Soundcloud: five favourite flavours for May

Every month, we pick out our five favourite flavours from the artists followed by rUbba nEck on Soundcloud; tunes we reckon will inspire, you to produce great music. Here are the favourite five flavours for May:

Del Valle: Mono-family

A few months ago, I wrote about the Korg Monotron competition: Monomania. Why? Back in the day I owned an MS20 – and I still have an MS2000. I’m a big fan of the Korg analogue sound. So it was great to see one of our favourites, Del Valle, uploading a tunes that feature Monotrons (which share the same filter circuits as their MS ancestors).

Del Valle dives straight in with 303-style acid bass and a beat cut on an 808. You could be back in 1990. Until the weirdness starts. Backward, stretched and tempo-shifted vocal samples… an eerie analogue pad (with a sawtooth pitch modulating on the quarter notes)… some subtle percussion panned right to the edges of the mix… and you’re back in 2012 – and back in Ableton. It’s elegant, simple and as minimal as the 303 bass will let it. Hombre. Nos gusta.

Two takes on techno: the fabulous, the fossil, the fun

Strom Festival, Copenhagen

Mooching around in Google time, I found two articles on electronic music that turned out to be gems: real labours of love.

The first is Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music. Sponsored by internet radio broadcasters DI.FM, the author calls it, “a non-technical, irreverent critique of electronic dance music… I suppose it could be used as a credited source, but that’s not recommended since I made most of it up. Several biases are celebrated lavishly, because downcasting people for their taste in music is close-minded. Except if their taste in music sucks.”

You get the tone.

Ishkur has a caustic sense of humour and takes no prisoners as he drives us through a street map of electronic music, ranting like a taxi driver with a cab full of teenaged tourists. I’m serious, it really is a tour.

Cool Ableton workflow tip: set up a template and start producing out of the blocks

Workflow in Ableton for minimalism against the clock

In my last post I talked about the difference between a professional and a dilettante producer: they might have the same gear, but while the dilettante skirts around the tricky bits, the professional digs into everything – and I mean everything – and learns it inside-out. So, not only do professionals get to access all the great features that those clever product designers build into their babies, but they also get to establish a really fast workflow.

Cry me a river

If work is blood, sweat and tears, workflow is the river you weep that sweeps you over the edge of the waterfall into the promised land where everyone can sing and every day is Sunday. Except that, work isn’t really all blood, sweat and tears. And workflow is simply the order in which you go about creating your tunes.

Making music on the iPad: the good, the bad and the boogie

We have the technology; we can rebuild him.

Making music on the iPad is a lot of fun. The iPad gives you access to hundreds of music apps, puts everything on the screen at the tips of your fingers and it’s small enough to take with you so you can work and boogie anywhere. These were the features that first drew me to using one. And now, these same features have led me to drop it as a serious music-making tool – at least for now.

Choice v. productivity

So, hundreds of apps: if you want to learn an instrument, choose one and master it. Picking up a violin one day, a trumpet the next and working your way through the entire orchestra day by day won’t help you learn how to play any of them properly. And this is the problem you face with the incredible choice of music production apps for the iPad.

Not only are there loads of them; at just a few bucks a shot, you can go crazy in the app store and still spend less than you would on a rainy afternoon in Starbucks. But by the time you’re done, you have an orchestra of synths, drum machines and sequencers all jumping up and down like the donkey in Shrek shrieking, “Pick me! Pick me!” I found picking one and sticking with it tough. 

Monomania doesn’t have to be so scary

But it can be…

The prize: a silver-plated Monotribe

Virtual analogue synths have dominated the synthesizer market for the last 5 years. And rightly so. All that hands-on tweaking without the breakdowns, dodgy tuning and the sheer bulk of boxes stuffed with wires and resistors that defined the original instruments. But now, two new trends in synths are emerging.

You may have read something here before about the first trend: synths, groove-boxes and DAWs on the iPad. Some are simplified versions of big daddy software, such as ReBirth and Garageband; others are recreations of classic synths such as the iMS20 and the recently released Animoog; and some, such as the MadPad, have little to do with any instrument known to man, woman or child. One thing they all have in common, though, is the tweakability of the iPad’s multi-touch screen and the flexibility of loading it full of a dazzling range of instruments – at a fraction of the cost of their hardware counterparts.

One overwhelming reason to choose ReBirth for the iPad

Propellerhead's ReBirth for iPad

If you like your techno and house coloured with a tint of acid, you’ll be familiar with all the sounds Propellerhead’s ReBirth has to offer. Even if you’ve never heard of a TB-303, a TR-808 or a TR-909, and think a Propellerhead is a puppet from an obscure ’60s TV show (er… which it is) you’ve probably danced your socks off under their influence at some party or other – probably in the ’90s.

For anyone who produces electronica of any shade or tone, Roland’s terrible trio are still sought after for their warm, fat analogue sound and tweak-ability. The originals, though, appeared so early in techno’s evolutionary timeline that they didn’t have MIDI, storing sounds and sequences was crude, and sharing the results was… the stuff of science fiction.