Wsm - April 2007 - Issue 012

Sound Magazine www.Wusik.com

April 2007 #012

Sounds Analog Night - Bass Sounds HQ Synthetica Vol. 6 Orchestral Lite 2 Abi Soundset

Articles Getting a Pro Flat EQ Mix Love Your Samples!

Music and Tools Enigma Engine Big FX

Review Bonanza and much more...

Letterfrom theEditor

Sound Magazine Editorial:

Magazine Layout: MoniKe Editors: WilliamK and MoniKe Articles and Sounds by:

Just a month away for our Anniversary Issue, and we have already boosted the magazine with new content.

Wsm is also very mature now, with 12 issues and a large user-base.

But we still have a long way to go, and this can only be done with your help.

Post on our forum your impression of the magazine so far, what you loved, what you didn't so much, and what you expect next.

Only with your help we can keep the quality of this eZine, so be sure to express yourself.

We would also like to thank the new contributors for the hard work this month. We couldn't do this alone, so thank you all.

WilliamK and MoniKe

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WilliamK www.william-k.com

Articles by: Carl Lofgren - aka DrGonzo David Keenum Jeremy Janzen www.viraloutbreak.net Junebug junebug@electronisounds.com Kevin Burke www.kevinburke.ca Mallory www.wusik.com/w/enigma.html Mike Felker - aka Karmacomposer www.mfelkerco.com Peter 'Ray' Savage - aka Funkychickendance RaphaĂŤl Mouneyres www.mawzer.com Ryan Fierfell Wouter Dullaert - aka Kyran www.kyran.wayouthere.co.uk

Sounds by: Abdullah Said Uslu abiuslu@web.de Dangerous Bear and Daniel Kemp's www.dangerousbear.com/dbsig.html Eric Corminier www.reasonbanks.com/refill_AN.html Kevin Breidenbach - aka synthgeek www.skincontact.com/synthgeek Pro-Sounds Tesseract Demo www.pro-sounds.net

Proof-Reading by: Kevin Burke www.kevinburke.ca

In this issue: April 2007

Mastering Tips: Wusikstation 2-hour Development Diary

by Jeremy Janzen

18 Mastering Tips: Getting a Pro Flat EQ Mix

by WilliamK

40 Introduction to the Enigma Engine

Artvera Mistral

by Wouter Dullaert

#012

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Pro-Sounds Tesseract

by Carl Lofgren

06

Les Productions ZVON

by Funkychickendance

12

Dangerous Bear Fuel 3

by Kevin Burke

26

Nucleus - Soundlab Ambient Space 1

by Ryan Fierfell

33

Autodafe Mega Pads

by David Keenum

38

Autodafe Mega Bass

by Carl Lofgren

54

by Mallory

44

Creating Sounds Vector Synthesis

by WilliamK Big FX

by WilliamK

14 36

Music and Tools

by RaphaĂŤl Mouneyres

48 and more...

Love Your Samples!

by Junebug

50

What's On Your Amp Going Green The Synth Romance Sound List

10 25 56 58

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Artvera Mistral

by Wouter Dullaert

Wusikstation is a nice product. It has a bunch of great presets, lot's of evolving paddy stuff (putting to use its main feature, the wavesequencer), great synth emulations, some very cool drums, etc.

Electronic stuff has always been Wusikstations forte, but unfortunately "real" instruments haven't. The 2 gig collection only includes a few sampled instruments and unless you own Extreme Sample Convertor, there aren't that many "real instrument" Wusik soundsets out there.

Long-time Wusikstation hero Vera Kinter (Artvera), of New Age Collection fame, noticed the gab in our huge wusiksample collections and decided to fill it. Enter Mistral.

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Mistral is an ethnic sampleset that comes in at a nice 350 megabytes.

Don't be fooled by its relatively small size though. It contains more instruments than you can shake a stick at.

Soundset-wise it contains a lot of Indian and African percussion.

It also contains a lot of flutes, some string instruments (a sitar among others), jungle sounds, vocals and has a beautiful new skin thrown in for good measure.

Not all of these samples are extensively sampled across the keyboard. Especially the vocal samples sound "stretched" when they are played far from their root note. The focus of the samples lies on usability. Instruments which you're most likely going to use as a

Artvera Mistral

solo instrument, like the flutes, are multisampled, but the like the vocals and jungle sounds mostly aren't. I found this a very nice compromise. All sounds are very playable and useful without wasting precious disc space.

Like all good samplesets Mistral comes with a whole lot of samples by many great sound desingers, as there are: rsmus7, dnekm and artvera herself.

They include wavesequences, pads, solo instruments, effects and percussion loops.

Overall I found most of the presets to be very well made. They really showed off the quality of the samples. Most of them did contain a bit too much reverb and delay though. They tended to lose definition. I also would have liked to see some extra "traditional" presets

and fewer wavesequences. You can easily transform the wavesequences into "standard" presets though. The pads deserve some extra credit here. They are unlike anything I've heard pad-wise.

They really succeed in creating that oriental feel.

To sum up, I think that Mistral is an essential buy for everyone who wants to get something more than the traditional electronic sound out of his Wusikstation. It strikes a good balance between size and quality. It is extremely usefull and at $30 it has a stunning value for money ratio. If you're still not convinced than you can listen to some demo tunes on www.artvera-music.com or try out the demo which was included in last month’s issue.

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d n u o S

Pro-Sounds Tesseract

by Carl Lofgren aka DrGonzo

Small Demo Version Included With This Issue.

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So un

Pro-Sounds Tesseract

d

One of the latest releases from Pro-Sounds is Tesseract for the Wusikstation v3. It's designed by Bryan "Xenos" Lee and it's aimed for composers of dance music as well as scoring of film and video games.

One of the first things you notice is its light weight compared to other libraries. Today when almost every collection of sounds is several hundreds of megabytes - or even a couple of gigabytes - it's quite refreshing to see that Tesseract only needs 170 megabyte on your hard drive.

The library consists of some 200 presets sorted into the usual categories such as atmospheres, bass, percussion, leads, synth and pads. Quite soon after I started to listening to the sounds, two things became apparent.

The first thing is that although the categorization of the patches is helpful the structure is a bit fuzzy. And secondly - and most importantly - this is not a hit-and-run library relying on huge

The only bad thing about the atmospheric sounds is that they are too few. But on the other hand, I'd rather have six good presets, than 50 bad ones.

The choirs don't sound like other sampled choirs. Here pitch modulation have been used to bring some motion to the sound. Sometimes you get the feeling the choir is on the edge of being slightly out of tune - but not in a bad way. They feel different.

With the choirs comes some vocal samples, and this is the only part of Tesseract I found boring. But there's no point being too hard on the judgement here.

Vocal samples are a very difficult matter. Some people always record their own vocals - some rely on other peoples voices. The vocal samples in Tesseract are ok and include stuff from the quite cheesy "Welcome to hell", to more intriguing recordings such as "We are from the government, and we're not here to help you". The pads are more

multi-sampled sounds - but rather on a deeper knowledge on how to program sounds. The Wusikstation is a formidable tool for designing sounds, and Bryan "Xenos" Lee hasn't let the opportunity to slip by his fingers. Sometimes, the programming is quite complex. At other times, it's just clever. A good example is the programmed acid bassline in the synth category. If you put some pressure on the keys, a pad-like sound appears in the background. It's simple and very effective.

The atmospheric sounds are very impressive indeed. I found the style to be somewhat similar to the Spectrasonics Distorted Reality series.

of the ambient drone-ish style, than traditional analogue string emulations.

But there are some really beautiful classical pads in here as well, such as Shades of Blue, which reminds me a bit of the strings used in the movie The 5th Element. The basses are a nice surprise.

There are not the typical vintage synth bass emulations that we all have heard a million times. The basses here have quite some attitude.

Many of the sounds are fairly hard and some are even brutal. The same goes for the leads, although there are some presets in a softer and ambient style. The percussion category includes one electronic drumkit and some

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Pro-Sounds Tesseract

percussion loops. The drumkit has a good selection of drum samples - but maybe most interesting is the fx-version of it, where they mangled the sounds in different ways.

When I said in the beginning that the structure of the presets is a bit fuzzy, I mean that you sometimes find sounds that probably should fall into some other category. But that is really not a big deal.

Summary: Tesseract is a very impressive library indeed, and it all comes down to a sound designer who knows how to use Wusikstation in a creative way. The way modulation is used makes the sounds more inspiring and alive. Tesseract is one of the finest libraries for dance oriented music I've

used for a very long time. If you're looking for something that will make your music stand out - Tesseract is exactly what you need.

Price: 44.95 euros.

Web: www.pro-sounds.net

Bryan "Xenos" Lee speaks about the making of Tesseract I tried to make the set have as big a sound as possible with the smallest possible footprint on the hard

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drive. I crammed 120 samples in there and relied on the programming to "bring out" the sound (hence why I put several short, single cycle waveforms in the soundset). Lots of people on KvR have complained about so many sample sets taking huge amounts of space and I wanted to address that concern with Tesseract.

As to how the sounds were made... I made the vast majority of the samples completely from scratch - from drawing waveforms, to sampling household objects and mangling the recordings via granulation or other effects and looping the results. In one case I wanted to get an eerie, metallic scraping sound that would be pitched and could still be looped. I ended up recording a frying pan being scraped with a quarter in a circular motion, then I had to find the loop points and figure out the fundamental pitch in that sample so it could be played musically. With the

single cycle waveforms, I recorded various vocalizations or other things, like my cat purring on my lap, into the mic and edited/cut the result to get the sound I was looking for. With other samples, I recorded other seemingly bland objects and ran the result through spectral/additive resynthesis, mangling the sample into things unrecognizable.

