What’s your favourite tool for reworking musical ideas into something new?
Thierry Enreille
“Reaktor is a very good tool for finding new ideas and spicing up some projects.”
Luc Lic
“I’ve played with the demo of Sugar Bytes’ Obscurium and I was impressed at how much it can do. Besides doing a lot, it can load other regular, third-party plugins. Unbeatable.”
Mark Luljak
“CamelSpace, although it’s no longer available since Apple bought out Camel Audio. It was a dual set of filters (one main, one sub), a reverb, a flanger, a step sequencer and mini-arp, and more, all in one. If you had long, boring notes, it could transform them into lively mini-arrangements of their own, without being glitchy. It was like a sonic Swiss Army knife.”
Shannon Nauss
“For remixing, and for generating unique ideas in general, Renoise all the way. I use a conventional DAW when I want to work in a more linear fashion, but for thinking outside the box, nothing beats Renoise for me.”
David Wilkinson
“Live’s Audio To MIDI – with its pitch control to fix scales – will turn any random sound into something that can pass as a tune. You never know what you might find.”
Stevie Sall
“NI Flesh is great for taking old full drum loops and creating melodies. Throw in a sampled death metal drum, a Brazilian samba, then a four on the floor house… the results are unpredictable but always interesting. Great for ideas, and the MIDI notes can be used for anything you like thereafter.”
Rodney Wiggins
“Logic... and the simple reason is price.”
Tom Coxen
“For a single track or a whole song, Stutter Edit is great for providing a really quick way to trial multiple effects and rhythmic options with simple keyboard MIDI input as a trigger.”
Asbjørn Andersen
“Ableton Live does most things for me, but Melodyne is great for changing melodies.”
Andy Buchanan
“Cableguys’ ShaperBox is now my favourite tool for smashing the crap out of something. The ability to bend and twist so many parameters at once, especially on different timescales, is a guaranteed journey into the unknown, every trip. It’s sometimes hard to know what to do with the results afterwards, but you always get something new.”