like a set of marimbas or steel pans (the soundtrack for George Clooney’s recent re-make of Solaris used the latter to great atmospheric effect) is terrifically easy. The third page display in ScoreFX is Automation, and any MIDI controller such as your pitch bend or modulation wheel can be set to adjust the overall Volume, Pitch or Formant of each sound. Pitch is readily enough understood, and the Melodyne playback engine makes real strides towards minimising the “munchkinisation” which sometime occurs when sounds are substantially pitch shifted.

 

But Formant modification is less easy to understand, having more to do with the tonal difference between (say) a typical male and female voice rather than their actual pitch. Anyway, Formant alteration is quickly found to be more useful on some sounds than on others, but along with other variable parameters offers an enormous degree of variation over the ScoreFX sounds. For sounds with a rhythmic element, the Tempo can be quickly halved or doubled, or varied 1BPM at a time, and events can be Quantised to fall exactly on the beat from 0% to 100%. It’s also possible to Transpose the pitch of a sound completely, regardless of what MIDI key it’s assigned to, and to Lock it to a specific scale for playback – from C all the way up to B and from Major and Minor to Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian and Major and Minor Pentatonic, Oriental, Japanese and many other scales. ScoreFX then couldn’t be easier to use on a basic level, and if you have more specific needs in terms of pushing the rhythmic elements of a sound to match a beat, or moving elements of a sound to meet a “hit point” in an accompanying movie, is also terrifically straightforward. The sonic content as mentioned before is massive – all sorts of atmospheric bloops and burbles, layered voices, percussive sounds and electronic textures, and the designers quite justifiably recommend the package for use in film scores, computer game audio, adverts, trailers, websites, business logos, training videos and more.

 

UK suppliers Time & Space have many other Ueberschall products on offer as well as a vast range of other sampling and software instruments. Ten years ago, gaining access to sounds like these would mean buying a new module, or at the very least an expensive set of CD-ROM’s to load into a large hardware sampler. Ueberschall’s website includes several video demos of the package in action, and as these amply demonstrate, to be able to obtain this degree of power over a new means of composition, using a simple to operate software instrument which has no fear of key, pitch or tempo variations, is power indeed.

Ueberschall Score FX Accents, Beds & Rhythms – Cinematic Sound Design £115.00

http://www.ueberschall.com

http://www.timespace.com

CD Reviews

CD Reviews

by Mark Jenkins

“If One Door Closes Another Door Opens”

KEES AERTS (Groove GR-156)

Kees is co-founder of the Groove label from the Netherlands, from which we reviewed several CD releases recently. Unprolific himself, he often works in collaboration with the label’s co-owner Rob Boots who’s much busier in terms of actual CD releases. Ron pops up here on several tracks, which date from 1990 to 2006, so the CD can be seen as something of a catching-up exercise, and includes Kees’ contributions to several now unavailable compilation CD’s.

“Undelivered Delivery” opens with railway station sounds and is reminiscent of the European band Peru, who specialised in bouncy, synthesizer-led melodic tunes rather like a lightweight version of Jean-Michel Jarre. The Peru influence is also in evidence on “Put Me Down, Scotty” which uses dialogue samples from various generations of Star Trek leading into another bouncing, rolling sequencer and drum machine rhythm. Most of the sounds here are from the analog era (though analog had been and gone once by 1990) so there’s lots of swirling strings and bouncy bass in evidence.

There’s not much info here on the keyboards used – one track “Dragonfly” features the very distinctive clattering Roland TR808 drums along with the same manufacturer’s MC202 synth/sequencer, TB303 Bassline and W30 sampler, and Korg’s MonoPoly keyboard synth in a light, airy and bouncy tune, but with 16 years between that track and “The Sun Shines, The World Smiles” you can tell that Kees is still more interested in the full, simple, bouncy textures of analog rather than going into any deep sonic experimentation. An album then for fans of straightforward melody and simple, rich keyboard sounds.

“Mea Culpa”

RON BOOTS (Groove GR-155)

In contrast to the Kees Aerts release, Ron Boots gives a very comprehensive list of instrumentation on his latest CD, and has always been one for mixing deeper sonic experimentation with the bouncy analog sounds, and more recently with exploiting the possibilities of both hardware and software synths. So here you can try to pick out the sounds of the Prophet 08, Poly Evolver, Alesis Fusion, Roland D50, Moog Voyager, Korg Wavestation and M1, Access Virus, Clavia Nord Lead and Oberheim OB12 keyboards among others, from the software choir Voices of Passion and soft synthesizers by Arturia, East West and Native Instruments.