The last few were sounds I created through various VST's run through a chain (layering several Synth1's with a slightly different pitch/timbre on each, for example) and then edited.

Dark Ages - The Album

by WilliamK What people said about it: “Melodic, rhythmic and cinematic with world music and electronica influences.“ “Dark, Retro, Filtered, Deep, Epic, Transcendental, Emotive, Happy, Bento, YAY!!!”

“I just need one word: Excelent!”

“Its a new style: New Age Beat Fusion.”

Visit the New Site: www.william-k.com Wusik Sound Magazine April 2007 #012

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What's on

your Amp Many of you may or may not know about my music that I compose. I have always strived for creativity and originality and rarely, if ever, created a cover tune. I have always liked creating instrumentals and new age pieces for all to enjoy, but also ventured into rock, pop, soft rock, ballads, ambient, jazz and even orchestral music. However, like anyone else, there were tunes and bands I listened to in my youth that shaped and moulded me and became the driving force behind my music.

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by Mike Felker

Setting the way back machine to 30 years ago, I remember being influenced by The Beatles.

Paul McCartney, John Lennon and the rest of the band just could do no wrong. From “A Hard Day’s Night” to “Eleanor Rigby,” their music was a cornerstone for almost everything else to come. I doubt seriously that I would be involved in music scoring if I had not listened to the music of The Beatles so long ago.

What's on

your Amp

Another band that I listened to at length was ABBA. Their music was so cleverly written and their harmonies were incredible (I had not even noticed at the time – I was only 10 for heaven’s sake).

“Dancing Queen”, “SOS”, “Super Trooper” and “Waterloo” will always remain as some of the most influential music from my past. When Atomic Kitten re-made a good portion of ABBA’s music in the form of Techno, I was delighted; mainly because they did such a great job and did not butcher the covers.

As far as instrumental music goes, there was one composer that just rocked my world way back when. Chip Davis created some of the most bizarre, and wonderful, compositions of my time. You may not recognize his name – unless you match him with the entity he created. Fresh Aire was the name of the orchestra. They made musical pieces like “Earthrise” and “Nepenthe”. Their tunes were all instrumentals and all about nature and life and the joy of just being. Chip David became seriously famous when he released the Fresh Aire Christmas CDs – and the rest, for him, is history.

There was no other band and no other individual that did more to shape my sound and feel of music than this next band. Jeff Lynne will always be my musical hero. From the 70’s to the 2000’s, his music has shaped thousands of musicians and millions of minds. Jeff became famous with his superstar band, ELO – or the Electric Light Orchestra. Their sound was unique. Take a rock band and combine it with a light orchestra and you get ELO. They are best known for songs like “Turn to Stone” and “Evil Woman” from the mid 70’s.

However, it was their lesser known albums that

displayed Jeff Lynne’s raw talent as both a musician and singer, and composer/producer. Time, without a doubt, is their best album – every single cut is better than the next. Secret Messages is a pleasure to listen to. Every cut on this album is incredible – and like many of their records (yes, I said records), every song flows into the next and the overall album has more meaning than just the individual parts. Simply amazing. Their last album, titled simply “ELO” contained the hit song “Calling America” that made it on the charts and was to be their last major hit song together. Later, Jeff Lynne and his band split (a sad day indeed) and he went solo. His next album, Armchair Theatre, was not the massive hit he wanted it to be, but it still contained gems that any true Jeff Lynne fan were sure to love.

The rest of the band also attempted a new album called ELO II and a few good songs were on it, but without Jeff Lynne, it simply was not the same. Jeff Lynne has shaped a multitude of rock legends, like Tom Petty and Roy Orbison, and was also a key member of the short-lived band “The Traveling Wilburys”.

I would have to say that this brief look into my musical past is what started me out in my quest for musical greatness (that I have yet to attain). Of course, I have listened to thousands of other fantastic artists and composers and simply do not have the time, magazine space or memory to recall.

However, they all had a small part in shaping the way in which I compose and I will never forget my early musical heroes – may they never be forgotten.

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Les Productions ZVON

by Funkychickendance

One of the most intriguing packages of Wusikstation soundsets and presets comes from the Canadian developer Zvon, and his company Les Productions ZVON. Unlike many other sound designers, he doesn't work simply with existing synths or physical musical instruments, but focuses his main efforts on a trio of rich acoustic sources.

The first is an altered Rhodes electric piano. Who'd mess up such a beautiful instrument? Well, John Cage did the same with a Steinway piano and surprised us all.

Zvon's Prepared Rhodes is coaxed into making strange sounds by adding thumbtacks to the hammers, inserting paperclips, and generally messing things up, adopting a physical approach to FSU. Instead of

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clean-sounding scales or chords, you end up with mutant creaking, car crashes, clonks and twangs. And that's just in the soundset. Couple this with some expert tweaking in the WusikPRST arena, and you have some quite amazing mutant sounds that work nicely in industrial or ambient settings, and are not unsuited to many other genres, depending on how adventurous you are...

The next is the set of Julie's Vocals, based on the voice of jazz singer Julie Hamelin. Zvon sculpts her sampled scat singing, giggles and vocal FX stunts into an interesting family of one-shot presets. And more recently, he's used them in a resynthesized way in a separate collection called Julie Resynth which can be played

Les Productions ZVON

chromatically across the keyboard to produce what sound like mutant instruments ranging from medieval drones to organs to, well, you decide...

Another rich field of exploration is his Marching Band Horn. This mutant trumpet/hunting horn, a battered instrument with a 'what the hell is that?' kind of tone forms the basis of an extensive set of sounds ranging from wheezy brass bands to James Brown-like funk sections to pure sound exploration.

As he says on his site, the sounds: "range from very smooth and mellow to hard hitting and growling, from staccatos and stabs to sustained pads. As some samples are time stretched, it's not necessarily meant to perfectly emulate the real instrument. But it is great for adding

an authentic horn flavor and also providing a wider range of uses. No other processing was involved so what you hear is really acoustic, not electronic." Over 350MB of samples, 200+ presets, for $25: no argument, a great deal.

Two great things about Zvon: first, he is a very nice guy, and extremely helpful in supporting his products and guiding you in making decisions among his variety of packages. Second, his prices are very reasonable. He's not solely a Wusikstation devotee: his stuff also comes in EVE versions (nowadays, pretty much the same), and in various modifications for Tim Conrardy's M42 and M51 space synths.

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Creating Sounds - Medium Level -

Vector Synthesis

by WilliamK

A lot of people don't know, but Wusikstation is capable of doing from basic to complex Vector Synthesis.

This is done by using 4 sounds in a X/Y configuration.

Where ABCD are the sounds: when Y is set to 1 and X to 0, only the sound of A will output. At Y and X center, all layers will play together.

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Creating Sounds Vector Synthesis You can see this option under the Master area, a square named X/Y Pad. [Fig.1] Fig.1

When the "+" is selected. The X/Y Pad will act as a Vector-Mixer. Just as explained above, but using this graphic instead. [Fig.2]

Fig.2

You can also modulate the X/Y Vector Mixing by using the Modulation-Matrix.

First, let's open the included preset "Vectors 01" [Fig.3]

Fig.3

For this preset we have set 4 layers with basic waveforms. Just make small changes for each layer, tuning or type of waveform selected.

[Fig.4] You can see that the Mod-Matrix has 2 entrees.

LFO 1 to Vector Mix X Pad and LFO 2 to Vector Mix Y Pad. Each LFO is set to a different speed.

Fig.4

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Creating Sounds Vector Synthesis On the Master section, you can see that the X/Y Pad graph shows a grey line drawing the background.

This is the Vector-Mix been changed in real-time.

You can also click on the X/Y Pad and select which layers will sound by moving its X/Y position.

[Fig.5]

You can even use an External Joystick to change the X/Y Pad. There are a few Joystick and Mouse Pad to Midi programs out there, just Google to find some.

Right-click on the number next to "X" to use midilearn, and the same goes for the "y" number.

Fig.5 Now, play some notes and hold it. You can see that the sound is evolving, from one layer to the other, but in not any direction. That's because both LFOs are set to different speeds. Making a very complex pattern that can be seen on Master section. (see above)

You can get more complex results by using a sequencer with no sound, but using its "Mod" option, as seen on the following picture.

[Fig.6]

Fig.6

In this case, we used W1 Mod 1 to Vector Y Pad. Play and hold some notes to hear the result.

[Fig.7]

There you go, now you get the basics on creating Vector Synthesis, just like the old days.

We included more presets for you to test, so feel free to browse for those.

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Visit www.viraloutbreak.net For tons of demo mp3s and to Purchase!

Viral Outbreak Volume One Is finally here for Wusikstation.

Viral Outbreak Volume * Over 2gb (Wusik Format) Sick of searching for One is the first in a series of of multisamples comprised of sounds and plugins that sample libraries based on the 130+ soundsets. are supposed to sound sounds of the Virus TI * virtually all soundsets stereolike a Virus, but don't? hardware synthesizer. Using sampled for the greatest depth.

Get the real thing - and the power of extensive 96khz * Sampled at 32-bit 96khz harnass its power in multisampling, manual looping quality!

