Molten Music Monthly – October 2018
Description
Lots of fascinating stuff to talk about this month. People go polysynth crazy over the Moog One, Akai fire up a controller for FL Studio, M-audio and Fluid Audio release audio interfaces with nice big knobs, Soundbrenner come up with the ultimate musicians utility watch, TouchAble Pro makes the leap to Windows, Riffer makes your DAW sequencing feel more analog, and Novation put analog style sequencing into a controller keyboard, MINI-MU lets you sew your own chiptune controller gloves, Pipes brings massive sample instruments to hardware, we have a super bunch of synths from AtomoSynth, GS Apollo, Analog Fusion and Future Sound Systems and 4MS come up with some very cool little pods to put the odd module in.
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But first – Synthfest!
Yes, we just had another SynthFest. It was the place only 2 years ago that i first grasped the concept of Eurorack and fell headfirst down the modular rabbit hole. So it’s become a bit of a pilgrimage for me. It’s a synth show held up in Sheffield and hosted by Sound On Sound magzine. Everyone was there – the big names like Korg, Yamaha, Roland, Arturia and Moog but also the little names and individuals like Future Sound Systems, Soulsby, Expert Sleepers, Erica Synths and loads more. I wasn’t bowled over by anything new and exciting this year but I did get the opportunity to have a fiddle with a number of things. Tried the Modal Sculpt – it was a bit weird – made a fabulous drone on the Studio Electronics Boom Star – had a go on the Grandmother which was pretty sweet and the Erica Synths Techno system which does exactly what it says on the tin. Nina from Transistor Sound Labs gave me a demo of their cool new Stepper drums prototype, and i got a run through with the analogue solutions Generator. Turns out that when i said they were going to lend me one for review i completely imagined it. But it was a super day – it has such a great vibe, cool, relaxed, fun nothing like any other trade or gear show i’ve been to. Lots of lovely people came and said hello which was fabulous – thanks! The crowd is still overwhelmingly white male but there was a bit more diversity and a larger proportion of women running stands. I didn’t get to any of the seminars – i was just there for the gear and the people.
Moog One
Moog have finally revealed the successor to the MemoryMoog – the hugely polyphonic Moog One. The Moog One is a beautiful chunk of an instrument. All analogue in 8 or 16 voice versions and 3 part multitimbral. Each voice has 3 oscillators and then there’s filters and envelopes and modulation and all the usual stuff arranged across 200 knobs. They say there’s more power in a single voice of the Moog One than there is in the whole Moog Voyager – which will probably piss off a lot of Voyager owners. It’s capable of handling thousands of presets but loads them up in banks of 64 with each one being instantly selectable. It also has some digital effects at the end of the chain from Eventide. It’s an immense and expensive synthesizer that’s elegantly traditional and solid. The 8-voice will cost you £6000, the 16 voice £7799.
Moog has produced a wonderfully trippy promotional video with all these possibly stoned out synth players being enraptured by the sound – it’s awesomely other-worldly and demonstrates just how far away they are from the budget end of the market – and so they should be. This synth is not for the likes of you or me.
Akai Fire FL Studio
An unexpected controller from Akai designed for use with FL Studio. It’s laid out as a 16×4 matrix of control mirroring the infamous FL Studio channel rack step sequencer. You can wire 4 of these together for a massive 8×32 grid. The integration extends to the browser letting you load up samples, plugins and projects. You can select patterns, mute and solo tracks and move into other modes like Note mode, drum mode and performance mode making use of the pads velocity sensitivity. It’s a very natty thing and even comes with a pretty fully fledged version of FL Studio in the box. You kind of think it could so easily be a fabulous standalone MIDI step sequencer – but no it’s just for FL Studio and for that it’s awesome.
http://www.akaipro.com
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M-Audio M-Track 8x4m
Following their flavour of desktop audio interfaces M-Audio has released the M-Track 8x4m. 8 inputs with 4 mic/line, 2 instrument and 2 line inputs and 4 outputs. There’s 2 independent headphone outputs, metering LEDs and a nice big knob in the middle. It’s a bit chunky but capable of 24bit and 192khz over USB. Seems all right – but what’s slightly interesting is that it’s on USB-C – is that interesting? Who knows. I confess to being a bit nervous of M-Audio since they were bought by InMusic- i mean i used to love M-Audio products but i cant help feeling that it’s not quite the same anymore. These do look quite good though, come with a huge bundle of software, low latency, probably worth a go.
Fluid Audio SRI-2
Probably just as interesting is the SRI-2 2in 4out interface from Fluid Audio – not come across them before. Apparently they have been mostly making speakers and suffer from a slightly cheesy logo. But otherwise this is a good looking interface with another one of those knobs and a nice bit of metering. There’s not a whole lot to say about audio interfaces these days other than to point it out. But i thought it was pretty.
Soundbrenner Core
A while ago Sounbrenner decided that we all needed to wear a metronome on our wrist. I wasn’t completely convinced by that and so they’re having another go and this time it does a few more things. It’s still a vibrating metronome which i guess can be a useful alternative to a click track when performing or recording – but it’s now also a loudness meter and if you snap the face off it becomes a magnetic guitar tuner and the last feature which i cant believe they missed off the first one is that it’s also a watch – it’ll even beep to tell you things. It also looks something resembling coolness. So perhaps it has enough features to make it a thumping, tuning, loudness indicating, time telling smart-ish watch. It also bluetooths to your DAW, syncs up with other Cores and gives you a much better experience than juggling apps and phones. At 200 dollars for the one with the nice strap it’s not cheap but it’s not iWatch prices either. Hmm… I’d quite like to try one out.
TouchAble Pro
This is high on my list of things to do a review of at the moment. TouchAble Pro is or was an iPad app for controlling Ableton Live. Well now they’ve ported it to PC which means you can run it on a Surface or desktop touch screen alongside Live and have it all on one device. That’s supercool. I really liked Yeco who did something similar a while back but don’t seem to have moved forward since. TouchAble Pro might just have an edge in terms of looks, design and functionality and so that’s piqued my interest.
You get all the controls you’d imagine, clip launching, scene selection, mixing and so on, but you also get to play instruments with a virtual piano or grid layout. You can drag and drop samples and edit sequences directly in TouchAble which is where (i think) it starts to depart from Yeco. You can draw and edit automation and they have templates for all the Live modules for instant tweaking and you can build controllers for any other plug-ins. Zerodebug have sent me a copy to review a
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