There’s even a bit of vocals delivered by Ron, in a pleasant bass voice reminiscent of Demis Roussos, over a slowly rolling bass sequencer pattern on “The Roses of My Life”, while “Mea Culpa 2” counterpoints fizzing analog textures against clattering, filtered drums and a more up-front sequence reminiscent of recent Tangerine Dream.

Again it’s an album for fans of analog sound, but there’s quite a lot of sonic experimentation going on too, and some interesting juxtapositions of textures including drums and voices.

“Atmosphere”

SYNTH.NL (Groove GR-154)

Synth.NL is Michel van Osenbruggen whose debut CD was inspired by the subject of Formula 1 racing – so you’d have thought that tracks inspired by different atmospheric layers and cloud formations would have been a little more relaxing. Far from it – Michel find lots of turbulence and disruption here, so the swooshing and swirling noises soon give way to rolling sequences and forceful drums as well as abstract sound effects. 

There’s more information here on different types of cloud formation than there is on the keyboards used (though lots of Korg T1 patches are in evidence) but there’s a good mix of rich analog sound, sampled vocal noises giving some hints of Enigma or Enya, drum machines, rolling arpeggiator patterns and choral swirls. Possibly not such a varied album as his debut, but still an enjoyable listen.

“Snap Shots”

FRANCIS RIMBERT (Czen Prod CZP2007)

Francis Rimbert is Jean-Michel Jarre’s right-hand keyboardist, so lazy comparisons to the French synthesizer maestro’s music will inevitably follow. There are plenty of stylistic differences though. “Dawn Of Light” though with a droning synthesizer background features sampled harp and flute sounds in a more classical manner than Jarre would normally touch on, while “Victory” does slip into the Jarresque, rolling sequencer and rock drums mode.

“Hidden Movie” gets back to the orchestral textures though with Arabic-influenced staccato strings under a James Bond-like melody and even the flamenco footstamps from Madonna’s “Die Another Day” theme, while “Twin Dam Do” has a lyrical piano solo under strummed guitars most untypical of anything Jarre has ever done.

“Memory of Love” is really an Enigma clone complete with ambient dance drum loop and some nice female vocals, while “RBF” closes the album with what really is a Jarre-like rolling sequencer piece, but an unusually powerful one with some great techno drums and chanted vocals. I think it’s about a football team, but I’m not sure…

Rimbert’s album has a lot of variation, shows him as a versatile keyboardist and while appealing to Jarre fans, certainly gets him out from the master’s shadow very effectively. There are several more Rimbert solo projects available through the same label (www.czenprod.com)

 

“This Is Not The End”

REMY (Akh Records AKH04081-)

Remy is Remy Stroomer, a Netherlands-based composer who combines avant-garde classical leanings with electronic music and has organised some interesting live performances in churches and similar venues. “Return of the Dream” spins solo cello lines over deep electronic drones, while “There’s Something in the Air” adds sampled choirs and bubbling analog sequences to the mix. “Because It’s Said” also has some deep string sounds but rather filtered through various effects units before the sequencer/drum machine mix takes over again, and “Those Days” is a slow, gothic exercise in digital-sounding, organ-like textures.

Although there’s a lot of Jean Michel Jarre-like sequencer and drum machine work here, Remy’s music generally incorporates a gloomier, gothic texture and will appeal to those who like their instrumental electronic music a little on the dark side – more on the website http://www.akhrecords.nl.

“In Stereo Gravity”

MARTIN ARCHER (Discus 33CD double CD)

Martin Archer’s a prolific Sheffield-based keyboardist, saxophonist and composer whose avant-garde jazz-based label Discus has featured many well known names, including on this album collaborations with singer Juliie Tippetts and drummer Chris Cutler.

Martin’s main weapon of choice is the Korg Prophecy which is a monophonic acoustic modeliing keyboard synth which can be used as a polyphonic controller for other instruments including software instruments. On “All The Wars Were Lost”, taped dialague samples are spun over electronic drones, semi-random clattering drums and processed woodwind sounds, while on “PicoFarad” there’s a slow drum, bass and guitar backing reminiscent of the German “krautrock” bands Can and Neu.