For resource efficiency, then Wusikstation! and professional preset design carefully downsampled to 24-bit Nucleus SoundLab brings the TI sound to your 48khz. sampler! * Nearly 750 Wusikstation v3 presets, many taking advantage of all the new v3 Viral Outbreak Volume One is available now features! (450 presets for Wusik v1) for Wusikstation v1/v2/v3, SFZ, and Kontakt 1/2. * The best preset designers out there: Viral Outbreak Volume One contains all ToTc, Teksonik, Tim Conrardy, Jeremy Janzen, manner of TI-based sounds. Classic wavetables, rsmus7 and more! raw saw and pulse waveforms (sampled at multiple * An amazing, TI-inspired, Wusikstation v1pulsewidths), unison dance leads, breathtaking v3 skin by Vera Kinter. pads and even punchy synth drumkits. Details:

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master ng

t ps

Wusikstation 2-hour Development Diary

by Jeremy Janzen

Have you ever got bogged down writing a song?

Too many plugins?

Too much tweaking FX? And too little music-making?

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Wusikstation 2-hour Development Diary

master ng t ps

This month, I’m going to try a song-writing exercise specifically-designed to wipe away all the excess. The goal – write a complete track using minimal tools in just 2 hours.

The tools: ▪ ▪ ▪ ▪

energyXT 1.4 Wusik 3.15 Stylus RMX Kjhaerus Master Limiter

That’s it!

I start out with this default template in eXT, containing 4 Wusikstation instances and 1 Stylus RMX instance. I'm looking to create a mid-tempo electronica track with minimal non-traditional percussion (I.e. no regular kick/snare drumkit).

I'm going to start by choosing a polyphonic sound Poly-Addacus from my own SoundCell library. It’s basically an effected piano. Next I'll change the reverb to the new Studio Verb, and I'll record a short sequence and loop it. (www.wusik.com/wsm12/wsm1.mp3)

Ok, I've got a basic chord progression on the piano. Now I'm going to get some percussion going just to hear how it sounds together. I'll pull up Stylus RMX and find some good loop material. I'm starting with the Liquid Grooves library because it’s very eclectic and non-standard - just what I'm looking for.

Ice Brushes - Wavedrum 1 fits well, but its a bit off-beat. I'll import the midi into eXT using drag n drop and then slide the entire beat over 1/8 note; sounds good.

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It sounds like some type of reverbed hit or snare would sound good on the off-beats, in half-time. I'm going to pull up Mysterious Drums - also from Liquid Grooves. Now I only want the snare sound, so I'll remove all the other midi notes after importing into the eXT sequencer.

Perfect, but I want more spaciousness on that snare hit. I'll add some long RMX reverb to the snare via the Send 1 knob in the RMX mixer. Also I'll add a Graphic 12 EQ to the Mysterious Drums channel and roll off the highs and accentuate some mid-range frequencies for a softer, resonant sound. (www.wusik.com/wsm12/wsm2.mp3)

Now I need a bassline. I'm going to load the Ibanez Bass sound from SoundCell into the second instance of Wusikstation. I'll sequence a bassline that runs the entire 16 bars of the piano pattern. I'm also going to add a high-pass 1/8th note delay to the bass in the Wusikstation FX engine. (www.wusik.com/wsm12/wsm3.mp3)

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Wusikstation 2-hour Development Diary

Wusikstation 2-hour Development Diary

master ng t ps

Alright, now I've got a pretty good start and I've used about 1/2 of the time and I've allotted myself for the song. Next I'm going to add a lead instrument. I'm going to load the preset 'Amiga Flute' from the SoundCell set into the 3rd instance of Wusikstation. I'll write a quick, simple melody. I love this flute - it reminds me of the flute lead in the classic 'Shadow of the Beast' soundtracks on Amiga. It fits rather nicely here. (www.wusik.com/wsm12/wsm4.mp3)

Now I'm going to arrange a bit. I want an intro. So I'll shift everything forward 16 bars, and then copy and paste the piano at the beginning. I'd like a pad over this piano to comprise the intro. I'll decide on Atmo-Airwaves. It’s actually more of a rhythmic pad and it goes very well over the intro piano. (www.wusik.com/wsm12/wsm5.mp3)

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I need a B section. I compose something quickly on the piano part and insert it after 32 bars with a 1/2 bar gap in-between A-B. I copy and paste the drums as well. By accident, the drumloops don't properly line up with the B section - but this sounds good! I decide to leave it like this. A lucky accident I suppose. I write a 'response' type melody on the flute, and a simple bassline. (www.wusik.com/wsm12/wsm6.mp3) Now I start experimenting adding a pad over the B section. Nothing fits well!

Perhaps there is too much reverb on the flute and piano filling up the mix so I work on tweaking that. Time continues to tick away‌ I decide its fine without a pad.

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Wusikstation 2-hour Development Diary

Instead of cymbal crashes I add some FX Hits from Stylus RMX and tweak them to taste at various points throughout the track. I'm quite short on time now, only 20 minutes remaining. I decide to fill out some of the remaining space in the mix with some more RMX loops. I choose Roton from the Metamorphosis Xpander for the first run through the A section, as well as Bubbly Clay Pot from Liquid Grooves. I choose Brother Eric Eko Whale from Liquid Grooves for the B section - this fits great! And finally I replace Roton on the second run though the A section with a brighter hi-hat loop from the factory library - Eden Hihats.

Wusikstation 2-hour Development Diary

Ok, not bad. Obviously there is no more time to play with FX and EQ so I just slap the free Kjhaerus Audio Master Limited on the Master Bus and set it at -3db and render the entire thing to wav. Fini! (www.wusik.com/wsm12/wsm7.mp3)

master ng t ps

In the end I'm not extremely happy with the results of this 2-hour composition but I have learnt quite a bit. Initially I spent way too much time tweaking the A section.

I should have gotten the entire song arrangement fixed before I began messing with RMX loops and tweaking different pads. I'm sure if you try this exercise you'll learn a lot streamlining your workflow too!

I think I will try it a few more times – and perhaps there will be another installment of these diaries in a future WSM. Cheers.

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Enigma Engine Mallory's Preset Generator for WusikEngine With this amazing utility program you can create thousands of semi-randomly generated presets for your WusikEngine SoundSets.

Presets are based on 8 carefully designed algorithms, each targeting a particular type of sound.

Features include: • Presets can be created for WusikEngine V1 and V2/V3 according to preference.

• Many parameters affecting the algorithms can be tweaked according to taste.

• Presets can utilize sounds from multiple Sound Sets simultaneously.

Supports many popular WusikEngine SoundSets, including: • Famous Keys Wusikstation)

(default

soundset

for

• Famous Keys Plus 1, 2 & 3 • Digi One • TSW, TSW Pro and Vox'd, by BITR • Manystation and Ultimate Bass Kit, by Manytone Music • SoundCell 1-3, Oberheim Resurrection and Viral Outbreak Vol 1 by Nucleus Soundlab

Only $19.99

• Ignition, Fuel and SonicScapes vol 1, by Danger ous Bear • Prepared Rhodes etc, by Zvon • Drone Structures

Now includes a utility that allows users to add support for any other SoundSets not yet directly supported internally (perhaps commercial sets converted from another format).

Sound Designers can also use this to provide support for new SoundSets without requiring my input.

System Requirements: CPU: Pentium 4 or better O/S: Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP RAM: At least 512MB HD: At least 100MB free space Microsoft's .NET framework V1.1 The Enigma Engine software is built upon Microsoft's .NET Framework v1.1 In order to run the Enigma Engine software, you must have the .NET Framework v1.1 installed on your system.

V1.1 can happily co-exist alongside the later V2.0 of the framework but you do not need to download that. Also there is no need to uninstall V2.0

For more screenshots, a freely downloadable demo or to purchase the program, visit:

www.wusik.com/w/enigma.html

Going Green

by WilliamK

You may not know this, but your computer could be bad for the environment.

Now, thanks to Green-Peace, we all know which companies care and which just don't give a crap about.

You can read the full report on the following link: www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/international /press/reports/guide-to-greener-electronics.pdf

What impresses me the most is how Apple got the lowest rank from them all. For such innovative company, this is really amazing.

Back in the 90's, I remember reading that most Chinese companies were polluting too much. So when I saw Lenovo with the highest rank, I was really surprised.

We hope that with time, every company will be forced to go green, otherwise our planet will suffer, and we too along.

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Dangerous Bear Fuel 3

by Kevin Burke

In reviewing the giant soundset that is Fuel 3, one first needs to plan the angle of attack, check that enough resources are available for the task at hand, clear the calendar and then dive right in. The challenge, I would discover, is in trying to resist in the temptation to write a song along the way.

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Dangerous Bear Fuel 3

Fuel 3 is the latest and the new pinnacle in the Dangerous Bear (dBu) Fuel lineage sporting a whopping 5.61 GB of, well, fuel for Wusikstation that had been carefully crafted over a period of two years. This newly assembled library comprises of all the content from Fuel 2, Ignition, and SonicScapes and to wit has been revised, reorganized and revitalized according to the vendor's website. As a Fuel 2 owner, I was curious as to what new sonic treats would await me so I wasted no time in downloading and with the simple and automatic installation. The installation files have been broken down into 100mb chunks for easier retrieval; I used a browser plug-in to automate my download as even with broadband it will still take a while to grab the files from their server. Downloading was smooth and painless with no hiccups or failures.

After installation - it was time to delve into the directory structures to see what had changed.

