Get something ice-cooled and lower your body temperature with some cool bits of gear. There’s a bit more software this month as June tends to be quieter on the hardware side after Superbooth.
It’s hot, very hot, so let’s not dawdle. Get something ice cooled and lower your body temperature with some cool bits of gear. There’s a bunch of software this month as June tends to be quiet on the hardware side after Superbooth. This inevitably brings up concerns over AI. While I appreciate that some people want nothing to do with AI of any kind, it has already become part of the development process of many software workflows. I’m not going to be judging that and on the whole there’s no way of knowing if something was vibe-coded or written from scratch, let alone if it matters. Ai will continue to be a cause for concern, and it’s right that we talk about it especially in the area of AI music generation which is currently taking work from a lot of mid-level and home producers. My take is to keep talking about it.
Plugin Corp – Sound Capsule. I’ve been a fan of Jade Wii every since I met her at Thomann Synth Reaktor in 2019. She’s an artist, musician, producer, developer, youtuber, champion of dawless jamming and always appears to be doing a dozen things all at once. Recently she’s been making a bunch of plugins which are available via Plugin Corp. There’s a Soud Capsule series which are lovely, simple, regular effects. And then there’s the slightly more complex Ambient series which are just lush. They look lovely, sound great. She’s also working on a music platform called Jamnutz which hopes to offer a more lively and animated alternative to Bandcamp or Patreon. At the moment it’s has a trippy grid sequencer as a holding page but it’s one to watch I think.
Raccoon Audio – I might have just had a fever dream but I’m pretty sure Raccoon Audio has just released a bunch of weird-ass plugins that have to be seen to be believed. The basic premise seems to be built around a Raccoon torturing some guy with audio processing. There’s an echo that seems intent on producing mutant clones of the bloke that then get turned into snacks, and a ManTube Fuzz that electrifies the juices out of him. The fuzz is immense with all sorts of styles and blends to make a flippin’ epic sound, and the Echo is brilliantly characterful with the bonus feature of torture. There are more to come and there’s a free OctaveWah on the website you can grab now – you can also turn off the animations if you must.
NoodleRack – This is simply the best software modular I’ve seen. It’s put together by Stetson Blake using Claude AI. I love its simplicity, I love the fact it runs in a browser, that it has all the most useful modules and has an easy workflow. It’s the perfect place for learning modular without all the install, complexity and cost of VCV Rack, Softube Modular and so on. But is that the problem. You build something in AI and give it away for free and remove the market from developers trying to make their own product in exchange for appropriate compensation. On the other hand Stetson uses Claude as way of building code – that’s not as easy as people think and the work that’s gone into this is obvious. It has a lot of great tutorials, sounds great, I would certainly consider using it to teach modular.
GCS Model 8 – Hot on the heels of Tape 16 that we saw last month is another virtual Tape DAW. This time it’s a 24-track tape-styled studio but it features magnetic physics, analog modelled synths and outboard effects. It has a lot of tape distortion and vibe around how everything works, the transport, the controls and it simply sounds brilliant. A lot of the animation and stuff looks great, some of it looks like it was made in SynthEdit from the 1990s. It can handle both VST effects and instruments and you have to embrace the idea of playing and recording live – no sequencing or messing about with clips and arrangements – you just have to go and do it. Love it.
https://gulfcoastsynthesis.com/
Reflection – A weird, node-based modular environment of sound design and music generation. There’s no timeline, just events happening in space, connected with signals, flowing into the abyss – or something! It has an interesting way of interpolating between snapshots so you can effect lots of change with the pull of a mouse. Fascinating – probably too complex and involving for me – I’m far too shallow for such adventures.
SteamGarden – TonicMint got in touch to tell me about their latest Reason synth – SteamGarden. I don’t cover those every often so I thought I’d give it a mention. But first of all I must that’s some sterling work there on an AI video – it’s sort of fascinating but then you realise you’re not really being given any useful information, like how it sounds or looks in Reason. Fortunately he’s done a less uncannyl demo video. I confess I was expecting something on the physical modelling side with vintage tones but actually it’s a hybrid synth with morphable filters and oscillators. It’s got a really wide range of sounds, thru-zero FM and a 24-slot modulation matrix for some really mad stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRY40THLJww
Gforce Prophet 5 – When I was a kid, before I was kidnapped by the shiny bells of Yamaha’s DX synths, I drooled over the Prophet-5. It was, in my limited view, the perfect synth that I never ever got to play – it was always out of reach. I’ve had a soft spot for it ever since and have enjoyed various emulations along the way. Suffice to say I was very excited to hear that Gforce Instruments were going to give it an official go. And it’s a marvellous thing. It has that sound of warm analog tones that don’t overwhelm or go mad – it’s not a massive synth, it’s lean and good, and cool and usable in every situation. Gforce have of course added X-Mod and effects, two layers, an arp and chord modes. You can have up to 10 voices per layer and it includes all three revisions of the filter and envelopes. Just lovely – the real deal.