In fact Martin’s influences from the German avant-garde are explicit – a track on the second CD is dedicated to the recently deceased Karlheinz Stockhausen – but those influences are filtered through the sensibility of the Britsh experimental jazz tradition.

A vastly varied pair of albums then, frequently featuring jazz sax alternating with extreme avant-garde electronics and voices, and there’s a vast amount of similarly challenging material on the label at http://www.discus-music.co.uk

Way Out West Kik Axxe

Way Out West Kik Axxe 

Review by Mark Jenkins

Many of the most popular keyboard synthesizers of all time – the MiniMoog, ARP 2600 and OSCar among the monophonic synths, the Yamaha CS80 and Prophet 5 among the polyphonics, and the Korg M1 among other “samploid” digital synths – have now been very adequately emulated in software, and the Kik Axxe from Way Out West adds another familiar name to the roster.

The Axxe was the entry level synth from ARP, Alan R. Pearlman’s early competitor company to Moog. The company successfully marketed many monophonic analog designs and saw their instruments played by Stevie Wonder, Edgar Winter, Camel, National Health, Chick Corea, Neil Ardley and thousands of other pro keyboardists. They had a hit with the Omni – a relatively limited but affordable polyphonic string imitating keyboard – built a huge custom synth for the alien encounter scene in the movie Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, but fell by the wayside before completing a true polyphonic or MIDI synth. The ARP Quadra favoured by Tony Banks with Genesis takes us full circle since (regardless of the fact that its delayed development contributed largely to the company’s demise) it featured a very basic poly synth, bass synth, string synth and Axxe-style lead synthesizer.

Back to the Axxe then. This was a single oscillator three-octave monophonic synth, simpler than the ARP Odyssey which had two oscillators and more special effects like random sample & hold. In fact you couldn’t get much simpler than the Axxe – alongside the single oscillator it had a single lowpass filter, white noise source for wind, sea and percussive noises, two envelopes, and that was about it.

So you may think the Axxe too basic to be of much use, but it was quite capable of truning out a decent bass sound, a cutting lead noise, and varous squelchy synthesizer noises. On top of that it was affordable, so represented a way into synth performance for thousands of players around the world.

Like most early ARP synths, the Axxe went through three incarnations, the first with wooden end panels, the second with metal end panels, and the third with a revised black and orange colour scheme and PPC buttons. The PPC (Proportional Pitch Control) was a set of three rubber buttons providing Pitch Bend up, Pitch Bend Down, and in the centre, vibrato modulation. not as versatile as a pair of mod wheels – for instance you couldn’t leave the pitch bend set upwards – but presumably cheaper and easier to install.

All models of Axxe sounded more or less the same though, and you’d have to work a little to make the instrument sound reasonably powerful. The shape (pulse width) of the square wave oscillator sound could be varied, and by doing this with the LFO (or with the envelope through the course of a note) a thicker, phased sound could be created. But there wasn’t much else you could do to vary the sound of the Axxe, so in their emulation Way Out West have teamed up the instrument with another ARP favourite, the 16-note Sequencer. This was a great favourite of 1970’s musicians for creating repeated patterns – it’s likely to have been used by The Who for “Baba O”Reilly” and by Edgar Winter for “Frankenstein”, and certainly gets a huge workout on Michael Hoenig’s new age/synthesizer epic “Departure from the Northern Wasteland” – and is reproduced in not too accurate detail in the Kik Axxe package. Among other departures from reality, this Sequencer can be flicked from playing the synth to playing a set of analog drum kit noises, so the package you end up with is rather more like an emulation of a Roland Drumatix TR606 drum machine and a TB303 Bassline synth squeezed together into one instrument.

KikAxxe Moves

KikAxxe can be purchased by download (in demo version until you buy a license) though a boxed version is available too, and runs on Mac or PC as an RTAS, VST or Audio Units plug-in. Run as a VST plug-in for example in Cubase, it opens with a three-and-a-bit octave keyboard, synth control panel, sequencer and simulated tape delay all on display. You can switch to a simplified view which only offers the basic control parameters, but the Advanced display isn’t all that hard to master – just hit Start on the Sequencer and you’ll hear a typical synth sound played in a repeated pattern with some accompanying alog drums.

Playing the KikAxxe sequencer is actually quite entrancing, the one drawback being that you can’t set drum and sequence patterns to different lengths. What you can do though is step the entire sequence up and down in pitch, or along a note, using Cursor-style buttons, which makes it possible to create endless live variations of even a simple pattern.