Fortunately my Fuel 2 installation was not touched; I would still be able to load current and unfinished projects in my Host without worrying about reassigning patches to my Wusikstation tracks. Older dBu patches are referenced from '..\Presets\dBu' in the Wusikstation data directory, whereas Fuel 3's patches are in '..\Presets\dBu Presets'. Likewise, older dBu soundsets were stored in '..\Soundsets\Dangerous Bear' whereas you will find Fuel 3's samples in '..\Soundsets\DB_Fuel 3'. A marked change, this alleviates any guesswork about where the installer positioned the library files.

For those who own any of the previous libraries included in Fuel 3, you can simply delete the old directories once you've totally migrated to the new version.

On to the library itself: Fuel 3 contains some 1823 presets slotted into seven categories - Atmospheres Drones and Soundscapes, Bass, Dangerous Keys, Drums&Percussion, Fuel, Infamous Keyz, and Synths. These categories are further split into be-

tween three and ten additional sub-categories, and it is here that the invitation for exploration becomes quite evident. Unlike other libraries that try too hard in naming their presets to mimic the real world and/or be instantly recognizable to the average Grade 6 reader, dBu has opted to be clear and concise when appropriate, and off the proverbial deep end when they're created a patch that defies

ordinary (read: mundane) description. I will admit to losing one-half-hour playing the 'Draob' pad alone - yet (to me, anyways) the name means nothing. A gem with a misnomer? I don't think so.

If the patch had been named 'CalmString' I might not have given it another glance, but it is precisely the interesting names which capture the eye and cause the hand to click. With five sound designers building patches for this unique library, fans will easily be able to see which ones came from the Chris 'Ugo' Sciurba camp simply by the designation.

Ok, let’s review the presets delivered with Fuel 3. I will be reviewing each sub-categories presets starting with the main category, ‘Atmospheres, Drones and Soundscapes’:

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Dangerous Bear Fuel 3

Atmospheres, Drones and Soundscapes Ambient Drones: As can be expected, FX are used to augment the dry drones in order to provide a sense of space to the sometimes mechanical, sometimes organic samples used here. With a large palette to draw from, there is something here for every project requiring a certain "atmosphere".

Standouts in this section are difficult at best, but I liked the wet nature of 'AmbDrn1b' and the understated factory muse provided by 'AmbDrn8'.

Pads: You can't argue with a sound that evolves on its own volition. Pads are the bed upon which we lay our tracks, and I can't get enough of them. The third patch here, 'Beranspo', gets my creative juices flowing; after holding down a couple of notes about mid-register, I slowly played individual notes from a higher octave on top. It was magical, evolving film-like. Ugo's 'Big Strings' is a winner - a lush ensemble of violins available with one finger.

'HorrorString' is, well, to evil to talk about but those with a bent to urban exploration will love this one.

'Lush' would suit your next IMAX(tm) trailer with its crystal clear strings and growly bass, and you'll be doing your own exploring with 'Passage' providing key inspiration. Lest you think a pad is a pad is a pad - wake up with the shredded angst of 'Tom'.

Transembles: These are a little more difficult to describe, but some of the sounds here are split at the C4 marker with the two halves having similar and complimentary content, but are at the same time solidly different in texture. 'Transemble2', for instance, has a distinct bell-like sound in the higher register, and more string content in the lower.

'Transemble4' might best be described as a spaceinfluenced choir in the lower half, and a space-viola + violin in the upper. This is very project-specific stuff here and won't suit all tastes. But there's not many of them, and it does increase the library's breadth of scope.

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Bass Bass 1: This section kicks off with several fairly loud and true acoustic basses, but when we enter the sixteen variations of 'K-Stat Bass' there is a distinct volume drop which will make it more difficult to audition in an existing track. Bass is a tricky beast anyway with the ear being increasingly less sensitive as the entire frequency content drops beneath 50Hz or so, and I'm not going to suggest that some sort of normalization should have been applied - quite the contrary. Just note the unevenness, compensate, and you'll find the anchor for your next hit. 'MMV Bass 09' is a standout here.

Bass 2: All analog bass in this section. With scores to choose from - if it's analog, and it's bass, it's here. Bet you can't pick just one. Don't forget to play with the envelopes and filters here folks - it's all about getting the exact sound you want. The ingredients and tools are all provided for you.

Bass 3: Some hybrid basses in this section. In fact, by the time I got to '3rd Bass' (no, really ...), oh never mind. It's difficult not to fall in love with 'Balls' though - there is just way too much character in the sound - a scene stealer ala Prodigy for sure.

Then there's 'Butt Hammer' - another gritty monster that demands attention. Yes sir! I so love this part of the bass library. 'Edgy' and 'PulseCheck' will take you on a livin'-large lofi screamfest, but watch out for 'Triple Bass2' - it's quite loud and you might just blow a cone.

Dangerous Bear Fuel 3

Dangerous Keys

Drums&Percussion

Clavinet: I'm no clav fan, but here you'll find presets that are "in your face", some further back, some doubled, and some even with a sproingy (?) touch. Funk up those old classics! Once again, you'll find 'Funky Cutter' much louder than the rest, which I suppose aids in its ability to ... um.... cut.

Classic Drum Machines: All the usual suspects here, including machines from Alesis, Boss, Ensoniq Mirage (!), Fairlight, Kawai, Korg, Linn, Mattel, Pearl, Simmons, Yamaha, and of course the Roland CR78, TR 505, 606, 707, 727, 808, and 909. Most represented brands do not contain the full spectrum of machines - for instance the Alesis only includes the HR16 and 16B - no D4, DM5 or later. The Kawai XD-5 is also absent - but, oddly, Absynth drums do make an appearance. However, it's more than probable the one you want is in the list

Organ: The venerable B3 is represented here with full on, gospel, jazz, pipe and stack versions, and most with an alternate version as well. There are some understated organs in the preset list too - like 'B37' and 'B39'. 'db-33A' has that cherished blowntube sound, while 'dB-35B' could feature in your next psycho-thriller; it's got a childish high pass sound to it with a built in Leslie(tm) - and just the right amount of echo to make them wonder if you really have truly lost it. Further down the list are the classic 'Farfisa' and Vox Continentals - with seven to choose from. Then there's the circuit-bent 'Organ Failure' that sounds like it was crossed with a shivering alien. I didn't hear any grandiose theatre organs, but then again, I'm not writing music for supper clubs so I will likely not miss it.

Piano: There are both electric and acoustic pianos represented in this section. The 'Fender Rhodes Hi' sounds a treat, while 'Piano' is too in-your-face, dry, and single-layered to be of much serious use for solo work. The 'X3' series is going to be the most useful (there are six of them) I predict, but people have as much preference in the piano sound they like as they do in the beer they drink (at least, for those who partake); you will know the sound you like when you chance upon it. Although, as I mentioned earlier, there is a prepared piano FuelCell already available, perhaps dBu will see fit to offer an ambitious acoustic piano product in future. For those who like the electric piano tone, there is abundance in this section.

DBSK1 and DBSK2: These are sliced loops and in both cases Wusikstation couldn't find the associated soundsets (specified by incorrect paths in the presets) and instead wanted to load the same soundset from my previous Fuel 2 installation. I could have deleted by old directories, granted, but I'd prefer that the path be corrected in the presets.

Drums&Percussion 1 and 2: Nothing exemplary here; I think, again, we've grown accustomed to the BFD's of the world, the Battery kits and Synthetic Drum series - as well as analog emulating VSTi's that one simply can't compete with a lackluster grouping of middling drum kits. In these sections, Ugo's work shines, but I'd rather have less kits of higher quality that take advantage of a five octave range rather than the single octave present in many kits here. For those without access to large drum libraries, however, you’ll find lots to get you started.

Percussion Elements: The 'Afrodrums' series appears well recorded. Also quite useful are the mapped individual kit pieces - like 'Kickmap', 'Snaremap', 'Tommap', and 'Hatmap' offering all manner of choice across the keyboard for each piece individually. All kicks, all snares, all Toms, or all hats. The 'Synkit' series and the 'XKit' series appear much more useful than other kits I previewed.

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Dangerous Bear Fuel 3

Fuel This part of the library contains a wide array of both stacks and solo sounds, arranged in ten sub-categories, and invites preset by preset demoing. 'Unstrung 2' is a wonderfully ambient cross between what sounds like a pan flute and a church pipe organ and is large enough to open a track with.

I found 'Unstrung' - a similar patch - a little too up-front with a clunking bell-like clang, but was able to strip this layer out from this multi-layer preset and was left with a wonderfully evocative and flowing string/organ sound. The beauty of many of the presets here is that one can easily customize the source content to your own liking. 'Dreamscape' is another gorgeous and ethereal patch which will lift a track to new heights. Wusikstation's Wavesequencing is used to great effect in patches like 'Chaos Theory' - a patch not unlike a certain infamous Korg Wavestation preset. I did find some odd key mapping with 'Heavenly Haunting' - there is no sample(s) mapped from C#3 to G#3, nor above C5 (although in the latter case it would be unreasonable to expect so as the sound at those frequencies would be too shrill).

I should mention also that some of the presets in this Fuel section are entirely beat oriented - which is to say they contain percussion and sometimes pitched components, looped for instant gratification. I'm no rapper, but 'What Nonsense' almost had me doing some stylee over the groove.

And, well, Devo fans will absolutely thrill to the early eighties beep and blip fest that is 'Base RunnerTek'. In fact, the 'Fuel 3' sub-category is filled to the brim with programs from noted sound designer 'Teksonik'; I'm going to be spending far, far too much time in this section later as there is just so much brilliant material with which to work. I totally got stuck on 'SEQ-Deep' and am beginning to write something around it post haste.