https://www.gforcesoftware.com/product/prophet5/
UJAM Retrocraft – A suite of new old plugins that aim to retro-fy your music in the simplest way possible. I’d say that retro plugins have been a bit overdone lately, but I just love them anyway. This is about imparting imperfect character onto your tracks. It has analog amps, tape machines, vinyl, speakers and a bunch of modern things that will help you sound terrible. You’ve got 6 slots, each one a category and then 62 effects
https://www.ujam.com/craft/retrocraft/
Electronisounds Tracker TRX-12 – I struggle to see the attraction of the tracker – it just doesn’t resonate with my brain. I was so surprised to find one of my kids using one after reading about how aphex twin makes music. He has access to Reason and music making software and yet he’s fiddling around with numbers on a cascading screen. On the other hand I am fascinated by people who make music by live coding. Anyway Dean Daughters of Electronisounds has released Tracker TRX-12 which is inspired by things like the Polyend and Dirtywave M8 but built with all the things Dean wished they had. It has all sorts of per-step creative commands, chords on a single track, multiple drum sounds on a single track, melody mutation, probability and randomisation. It has 12 tracks, 75 instruments and a massive sound library. It looks like a complete nightmare to me but to people who like trackers this could be amazing.
https://www.electronisounds.com/trx-12-tracker-daw
Fender Studio Pro 8.1 – It was inevitable that we would see AI generative tools integrated into our DAWs, and the very very, super popular Fender are the first to give it a whirl. What fascinates me is how all these tech companies are absolutely convinced that AI is the best thing that can happen to their software and are simply not listening to their user base of musicians who see it for the slop it is. Well, as a writer and reviewer of such things I have to keep an open mind and I’ve just finished writing my review for a popular magazine that you’ll see in about 2 months. To summarise, Studio Pro has integrated a subset of Moises AI Studio for Stem Separation, Vocal Conversion and Stem Generation. The Stem Separation is pretty flippin’ awesome and the Voice Conversion is very believable in how it replaces your voice with a different voice while retaining the entire performance. The Stem Generation on the other hand is pretty ropey. The good news is that Moises says it’s been trained exclusively on licensed material and everyone gets paid. The bad news is that you evitably end up with a sort of dodgy sound demo. I did a quick video on it if you want some examples but basically it’s very clever in how it follows your music and creates fills and trills in the right places – it’s very responsive, but it’s also inconsistent. The drums have moments of greatness and then go off on some other thing, the other instruments are initially interesting and then they all bang out the same thudding chord structure regardless of the source or prompt. None of it sounds professional, none of it sounds usable, even if you were to pick out a few bars. I’ve had much better results letting Suno write a whole song. Getting Moises to come up with an accompaniment to my piano and voice is far more work than just doing it myself. It’s also hampered by not having the full toolset. So it’s clever, but half arsed and doesn’t really serve any purpose. And if you want the high quality stem separation that’ll cost you £15 a month, which is about the same at Studio Pro. I keep seeing videos of people using it going “wow” and then not actually playing the whole thing – glossing over the crap bit and pretending this is helping their creative workflow. I am honestly happy to talk about how great AI generation can be – if it is, but this is not.
https://uk.fender.com/products/fender-studio-pro
ADDAC Four String thing – This is brilliantly bonkers in the best tradition of ADDAC Systems. It’s a series of Eurorack modules that get themselves involved in the playing of four strings. The strings stetch across a frame under which you place your chosen manipulation modules. There’s a couple of different pickups, a spinny exciter, a plucky plectrum, an ebow, mutes, a quadraphonic sound thingy – all just weirdly and unnecessarily awesome. There’s no fret board so you’re going to be tuning the strings and then droning or perhaps using a slide. But what an exciting approach to electronic sound making.
https://www.addacsystem.com/en/products/modules/addac120-series
Doboz DVNA – Interesting chord and texture synth that features a touch-plate front panel and a 4-oscillator sound engine. The oscillators can be stacked into chords or combined for larger sounds. Nice chord generation modes and free form modes for droning and making noise. Each oscillator can have its own waveform and modulation. It can also do FM within the 4 oscillators. It has a lovely volume system that evolves and changes between stuff. It feels like its designed to do exactly what a texture synth should do – make fabulously and warmly animated sounds. Beautiful, although the small screen and 4-knob approach feels a bit restrictive.
https://doboz.audio/products/dvna
Thorn Audio Splines – Initially I thought what an overly complicated way to make waves and modulation. But watching the demo makes me think it has some redeeming features. The display is fabulous, but I’m not sure about those weird rubber knobs and then all the text on the screen – arrrrg! I love the visualisation but I’m not enjoying the lists of stuff and then, oh god, I’m going to have 16 points that I can edit – I think I’ll probably go mad. It’s a fabulously versatile thing – both audio and modulation – with all the power you’d usually find in software. You can make interesting waveforms and wonderful LFOs and all sorts of other clever stuff – but you only get one thing at the end – feels like it should have multiple things going on. Anway, elegantly made, if you can cope with the interface.
