November was all about fireworks and football… and a raft of spectacular, high-scoring new music technology releases!
Elgato Hit The Deck
Elgato’s range of Stream Deck programmable button controllers has been making life easier for media producers of all kinds since 2017, and the latest addition to the family adds a couple of transformative new features that musicians are sure to find particularly compelling.
Sitting at the smaller end of the Stream Deck size chart, the Stream Deck + offers eight of the fully customisable colour LED buttons for which the platform is known, assignable to pretty much anything you like, from DAW transport controls, mutes and solos, to menu entries and QWERTY key commands, to MIDI data. So far, so Stream Deck, but below the buttons, four push knobs and a touchstrip open up endless new DAW-based possibilities – project navigation and zooming, plugin tweaking, mixer control, etc. The buttons and knobs can be toggled or swiped between multiple functions, and there’s already an impressively demonstrative profile pack available for Cubase, with other DAWs presumably coming soon.
Connecting via USB and making for an endlessly flexible – and handily portable – control surface for not only your DAW but many other applications on your Mac or PC, too, the Stream Deck + looks to be a formidable workflow booster at a great price.
Newfangled Audio Breathe New Life Into Dynamics And Distortion
The latest plugin from ex-Eventide DSP guru Dan Gillespie’s Newfangled label is an intriguing dynamics shaping effect that brings compression, limiting and distortion together as a processing continuum. The central ‘radar’ display enables morphing from compression through limiting to overdrive by moving the ‘puck’ around, either freely or locked to one axis via keyboard modifiers. Attack and Release controls let you shape the envelope, a sidechain filter is on hand for tailoring the bass response, and the Mix parameter facilitates parallel processing. You can also alter the compression/distortion transfer curve using the Shape, Squash and Gate controls, and apply three-band EQ to the sidechain, input and output independently.
Intended primarily for group and mix bus placement, certainly presents a novel take on dynamics control with its unified compression/limiting/distortion algorithm, and sounds fabulous doing it thanks to Newfangled’s expertise and the implementation of oversampling. See and hear Luke Goddard run a rock mix through this bad boy in our hands-on video.
Waves Erupt!
Promising to deliver “huge-sounding tube saturation which makes any vocal or instrument jump out of the speakers”, Waves’ new effect for November is unusual in that it’s a valve distortion module that doesn’t emulate or riff on an existing hardware design. Built on the company’s True Valve Modelling technology, Magma BB Tubes also sets itself apart with its descriptively named Beauty and Beast knobs: these crank up two serial saturation stages – gentle (mostly) even harmonics, and more emphatic (mostly) odd harmonic respectively – with which to find your desired distortion sweet spot. The Beast stage is switchable between two different tube types, and the Transformer circuit can be disabled for a cleaner sound.
Beyond that, the input gain can be swung up to 12dB up or down; an adjustable 350Hz shelving filter allows for low frequencies to be rolled out of the process; Pre and Post Tone controls enable high-frequency shelving (at 10kHz) before and after the tube model; and the dry and wet signals are blended with the Mix knob. And that’s really all there is to it, as Magma BB aims to make dialling in colourful, enhancing saturation effortless. Luke takes the stage again in our first look video.
Eventide Put Their Foot Down
The eleventh month saw revered effects manufacturers Eventide unleash a brand new guitar pedal, built on the same ARM-based architecture as their legendary H9000 Harmonizer rackmount. The H90 Harmonizer expands greatly on the existing H9 Max, packing in all of that pedal’s 52 delay, reverb, modulation and pitchshifting algorithms, and adding to them with seven all-new treatments – polyphonic pitchshfiting, massive modulated reverb, Uni-Vibe emulation and more – and the H9000’s Instant Phaser, Instant Flanger and SP2016 Reverb. Any two algorithms can be combined in a program, routed in series or parallel; and four inputs, four outputs and two insert jacks (accessible as dual monos or a stereo pair) put all manner of physical connectivity options on the table.
The front panel, meanwhile, is festooned with three footswitches, five push knobs and seven LED buttons for comprehensive hands/foot-on control, and a sexy OLED display. In Perform mode, the footswitches can toggle between two functions each, and three HotSwitches are assignable to multiple parameters at once. And if that’s not enough control for you, MIDI IN and OUT/THRU ports and two expression/auxiliary inputs put the icing on the cake. Lastly, organised ‘Playlists’ of presets are loaded in either of two modes: sequentially in Select mode, or in banks of three presets in the song performance-orientated Bank mode. In summary, it’s a bleedin’ powerhouse, bringing even more of that Eventide luxe to your guitar rig than the considerable amount already delivered by the H9 Max. Yum!
Kush Go For A Drive
It’s no exaggeration to describe Kush Audio as among the best in the business when it comes to emulating analogue saturation, and the second dual distortion plugin to catch our eye last month saw them extracting the distortion from their recreation of the vari-mu Lisson Grove AR-1 Tube Compressor. Rather than straight-up harmonic crunchifying, though, LG Drive runs the output of its two serial saturation circuits through a set of cascading phase-coherent filters to fulfil more of a frequency-shaping role that Kush say “rivals (and often surpasses) EQ with its ability to thicken and energize anemic drums, dramatically lift and level out dull, unruly vocals, add clarity and definition to murky bass and fundamentally shift the tone and vibe of an entire mix”. Said shaping takes the practical form of high and low cut filters, and a 632Hz-centred tilt EQ (the Tone control), and as the promo video showcases, the enhancing tonal shifts achievable using this nifty setup are a thing to behold. It’s out now…
Did anything of a music production bent not on our list grab your attention in November? Let us know in the comments.