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Not to be outdone, Ugo submits a stunning collection of presets in the 'Fuel 4' and 'Fuel 6' sub-categories. I'm not even at the halfway mark in this Fuel category and I'm being pummeled with one fantastic and expertly crafted patch after another: 'Fashionable' will appeal to Laurie Anderson alikes who prefer the simple voiceover; this patch is a cousin to the overly familiar "O Superman" bed that Laurie created. 'Breather' is set to become the foundation for a Goth ballad of dark proportions.

Wavesequencing is used again, here, to add additional interest, as on 'Necessity' and 'Transmission'.

Paul Walsh holds the creative torch with 'Fuel 5', an at times decidedly lofi affair with some genuinely useable presets - like the funny 'Bingo Lady Orchestron Organ' or male-choir-like 'Dirty Vox on 78'. 'Digital Valley', though, gave me a stuck note no matter how many times I tried it. 'Sleeping Beauty' and 'Tape Choir Layer' are addictive soundscapes that I can't wait to use in my next loving tribute to, em, myself. Heavenly, really beautiful.

Daniel Kemp is featured in 'Fuel 7' and 'Fuel 8' and brings to the table some Absynth-like percussion presets. 'Benedictine' is a lush choir-like ode to the religious-right. In fact, much of this section involves choirs and glass-like sounds - like, oh, 'Glass Choir' for instance. But you haven't experienced everything until you've heard 'Movement in Aether', 'Peaceful Morning', or 'The Ferryman' imminently usable. Special note here for the patch names; I thought they, too, were brilliant.

'Fuel 9' launches more wavesequenced presets, as well as more pre-programmed beats and rhythms. But 'Fuel 10' is where sound designer Vera Kinter gets the spotlight. Presets here are conveniently named according to user expectations - so ATM (Atmosphere), BAS, FX, KEY, PAD, SEQ, SYN and TEX (Texture). Tangerine Dream fans will spot a musical similarity in 'SEQ-Basmelody' (from around their Miracle Mile era). Sounds are so ex-

Dangerous Bear Fuel 3

pertly manufactured that it's difficult to appreciate any single one, but suffice to say with the scope and sheer number of offerings in 'Fuel 10', there truly is something for almost everyone. From beats to sequences, to pads and atmospheres, the meat of your new track lies somewhere within.

Infamous Keyz The ten-part 'Infamous Keyz' category mainly concentrates on presets of less complexity than we're heard until now. Naming conventions indicate what one would expect to hear - and so you'll find several choirs, pads, pianos, brasses and the like, but more representative of what you'd have found on an old D50 or M1. Let's face it - we need minimalist representations of real acoustic and electric instruments as much as we need the larger than life sounds. If every sound we used in our tracks was screaming for attention, we'd have the equivalent of a sonic war. And so, consider these for filling in the audio spaces.

It's not until Ugo makes a reappearance in sub-category 8, and Daniel in 9 and 10 that things start to remove themselves from the ordinary again.

Daniels' (dk) 'Ambient Rythyms' (sic) series is a treat for the ear canal and leaves much open space for overlaying more instrumentation while the 'Machine Rythyms' series will have Industrial music followers reaching for their welding masks.

Synth Our last category, the Synth section, contains eight sub-categories: Analogy 1, Analogy 2, Classic Analog, Classic Samplers, FMx, FMx 2, Synth FX, and SynWav. Analogy 1 and 2: The first patch here, 'Analogy1', has a broken loop-point. The other presets offer standard 'old-school' synth sounds - very similar to the 'Infamous Keyz' category, in fact, but perhaps these are the famous ones. Stacks, basses, vox pads, sweeps, brasses, and ensembles are all featured here. 'EM310 Strings' was my favourite while 'M1K 026 Cloud Pad' held it's own.

Classic Analog: There are sounds here reminiscent of ARP and Oberheim synths from days past. 'M12 Final Pad' would be an unobtrusive behind-the-vocals pad with a little high-end roll off, or use 'M12 Soundtrack' which is ready to go with it's wide stereo field.

Classic Samplers: Here we have classic sounds from the much loved and worn out Emulator II, IIx, Fairlight CMI, Chamerlain, Mellotron, and Orchestron. In fact, the 'Orchestron Choir' reminds me of a choir sound from my first piece of hardware - an old Korg piano-top module. Not terribly realistic, but absolutely usable. It is here you'll also find that 'Fairlight Orch 5' sound as used on many Art of Noise albums. Left out of this section are samples from the old Ensoniq Mirage and low-end Akai samplers.

FMX, FMx 2: Frequency modulated sounds in these two categories, although not many patches. But that's ok because there are probably few of us who would be impressed with the thin and bell-like tones of a Yamaha DX-7 these days. On the other hand, you might find one of two presets here to combine with another preset and create something magical.

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Dangerous Bear Fuel 3

Synth FX: If you're scoring the next sequel to Lost in Space or (for the younger generation ...) Star Trek, you'll find some of these artificial sound fx useful. But for game developers coding for any title with a futuristic or industrial slant, the 'SciFi Landscape' series of ten presets are waiting for you.

Likewise, the 'Signals' series will help add to the ambiance.

SynWav: The odd-balls. Most of the presets in this sub-category are not musical in nature, but reflect some odd effects and ambiences from more modern synthesizers. Patches like 'Tablesturn_pw' were built with a serious amount of wavesequencing work and samples. And 'The Irradiated Garden' is exactly what I had hoped for - an audio representation of Chernobyl after all of its citizens had been evacuated.

And so we’ve reached the end of this gargantuan library. My experience in traversing through some of the 1800+ presets has been a positive one, and I am stunned by the sheer potential that this library will offer in future compositions. An engine runs only as well as the fuel will allow it, and this is high test premium.

I would like to see a leveling of volume across the library as the sudden periodic jumps after a preset change can be alarming, and some presets are next to inaudible at normal listening levels. I am also wondering if some of the patch paths need revision in order that Wusikstation not have to locate the associated samples on its own.

The sound designers on this project, Chris Ugo Sciurba, Daniel Kemp, Vera Kinter, Paul Walsh and Teksonik, all deserve the highest respect, for in so far as they have given us a gift of “new paint”, as it were. Their efforts will shine through the memories created in new songs crafted with their raw material. Kudos goes to Dangerous Bear Underground for harvesting these talents and for bringing the results of their work to market.

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For owners of Fuel 2, or Ignition, and/or SonicScapes, a Fuel 3 purchase is worth serious consideration in completing your library. As well, dBu offers expansion packs called 'FuelCell's which compliment Fuel 3. These are available individually at low cost (currently $20) or by subscription mode (currently $50 for the 2007 series). Available now are 'Padded Cell' and 'Tom Gersic Prepared Piano'.

And as for Wusikstation owners looking to supplement their original library with a third party one created by known and respected sound designers, look no further. I’ve only touched on the broad spectrum of presets included with this vast library, and to wit, everyone has differing taste. Fortunately, there is so much more to discover here; the issue will not be finding just the right sound(s) for your current project, but trying to stay the course and not give in to the temptation to write a few additional songs along the way. This is a valuable and worthwhile sound resource whether you compose pop, ballads, industrial, electronic, rap, or any of the myriad of sub-genres that go along with them. You’ll also be in your element if you are a Foley designer, game sound engineer, or score films for fun or for a living. What you get, in return, is the unique opportunity to not sound like everyone else.

Price: Download/$80, Disc/$90 (US) Vendor: Dangerous Bear Underground Website: www.dangerousbear.com/synths.html Special thanks to the creators of WinDirStat: www.windirstat.sourceforge.net/

Nucleus-Soundlab Ambient Space 1

by Ryan Fierfell

To give this soundset a title of "Space" is actually quite misleading because there is anything but space within these dense passages and textures. Ambient Space 1, by Nucleus Soundlab is an amazing find for ambient artists, film scoring, and composers. It is also a cost-effective one at that: $24.95 Wusik Format, $29.95 Multi-Format Download and $34.95 Multiformat DVD with shipping expenses paid. Ambient Space 1 contains over 800mb of samples (extending from 30 seconds to over 2 minutes in length and 50 different waveforms), so I could come up with any texture I needed with the twist of a knob or two. It also worked amazingly well with Wusikstation (almost as if it was made specifically for it).

Installation was also a

breeze: extract a folder, and you're done. I was creating dimensional backdrops within five minutes of installation. The quality of the samples is outstanding and I had my brand new sub-woofers rumbling and shimmering from here to Mars. In addition to the samples, if nearly endless spatial sounds haven't convinced you, it also comes with 100 presets to have you busy for nearly a week. I know I was. If you feel that your music is the kind that requires a portal to another dimension, Ambient Space 1 by Nucleus Soundlab is your wormhole.

"Ambient Space I" can be found at: www.nucleus-soundlab.com

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Creating Sounds - Basic Level -

Big FX Getting That BIG Film Scape Sound FX

by WilliamK

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Creating Sounds

Ever wondered on how to use a Reverber to get those BIG FX sounds you hear on movies?

It’s very simple actually.

Big FX

First, open up the following preset.

[Fig.1]

Here we have set a very simple Snare sound on Layer O1, with full FX 1 Send.

[Fig.2]

Fig.1

On the FX 1 slot, we have loaded the Studio Verb Quad reverb. DryOut is set to zero, so only the effect will be heard. We also send the sound to the FX 2 slot, where we have loaded yet another reverb.