What would be wonderful would be to set up two instances of KikAxxe on your computer and lock their two sequencers together. However on a 2.33GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo MacBookPro with 2GigRAM this proved next to impossible – the processors just couldn’t handle it. Setting up one KikAxxe with instances of other less demanding soft synths like Oddity and KorgM1LE was not however a problem.

KikAxxe has some advanced options allowing you to synchronise the sequencer and LFO to MIDI and control sound variations in a number of ways, but just running through the preset sounds – like Syntax and High5UpDo – quickly gives an idea of how limited the Axxe sound creation options really are. With no second oscillator there are no truly thick, detuned or hard sync sounds and with a single LFO there are no really complex modulation shapes, but you do have the option of adding in the Tape Delay, a simulation of a simple Copicat-style tape loop echo which can be added in variable amounts to synth and/or drums. You can also use the Axxe filter and envelopes to process other sounds in your software system, and 

Sequencer Loops

The KikAxxe sequncer is in many ways more interesting than the synth, and allows a lot of live improvisation to go on. You can reset where the sequence pattern ends so that it constantly varies,  pre-program patterns and jump from one to another, transpose the key from the KikAxxe keyboard, and so on. The drum part of the sequencer doesn’t sound like any particular old drum machine but a montage of many – you could certainly get a Roland TR808 type of kit out of it, and in fact each sound is completely re-programmable using a simplified set of synth controls, so you’re really looking at a programmable analog drum synth rather than just a drum machine. This kind of thing could be of great interest to fans of bands like Kraftwerk and Depeche Mode who always used to program their drum sounds using analog synths. Six kits covering urban, acoustic and Roland 808/909 drum machine styles are already provided. 

Drum and Synth MIDI channels can be set independently according to how you want to control them within your software sequencer system, and a Preferences displays allows you to re-arrange sequences, drum patterns and synth sounds as you wish.

Conclusions.

KikAxxe is great fun to play with, but its synth sounds are very limited – just as on the original synth – and won’t take you very far beyond a bass line, thin lead synth or squirty analog sound. There’s not a great deal of nostalgia about the original Axxe for this very reason, so Way Out West have been wise to throw a few more options into the package. The Sequencer is great fun, and the fact that it plays drum sounds as well is a huge bonus. Having these drum sounds comprised of fully programmable analog patches is a touch of genius, so that those who like the early analog and techno bands could well find themselves endlessly varying the drum sounds and sequencer patterns and paying relatively little attention to the main synth section itself. One then for the 

Way Out West KikAxxe

£39.00 (download)

http://www.maudio.co.uk

Akai MPK49 Review

Akai MPK49

The first new keyboard product from Akai in many years…what can Mark Jenkins learn from its design?

 

Akai was  a leading brand in the musical instrument market for many years, having become an established name in hi-fi, but the company’s keyboard instruments never became widely used. After launching a couple of analog keyboard synths, Akai concentrated on sound samplers, and though there were a couple of keyboard samplers – including a big sound sampling version of Akai’s wooden weighted MIDI master keyboard – the sampler market basically became one for MIDI sound modules only. 

So Akai’s musical instrument division basically became an outlet for their sampling modules like the S900, S1000 and S3000, and when that market collapsed with the advent of software sampling, became rather dormant. Some products were still available including wind synthesizers and the MPC range of sampling drum machines, which featured large velocity sensitive pads and were always popular in the hip-hop music market – and it’s the continuing success of this range which has partly led to the revival of Akai’s keyboard lines in the form of the MPK49.

The MPK then offers to provide MPC drum machine-style pads combined with MIDI/USB keyboard control and a set of software editing controllers. It’s a four-octave design as its name would suggest, so neither too small to play convincing piano parts nor too large to fit on a small desk alongside a laptop or desktop music computer.

Placed above the keyboard (always a good way to save space) you’ll find conventional pitch bend, and (re-programmable) modulation wheels, while the rest of the hardware comprises 12 pads, eight sets of illuminating button/slider/rotary, an LCD display and around a dozen assorted programming buttons.  A simple enough layout then, while the back panel features MIDI In and Out, USB, footswitch and footpedal inputs, and a socket for an external power adaptor if you’re not using USB power from a computer.