Akai MPC One G2 and MPC Key 37 G2 – Akai try to sell us another 16 pads on a thing with the second generation MPC One and MPC Key 37. They are standalone beat makers, sample groovers, synths and audio recorders. You have 16 tracks of audio, 32 plugin instruments, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and 4 times the processing power. They are fast and furious music making machines that require no computer or faffing about. Proper connections on the back for recording and sequencing and CV but no dedicated mic input, which is odd. Akai has been doing these right for a while now and this is just a better updated version.
https://www.akaipro.com/discover/mpc/g2/
Miltone 4Exp – Something I missed from the Superbooth coverage, the 4Exp replica of the Oberheim 4-Voice in hardware. You get a row of SEMs! It’s all built from discrete circuits based on the original synths with hand-match components and years of study. You got some master controls for level and pan but otherwise you have to setup each SEM to suit what you want. They are taking preorders for around €10,000
Befaco Backpack and ART – The lovely Befaco have produced a backpack for their 7U case. I’ve been hauling mine around in an Analog Case case which has been ok, but this looks like the bees knees. Perfectly sized, comfortable, lots of useful pockets for power supply and other bits and pieces. I will be using it to take my rig across London for my gig on Monday night. In the box came this rather nice brochure that including some details on the ARK that, I think, they’ve only teased up until now. ARK is a 16-track sequencer, sampler, synth and voltage generator. It has deterministic, stochastic and euclidean generation, selectable signal generators, internal modulators, harmony tools and chord progressions, an internal mixer with effects and mastering dynamics. 8 CV/audio/gate outputs – you can mix internally to two outputs and it can split into two parts. Could be amazing, could be a finger fudging mess, we won’t see it until October.
https://www.befaco.org/7u-case-backpack/
Behringer D Mini – The Behringer D Mini is finally here. It’s a 3-oscillator, analogue mini synth based on the very large Minimoog and squeezed into a tiny box. You’ve got a handful of controls, a little sequencer and stuff. It might be cool – I mean it’s €99 for a classic sounding analogue monosynth – who cares that the front panel is not very inspiring? For another €99 you can get the Model D which does actually give you a synth to play with.
Bartola Instruments Swell – Oooo we do like a nice valve. Swell is a harmonic low pass filter shaped by a cold-war-era Soviet valve. It has a 24dB/Oct slope, fully analogue, very musical and completely chaotic. It will self-oscillate with 1v/oct tracking and that tube can give you some very interesting waveforms. It looks really lovely and I’m enjoying everything I’ve heard from it so far.
https://www.bartolainstruments.com/product/swell/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OGdg_4en8A
THRP – I’ve been inspired lately to pursue the idea of eliciting an artistic human response. All around us AI is feasting on our culture and regurgitating it to us as the answer to all our questions. I began wondering what it would be like if we asked each other, rather than AI, and how it would feel to get a human response in the shape of art. So I’ve been playing with putting an App together where people can ask questions or shout into the void and in return they get a response from a bank of creative human beings. It may take time, it may or may not answer your question, but it will be human. I plan for this to harness artists, musicians, writers and creators as a curated field of responders to the everyday ponderings of the universe. I’m not sure what it will look like but the concept is coming together. What it won’t be is owned by billionaires, AI driven, or full of meaningless crap – the crap will be meaningful. If you’d like to know more or would like to join in with realising this mad idea then go to thrp.art for more information.
Coming UP
Gig – First of all I’ve got a gig coming up this Monday, the 29th June at the The Lower Third which is, I believe, in Denmark Street just off the Charing Cross Rd, round the corner for where I used to work at Turnkey, which is now a Chipotle. I’m supporting the return of Globo who are a classic 90s electronic band who feature none other than Mark Roland from Electronic Sound Magazine. I’m playing all by myself and so naturally I’m terrified of having to come up with 30 minutes or so of music with no safety net. It’s going to be interesting! Tickets are only like 6 quid. Doors open at 7:30pm
https://dice.fm/event/av55o2-globo-29th-jun-the-lower-third-london-tickets
Synth Picnic – The next picnic is on Saturday the 12th of July. I still have the Sequential Trigon, I might have a new Pittsburgh Modular synth and the Echon 6 to play with along with a smattering of other boxes and bits and pieces. Reviews on those synths coming soon.
Otherwise next week I am working on a review of Mylars Random8 and AJH’s Gemini dual filter, but who know what might crop up. And remember – if you want your product on my Molten Monthly then get in touch, I don’t always have the time to trawl through every news site for releases – so do let me know via any means.