[Fig.3] [Fig.4]

Notice how the sound plays, try the lower and upper ranges of the keyboard.

You can get different variations by adjusting the LowPass and HighPass filters inside each reverb.

Try the other included presets, to get a better idea.

Some features simple waveforms, to check how they sound with such long reverbs.

The last preset also features a melodic sine waveform through a very light reverb, but still long and big.

Fig.2

Fig.3

Fig.4 Wusik Sound Magazine April 2007 #012

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Autodafe Mega Pads Collection

by David Keenum

I really like pads! I like slowly evolving, ethereal ambient pads. Now I also like simple, even thin pads that can sit in the back of the mix without being noticed. But those ambient pads always get my attention! This brings me to this set of samples/presets for Wusikstation.

Autodafe’s Mega Pads Collection is a 629 MB downloadable set of 128 presets for Wusikstation V2 and V3. Purchase price is $9.95 (U.S.) and is only available through the wusik.com website.

The website (at has www.wusik.com/w/extra_soundsets.html) demos that are made from the patches. It states that “all the sounds have been sampled from Analog, Digital Synths and Softsynths.” It also lists a number of analog and digital synths used in creating the sounds. And a quick look at autodafe’s website (www.autodafe.net/) reveals an extensive and impressive list of currently and previously owned synths. Impressive indeed!

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All of this is good, but how does it sound?

If you are a fan of pads, the answer is “really good.” I didn’t notice any trance pads, and I didn’t hear any “hold one finger down and create a song” type presets or abrasive pads. And let be clear that I am not implying that this collection contains pads that evolve over a long time, like the pads in Cameleon 5000 or Absynth. But, with the exceptions mentioned, there is a wide variety of pads! There are pads with obvious analog sources and there are pads with a digital (think DX-7) sound. Earlier I mentioned pads that can sit back in a mix and not be noticed. There are a few of those, but most of the pads have personality. They demand attention.

Autodafe Mega Pads Collection

Today I was listening to Thom Brennan and the first few presets reminds me of some of his sounds. I’m not saying that this $10 set of sounds will make you sound like Mr. Brennan, but you can “hear” the layers of the different synths and the gentle sweep of the LFOs. Here are some more of my favorites: 029 – Island Shells – you can hear those clinking sea shells.

031 – Synth Pad – the “standard” pad, and a nice version of it too.

047 – Asia – a string-like sound with a nice but subtle filter sweep.

051 - Civilization Phase III – a layered sweeping pad.

088 –The Soprani – this is an analog string sound with a nice tempo synced LFO. 115 – Cantarellus – an analogish version of the D-50s soundtrack preset.

119 – Fashion Victim – an updated Miami Vice sound 122 – Small PC – This sound reminds me of the pads from the Korg keyboards, specifically the old T and OW series.

There are some sounds that I didn’t like, for example 092 – The Pad is Broken (yes, that is its name), but for the most part the pads will be useful for my music. As a side note, most of the presets have a slow attack, so you’ll want to edit that to fit your song.

As my collection of samples and sounds has grown, I’ve grown fond of specialized, moderately priced libraries. Autodafe’s Mega Pads Collection is really good at what it does, and definitely fits that “moderate” price point. So if you need some pads, check the website and listen to the demos.

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master ng

t ps

Getting a Pro Flat EQ Mix

by WilliamK

Ever wondered why other people's music sounds so good and yours sounds so mushy? It’s the Mix, the equalization of the track.

If you have a good set of monitors, getting a good mix is not a real problem. But if you’ve got some crappy ones, or even regular speakers, it can get very problematic.

But somehow, even with good pro monitors, does your music still sounds strange - specially when listening on your friends’ stereo?

Here's why, your music is not equalized correctly. You need to get a Flat line in order for it to sound good in any device.

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Getting a Pro Flat EQ Mix

Well, not "really" flat, but near that. The most pleasant equalized sound is a pink-noise.

Here's how it should look like when using a VST Analyzer.

master ng t ps

Astral Projection

Coldcut Here we used the free, CPU friendly, and very easy to use Fre(a)koscope VST. You can download it by visiting the following URL: www.mdsp.smartelectronix.com (click on Downloads) Notice how the Pink noise plots with the Fre(a)koscope VST. That's how a perfect mix should look like. Always run your master output (after everything) through this analyzer to see how your mix looks. Don't just trust your ears.

You should also view the pros' mix.

Vangelis Kraftwerk

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master ng t ps

Getting a Pro Flat EQ Mix

Game SoundTrack Here's an example of a Bad Mix versus a Good Mix. Bad Mix

Andreas Vollenweider Same song with a Good Mix

You may be wondering now, how to "read" those plots correctly. Simple, the left portion is the bass, after the 2000 marker, that's near mid-low range. 4000 to 8000 is the midrange. And anything above that is the high-end range. Notice that some songs don't even pass 16000 Hz. But most new stuff will.

UB40

Just try to EQ your songs so that they plot similar to pink-noise. This will assure that your music sounds the same on any device.

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Introduction Introduction to the Enigma Engine Enigma

to the

Engine

- Special Edition by Mallory

I’m going to talk a bit about the Enigma Engine my preset generator for use with WusikStation and its numerous 3rd-party soundsets.

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Introduction to the

Enigma Engine History The idea for this program originally came to me soon after I bought my Korg Wavestation (WS) many years ago. Although I really liked the sounds that could be created by its clever (for the time) wave-sequencing, impressive inbuilt effects and other functions, I found it really difficult to edit using the tiny LCD screen they provided.

That, and the rather awkward layered patch management, made it just too much like hard work for me.

After purchasing a MIDI interface card for my PC and studying the Korg manuals (the sysex section in particular), I thought it would be a fun idea to write a little program to generate random presets using an algorithm and then build those into a sysex file to be downloaded to the hardware. This I eventually did and having produced my first bank of sounds I proceeded to try them out.

Most of them were pretty awful sounding, to be truthful, as random settings for the parameters often didn’t make sense in conjunction with many other parameter settings.

What it clearly needed was more order and a bit less randomness.

I wasn’t to be disappointed with my new purchase. Many of the included presets were real gems, reminiscent of my favourites from the WS. Though not always quite the same though, so I spent some time tweaking to see if I could more accurately reproduce the sounds I remembered.

Sadly, even though Wusikstation’s user interface is probably 1000x better than that of the Korg, I found editing with the mouse to be still somewhat annoying. Thus it was that my thoughts turned back to that program I wrote for the Korg many years earlier.

Thankfully, William had already published the specification of the preset files and by a process of editing different parameters, saving the presets and then examining the files, I was able to work out how to put my own values into a preset file that Wusikstation would be happy with and interpret correctly when loaded from that file.

This time, I decided this time to put much more effort into fixing the problems my old program had. Namely that it was just too random!

Several years later, with my latest PC several orders of magnitude more powerful than what I had back then I began to investigate the wonderful world of software synths. It wasn’t long before I was drawn to Wusikstation, given its obvious similarity to the Wavestation in architectural terms. After playing with the demo for a while and getting a suitable VSTi host and sound card, I duly joined the ranks of Wusikstation users back in 2005.

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Introduction to the

Enigma Engine The main issue I found was the user of samples in ways not suited to how they sound.

Thus my first task was to listen to all 400+ sounds included in the Famous Keys sets that were included as standard. Then my task was to classify each sound according to my impression of its suitability. For example, was the sound a piercing lead, a smooth pad, percussive, or something else? Also, since I wanted to auto-generate smooth cross-faded wavesequences, I knew that I had to attempt to get the relative tuning of each sample to be as close as possible. This turned out to be a lot of work!

Next I set about writing code to produce a preset based on rules I worked out based on the type of preset I was aiming for. Within certain restrictions, I still allow parameters to vary randomly but I was careful to apply restrictions in certain situations to avoid the horrible cacophony that had all too frequently been the outcome in my old Korg program.

After much work and tweaking, I managed to achieve what I set out to create. The program created semi-random presets according to design guidelines I had hardwired into the program, and chose samples randomly but appropriately according the situation.

The results of this initial version were posted online for free download at the KVR forum.

You can still find my free banks of presets at www.wusik.com/mallory/ After receiving some requests to make the program available I decided to set about improving it further and added a much-needed user interface (it had been a primitive looking command line utility until this point).

The result was unleashed upon paying customers in 2006 and was warmly received by everyone that tried it. Except for other preset designers, that is! LOL

Special Edition Included with this magazine is a special trial edition. It’s the same as the full version with the exception that it only supports two soundsets.

These are the “General Midi” set and ArtVera’s Newage collection, both of which were featured in magazine issues from 3 through to 8. Despite that, given the range of sounds included in those two sets, you should be able to have it create quite a few different and hopefully interesting sounding presets. Note: the “Soundsets” tab is not operational in this edition.

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Introduction to the

Enigma Engine To use it, you will need to have those soundsets installed already. There is a strong possibility that it will also work with the separate commercial releases of these sets but I haven’t tested this personally.

To generate some presets, all you need to do is run the program from the start menu (I assume you have successfully installed it already), select “General Midi” as the primary soundset and tick the box against “ArtVera Newage” in the secondary soundset list. If you don’t do the latter then it will only use samples from the primary soundest. Finally, click the “Generate” button.

Assuming you are running Wusikstation V2/V3 you will now have a new folder with your other presets. Look for a folder called “generated” within your main presets folder.

There are numerous settings in the program you can tweak such as disabling certain types of effects that you don’t like included in your presets, the length/speed of cross-fade wavesequences, and many more.

