When I first started out in the world of modular synthesis, I was lucky to have a couple of friends that had dipped their toes into the eurorack world and they helped me out understanding various aspects such as power, cases and signal path.
Author Archives: Ali Jamieson
Sidechain compression is a method whereby an external source is used to trigger a compressors, rather than the signal that’s being fed into its signal path.
It’s common place in electronic music and has been popularised by various french house producers. Hear
Guitar pedals were one of the catalysts for me getting into music technology. Through listening to various bands who created these non-guitar-like sounds I became fascinated in the guitar more as a vehicle for making weird noises rather than just being a traditional instrument.
Next to Aphex Twin, there is perhaps no-one more synonymous with the cringe inducing term “IDM” than Tom Jenkinson, better known to most as Squarepusher. Part virtuoso bass player, part programming wizard, Squarepusher has had a fantastically eclectic career, wowing both bedroom producers and wannabe Fleas alike.
A really neat feature of Ableton Live is the clip loop length. In session mode this can easily facilitate simple polyrhythm generation which can lead to some great results.
This summer’s Netflix one-to-watch has undoubtably been the Duffer Brothers’ nostalgia soaked Stranger Things. Incase you’ve been living under a rock, the story follows a group of kids, a mother (played by Winona Ryder), two adolescents and a cop searching for Will Byers, a boy who vanishes in the first episode.
Massive is wavetable synthesiser released by Native Instruments back in 2007 to great fanfare. It’s known for its brutal sub ripping basslines, formant filtered vocaloid patches and grizzly distorted effects.
A breakthrough for me as a musician, and particularly as a composer, was when I stopped imagining harmony in rigid frameworks. The first instrument I excelled at to some degree was the guitar (being a fairly average pianist), and that had a great impact on the way I thought about chords.
When first unboxing Reaktor 5 back in 2000-and-something I was blown away by the capabilities of these other-worldly synths, drum machines, granular sample destroying effects and sequencers, but it was some of the generative tools that really captured my imagination.
One of the eureka moments I had studying music was when I began to understand the harmonic series and how in turn this relates to pitch, intervals, harmony, tuning, waveforms, frequency and latterly timbre.