There’s nothing unfamiliar about this specification – none of the motorised faders of the CME controller keyboards, no X-Y touch pads as on some Novation and Korg designs – so though the MPK49 is comprehensively equipped, it does face massive competition from similar products marketed by companies such as Novation, M-Audio, Edirol, Korg and others. One aspect the MPK49 does have going for it is its keyboard feel. It’s rather firmer than most plastic controller keyboards, far from being a weighted but maybe a semi-weighted feel, certainly giving a little more resistance to the player than usual, which may well be to the taste of many potential purchasers.

Akai The Noo

The MPK49 is the controller keyboard that likes to say “yes” – it offers almost every facility you’d require for both studio and stage use, and most of the parameters are re-programmable to suit any hardware or software setup with which you may be working. One important note though – many controller keyboards offer an extra slider so there’s a set of 9 to simulate drawbars on popular organ emulation software like the Native Instruments B4. With only 8 sliders ( a much more logical number for mixing and other jobs admittedly) you’re going to be potentially missing a harmonic on many organ emulation packages.

What you could do though is assign the last rotary knob to replace the missing slider controller; all the buttons, sliders and continuously rotating controllers are completely re-programmable and the MPK49 stores three complete sets of functions (which includes 3 pad banks, so 36 in all) in 30 programmable preset memories.

The basic function of the central set of control buttons is a tape transport which will put your software sequencer into Stop/Start/Record modes, and these aren’t compltely re-programmable. But the 12 pads (which are similar to those on the MPC500 drum machine/sequencer) are, and since they are both velocity and aftertouch sensitive, can come in handy for a whole range of functions. One obvious one is simply to trigger drum sounds for when you’re programming backing patterns. But let’s be a bit more imaginative than that shall we? You could also use a pad to trigger a long sampled effect over which you could play on the keyboard; or set up an octave of tuned percussion and play the pads like a marimba; or set each pad to play a different type of backing drone, with the volume or tone controlled by your finger pressure on the pad.

It’s also possible put the pads in Note Repeat mode so they trigger repeatedly at the current speed of the built-in arpeggiator. The MPK49 features quite a comprehensive arpeggiator, and so although a lot of sound synthesis software and most sequencer software has an arpeggiator built in, you’ll find it useful for generating repeated patterns of all kinds. Push the Time Division button and the eight programmable buttons allow the basic time division of the arpeggiator to be selected – you can synchronise this to an external clock from hardware or software, and there’s also a Tap Tempo button to set the arpeggiator speed.

The arpeggiator can be Latched in two ways – adding all new notes you play, or only sounding the actual notes you’re holding – but one disappointing omission is the fact that the keyboard can’t actually split (though of course it can be switched in octave range, and transposed). It would have been useful to be able to have an arpeggio sounding on one software instrument from the bottom octave and a half, and a different sound to play chords from the remaining range of the keyboard. Or you could have set up more conventional keyboard splits – a bass at the bottom and strings at the top.  

Still, the MPK49 is going to find a use in many studio and state setups, especially those of players who use and like the MPC series drum machine/sequencer. The factory presets include controllers for Ableton Live, Reason, Cubase and SONAR sequencers, it ships with Ableton Live Lite Akai Edition software which is a useful live performance oriented sequencer, and is in the shops now. 

AKAI MPK49 USB MIDI CONTROLLER £279.00

• Number of Keys: 49
• Type of action: Semi-weighted, Velocity and Aftertouch (Channel).
• Computer Interface: USB/MIDI.
• Display: LCD.
• Footswitchable Patch Changes: yes.
• Number of Independent MIDI Ins/Outs: 1.
• Programmable Continuous Footpedals: 1.
• Programmable Footswitches: 1.
• Programmable controllers: MMC, MIDI START/STOP, MIDI CC.
• System Real-Time Controls: MMC, MIDI START/STOP, MIDI CC.

AKAI MPK49 USB MIDI CONTROLLER KEYBOARD WITH MPC-STYLE PADS

• MPK49 delivers a total of 76-assignable controls.
• 8 full-sized, 360 degree rotation pots, each with 3 banks.
• 12 MPC-style velocity and pressure sensitive performance pads.
• 8 full-sized sliders with 3 controller banks each.
• Arpeggiator with 8 musical timing division patterns.
• 8 assignable backlit switches with 3 controller banks each.
• Large LCD display.
• MPC Note Repeat Function assignable to the pads.
• MPC “Full Level” and “12 Levels” Function.
• Akai Groove Quantise built into the internal clock.
• MMC / MIDI Start Stop transport controls.
• Ableton Live Lite Edition software included

http://www.akaipro.com