If your taste is for weird sounds, feel free to loosen the restrictions on which samples can be employed in a given instance – see “Sample Type Allocation” on the “Preferences” tab. Having done that, listen to the SFX class of presets produced afterward and prepare for your ears to bleed!

You must have Microsoft's .NET framework v1.1 installed on your system.

It is best to download .NET 1.1 from here: www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fam ilyID=262d25e3-f589-4842-8157034d1e7cf3a3&displaylang=en Also, you should get its service pack 1 here: www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?fami lyid=A8F5654F-088E-40B2-BBDBA83353618B38&displaylang=en Users of Windows XP SP2 may have all the above already installed already. Users of Windows 98SE/ME may need to update the Windows Installer service first.

Disclaimer The use of this software is ENTIRELY AT YOUR OWN RISK. A more detailed license agreement is contained in "license.rtf". By installing and running the software, you are deemed to have accepted the license agreement.

Now for the small print: Enigma Engine System Requirements CPU: Pentium 4 or better O/S: Windows 98SE/ME/2000/XP RAM: At least 256MB HD: At least 100MB free space

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MUSIC and

by RaphaĂŤl Mouneyres

Music is as old as the humanity itself. Even nature surrounds us with variety of ambiences. It is part of human nature to create music which reflects personality, culture and feelings.

Many acoustic instruments were created to explore the imagination of man, and since the 70's, electronics are opening new ways to create sound, using mathematics and physic, whether it is visible or not from the creators themselves.

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MUSIC and

Nowadays, we can see that new electronic music systems are coming up every day. An infinite offer of different keyboards, sound machines, music software or emulations of acoustic instruments...etc is presented to us as the *best* way to realize the ideas we have in our minds.

In order to give the necessary resources to these electronics tools, computers need to supply more floating-point power. But if you buy some top class computer today, it will begin looking somewhat underpowered six months later.

Now ask you those simple questions : - How long have I been practicing electronic music?

- What is my first setup ?

- Did I ever have a computer without the Windows operating system?

- Was I able to be productive with it?

say this machine is at least 100 times more powerful than the DX4-100. But when I look at my personal satisfaction, the multiplying factor would only be around 5...

Yes, I can run a bigger sequencer like Cubase(c), I can load VST plugins , or record audio files. And then what ? I could do the same with Sonic Foundry Acid1.0a on the old DX4-100.

Yes it was only 22Khz sampling and I needed to backup all the stuff on an external 100MB ZIP drive, but it was all working perfectly without bugs, and I was satisfied of the result. Today, I only look for the same feeling, and I find it more difficult to achieve.

Are you one of these geeks always upgrading your configuration with latest FSB533 processor, loading more gigabytes of RAM than reasonable, instantly eaten by some gorgeous new plugin?

I'd like to share my experience about this.

If yes - you might want to reconsider.

Fifteen years ago, I was the happiest child in the world when my father gave me his PC 486DX4-100MHz. Equipped with the highest 16MB RAM ever seen, and a awesome 50MB hard disk drive, it was the Rolls-Royce of his time. Buying and MPU401 ISA extension, a Creative MIDI external "soundcard", and a floppy sequencer software called BigBoss24 running on DOS6, I was able to create multitrack songs with 0 latency ;) This computer was able to boot in less than 10 seconds, and the BigBoss sequencer (even in black and white only) was perfectly doing the job for 16 MIDI tracks project. Thanks to this, I was able to create a large collection of personal MIDI files (some I still use today), and even rescoring the complete "Greatest Hits 2" of Queen!

Today I have a P4-1.6GHz, 512MB RAM, 200GB HDD...in mathematics theory, we could

What should be understood through my words is you always need to keep in mind what is: - your goal in electronic music creation - your level of knowledge in computer systems handling And use a configuration adapted to the answers without paying attention to the promotion of Ferrari-like systems you don't really need.

Music is a question of feelings and creation. Don't try to be that one guy using the so-called best sounding effect, find your sound in great humility, and express yourself! Go to your mother's attic, and resurrect your old Amiga and its incredible unique sounds. Use it in your next live show, and I guarantee you'll have a wonderful visual interest from the public!

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Love Your Samples!

by Junebug

Don't Be Afraid Of Using Samples and Loops!

Imagine having an unlimited wealth of studio musicians at your fingertips, each willing to perform at your command! Just think for a moment about the beauty in being able to create music with other REAL musicians, without the frustrations and timeconstraints of having to get them to your real-world studio! Can you even FIT an entire orchestra into your studio? Not to mention the amount of microphones and gear you'd need to record them all... Simply said, samples give you access to sounds and musical material that you would otherwise not be able to create yourself.

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Love Your Samples!

Recently, I'm hearing more and more musicians saying, "I HATE using loops in my music!

I HATE using samples in my music!" I just can't see it. Samples and loops can bring a much-welcomed new "edge" to your tracks!

Why would one not want to partake of this incredible bounty? I remember programming my first electronic music tracks using a Roland S-50 sampler controlled by a Roland MC-505 drum machine used as a midi sequencer. Back in those days, I would've killed for even just one solid, useable pad sample from a real analog synth to add to my mixes! Now, any pad sample I could ever dream of is just a sample CD away! Talk about savings!! I can find sample CD's filled to overflowing with pad samples for a mere $30.00!!

Forget the days of having to spend $800.00 plus on a new hardware synthesizer!

There is a wealth of top-notch sample material available these days; from real, natural drumloop collections played by world-famous drummers to down right hard-core synth explosion loop & sound compilations.

We are living in a great time of samples, my friends - explore and experiment with sounds, loops and musical styles you aren't familiar with -- and you will see your music grow to heights you've only dreamed were possible.

There is no shame in using sampled material in your songs. Just because you didn't write or play/perform every singe note or track in your music does not take away your creative vision. Of course, if you simply loop together a string of sampled musical phrases at a matched BPM, you can't expect to feel the same reward as if you wrote all the tracks yourself. So, we are going to discuss creative use of samples and loops and different ways you can use them to create your own, unique music.

Feel Good About Your Chosen Sample Material Nobody wants to get sued. Don’t steal samples from your favorite records and CD's, no matter how tempting the urge may be. If you don't steal samples, you won't get into trouble, period.

We're not talking about a simple drum hit here, don't steal any melodic content! If you need the drum hit from that song you just love, sample it, and tweak it and use it, my friend! Just don't think you can sample that entire drumbeat and get away with it!

The internet will provide you with countless legal sample CD manufacturers and sample download providers with enough sampled content to fill your hard-drive to over-flowing! These companies exist to bring you high-quality sounds and loops from professional musicians of handpicked high caliber! Just "Google" the kind of samples/sounds/loops you are looking for and you'll find what you need.

Don't be fooled by downloading "free" samples from mysterious websites, who knows where they got that content from? If you don't steal samples, you won't get into trouble, period. Owning the sample CD you are using samples from (or the download rights to the samplepack you bought) is the only legal and moral way to use samples.

Tips, Techniques And Inspiration For Using Samples and Loops For best results, preview each sample by itself before trying to work it into your mixes, as it's much easier to get the feel for how the sample should work in your song this way. This is especially helpful when previewing synth or bass sounds

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Love Your Samples!

because you will know how the envelope of your sampler should be set ahead of time. Try experimenting with shorter or longer release times on your sampler's Amplitude Envelope until the sound plays back to your liking. Bass sounds typically get a very short release time (even zero sometimes!) while a pad sound may require a much longer envelope release time to sound correct.

Some samples are meant to be played in a certain keyboard range. SO WHAT! Don't be afraid to play that bass sample 2 or 3 octaves higher and use it as a phat LEAD SYNTH! Grab that pad sample, chop into it a bit with your sampler's "start-time" control and use it as a MEAN and unique stab! That low, low cello sample you love? Play it way up on the octave range for some unique violin-type sounds... You get the picture - EXPERIMENT and HAVE FUN!!

For even more variety in playing back your sampled loops, try chopping-up and re-arranging them with a "groove-slicing" tool such as Recycle, Wave Surgeon, or the built-in groove-slicers inside ORION Virtual Studio and Fruity Loops. This is an invaluable way to add variety and "real-playedmusician-track-quality" to your tracks. Use the chopped sounds to program variations, rolls, intros, etc - or chop some beats up, and re-program them from scratch using the original sounds, with your own unique rhythms.

Use your FX wisely! One thing many sample producers purposefully do when creating loops and samples is to give you dry un-processed versions of their riffs. These are SOLID GOLD to a samplist -they open the door for you to change the tone and "vibe" of the part to suit your mix. A phaser on a clean-recorded bassline is always phunky. Temposynched gates on pads quenched in reverb can make for trip hop dubby-ness, all the way to trance heaven! How about some flanger on that lead synth

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line? Back in the day, you would have to own multiple (and EXPENSIVE) rack-mounted FX units to make this happen. Today, almost every virtual music production software suite comes packed with these FX and many, many more. All for the cost of around ONE of these hardware rack FX units! These programs allow you to stack FX on top of FX, making possible so many unique combinations that you are unlikely to find another artist producing the loop you just used "the same way" as you did.

One of the best tips I can give you is, LAYER your drums!! Grab more kicks, snares, claps & crashes and layer them on top of your main drumloops/drum tracks - use extra snares or percussion for rolls, etc. Try layering one drumloop played through a hi-pass filter with another drumloop played clean for serious percussive rhythms. Try adding your favorite delay (filter delay or x-delay work GREAT for this!!) on the hi-passed drum loop, or your favorite bass-expander on the clean drumloop for phat and phunky results!

Love your sampler! Most all music production suites today are equipped with a sampler of some sort. Get to really KNOW your sampler! Utilize its LFO's, filters, envelopes and pitching abilities! Don't be afraid to play that loop a few notes (or even octaves) above or below where the original tempo lies! The more you experiment with the loop, the less you have to worry that someone else's song will sound like yours becuase they used the same sample. Besides, there are so many sample providers today and so much unique sample content, are you really that likely to hear your sample used in another song?

Automation can be your best friend! Most all music production suites have automation abilities now. Record sweeping changes in your filters, pitches, panning - you name it! Really make your samples perform for you!

Love Your Samples!

Layering synth samples can be a great way to get that "THICK" lead sound you're after. Don't be afraid to layer multiple synth samples performing the exact same part on different tracks to get the sound you need. For an extra bonus, layer a wildly lfo'd copy of your lead synth part to bring into your track for that special moment when you want to add some SPICE! Sometimes, a loop will have some extra tail-end to allow for the proper FX decay. (i.e. the reverb decay of a pad loop, or delay on a synth riff.)

When you come across these types of samples and loops, simply trigger the loop as you would normally, and set the "release" of the amplitude envelope on your sampler to maximum to reproduce the loop as intended. Now the FX decay will "bleed" over the start of the following measure and flow correctly.

Don't forget the filters!! Some loops will sound wildly different when ran through a filter with a good amount of resonance - EXPERIMENT! Also, put your filter's LFO to good work and move the cutoff to get more life from these samples (assuming your filter has an LFO). Assigning an LFO to pan the sound(s) gently can also help add "dimension" to your tracks.

Make your mix phatter and more complete by adding in samples from different sample CD's, or your personal sound arsenal.

good concept, and you may want to write many unique songs and see which one(s) "stick to you" after a few months of listening back.

Don't be afraid to completely drop a song idea if it is not working for you. Sometimes if the tracks you've got going aren't working for you anymore, the best idea is a fresh approach to the same samples. Possibly a much faster or slower tempo will get you into a new groove you didn't even know was there! Go ahead -- spin that BPM dial and see where your track really "FLOWS". This is especially easy if you've chopped all your drum beats up into hits that your sequencer plays back at tempo! Just start moving the BPM around until you're really feelin' it!

Get involved with REMIX CONTESTS! These are a terrific way to show your skills and creativity with samples!

Use your virtual instruments to add your own parts over your sampled grooves! Add a few of your OWN phrases and riffs to your tracks that feature sampled loops. This will really help drive home YOUR unique sound. Get some flava' on - and jam along with your new groove via midi keyboard or even mouse! A few extra tracks from you on top of some samples you've tweaked and arranged, and your next masterpiece is finished!

DA' WRAP UP Don't feel that your first few attempts at using samples or making electronic, sample-based music MUST be solid-gold chart toppers. I once heard an established artist say that you should write one hundred songs and throw them away before you should seriously consider submitting your music for critique. While a great idea, we don't all have the time to write one hundred tracks and toss them in the trash! Nevertheless, this is a rather

Samples are your friend! No sampled guitar riff ever hit on your girlfriend, know what I mean?

Do yourself and your music the favor they deserve, add some new flavors to your palette and explore some new samples today! Most of all -- have fun with it!

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Autodafe Mega Bass One of the things I've discovered using Wusikstation is that many libraries have a tendency for going into sequenced sounds, pads and atmospheric soundscapes. The reasons for this are obvious.

Wusikstation is an instrument with so many powerful tools for creating evolving sounds. The only problem, as I see it, is the lack of specialized libraries with focus on the lower end of the sonic spectrum. With this in mind, I was happy to examine Autodafe's Mega Bass library. The library is medium-sized with 556 megabytes of sampled synth basses. There are 200 presets neatly organized into categories, such as analog, FM, hybrid, squelchy and sub-basses, which makes finding the right type of sound easy. After browsing through them, I can say that these sounds are good. The library can be described as a quite safe collection of bass sounds. The fm sounds have that clean digital edge, although the capabilities of FM synthesis aren't pushed too far. There are no Mad Scientists distorted bass drums looped a la Drum & Bass or

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no playful directions.

by Carl Lofgren aka DrGonzo

adventures

into

unknown

sonic

In one respect, this is somewhat a shame as the sources of the sampled material are very powerful. Among the sampled instruments there are the Korg MS 10/20/50, Doepfer A-100 Modular, OSCar and the Roland Juno 106. The treatment the sounds usually get in this package is filtering with envelopes, effects (often quite subtle - some chorus/flanger and sometimes a minimal delay). The only thing I wasn't too fond of was the fact that all sounds are one-shots, which makes this library not so well suited if you want to have those long slow basslines. I also found the sounds to be rather quiet - but that's easy to fix yourself. To summarize up, Mega Bass is a nice collection of bass sounds, although don't expect anything drastic. The sounds are more of bread & butter kinds of sounds. There are better bass sounds for the Wusikstation, but not for this price. Mega Bass have a very attractive price tag of 10 dollars.

Artvera presents her first commercial sound project for Wusikstation - MISTRAL. This sound library offers Wusikstation users the chance to own a collection of ethnic sounds - string instruments, drums/percussion, woodwinds, vocals and more.

With more than 300 presets and 300 megabytes of sample data it's a great inspiration for musicians in any kind of music, especially composers of Film, Ethnic, NewAge or Ambient music.

The presets contain not only individual instruments but also longer melodic sequences.

Many presets take advantage of all the new features of Wusikstation version 3.

In addition, there are very interesting pads with extra sounds which can be used in different music styles. These pads have been created by combining multiple ethnic instruments. The package also contains percussive/drum sequences and even some nature sounds, which have been used to create some special sound effects.

MISTRAL contains also a free bonus - two variants of a new skin for Wusikstation, in both normal and large sequencer formats (see the preview of main page below). The MISTRAL presets have been created by Vera Kinter (Artvera), Daniel Kemp (dnekm) and Stephan M端sch (rsmus7). The price is very friendly - only $30.

Release is scheduled for March 2007. www.artvera-music.com/ Wusik Sound Magazine April 2007 #012

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by WilliamK

How come I could play games with my old Pentium-100 with good graphics?

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Getting music to the side a bit, how about we talk about games this time?

The game market is really getting crazy with all the new graphics cards and DirectX versions.

I remember when I had my old Pentium-100 that could play Quake without problems, with a very good frames-per-second (FPS) response.

Now I have a new computer: a Dual-Core, over 100 times faster, with a powerful graphics card, and Quake 4 will just play sluggish in low-resolution.

Oh the wonders of the gaming market. If I was a Quake aficionado (which I'm not) I would need to purchase a new graphics card that would cost me more than the whole computer itself.

And people wonder why I love Nintendo so much.

For instance, get the old Gamecube console and ResidentEvil 4. The graphics were (and still are) amazing.

Now Wii, the new console by the same company, comes with an even more powerful 3D engine.

But people say it’s "lame", since the XBOX and Playstation-3 come with much more power.

But I don't care; I want something fun, cheap and easy to use.

Maybe companies should start thinking more about the "fun" factor compared to the "power" factor.

Who cares if a game has zillions of polygons, when the game just sucks?

But again, that should be me alone. Today I saw a new graphics card, compatible with DirectX 10, which has a totally insane price. But it’s called the most robust card ever made.

Should we really care that much?

Let me launch Tetris and relax now...

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Wsm

#012

SSSoundS Analog Night Volume 1/4 - Bass Sounds This is the first Volume out of Four Based on the Famous AN1X Synthesizer Created by Eric Corminier www.reasonbanks.com/refi ll_AN.html Licensed by Wusik, converted by WilliamK

HQ Synthetica Volume 6

by Kevin Breidenbach -aka synthgeek www.skincontact.com/synt hgeek This is the Sixth volume of our special High Quality (HQ) Synth Sounds. (check issue #007 for detailed information)

53 Presets - 54 SoundSets - 262 Meg

27 Presets - 5 SoundSets 78 Meg

Location: \Presets\Wusik Sound Magazine\Analog Night

Location: \Presets\Wusik Sound Magazine\HQ Synthetica\Volume 06

Abi Soundset (Several Sounds)

by Abdullah Said Uslu abiuslu@web.de 71 Presets - 110 SoundSets - 139 Meg Location: \Presets\Wusik Sound Magazine\Issue 0012\Abi Sounds

BIG FX

by WilliamK 11 Presets Location: \Presets\Wusik Sound Magazine\Issue 0012\Big FX

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Wsm

#012

SoundSSS Vectors

by WilliamK 8 Presets Location: \Presets\Wusik Sound Magazine\Issue 0012\Vectors

Orchestral Lite 2

by WilliamK Plucked - Percussion Winds, Strings

Anomaly Demo

by Dangerous Bear and Daniel Kemp's www.dangerousbear.com/ dbsig.html 23 Presets - 10 SoundSets - 56 Meg Location: \Presets\Wusik Sound Magazine\Issue 0012\Anomaly Demo

Pro-Sounds Tesseract Demo www.pro-sounds.net 24 Presets - 41 SoundSets - 44 Meg Location: \Presets\Wusik Sound Magazine\Issue 0012\PS Tesseract Demo

51 Presets - 59 SoundSets - 169 Meg Location: \Presets\Wusik Sound Magazine\Issue 0012\Orchestral Lite 2

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