EXCITING NEW WAYS OF MAKING THE MUSIC AND THE SOUND FOR IT
Theory Board by Irijule– Music Theory Made Easy
This little piece of tech caught our eye through a Facebook ad for a kickstarter campaign 2 years ago. As musicians who’ve given up hope on ever pushing our theory knowledge to virtuosic levels, this particular bit of kit looked extremely appealing. What it is, is basically a midi controller with drum pad like inputs on either side of a screen. The screen lets you choose a scale from a ridiculously large library. Anything from melodic minors to indian scales you name it! The Theory Board is split into two sections. The “Melody Side” loads four octaves of the single notes within the scale, while the “Chord Side” loads every cor-rect chord. Color is used to express the correlations between these two sides, as well as keeping chords that share the same root note grouped together.The scales that the Theo-ry Board loads are universal for any instrument (guitar, piano, violin, saxophone, trumpet). As well as being a revolutionary musical instrument, the Theory Board also serves as a mul-tifaceted production tool. It keeps different elements of a song (baselines, leads, plucks, chord progressions) in the same key. The velocity control and everything can be tweaked to taste.
It sounds like the perfect tool for us non-musician music makers doesn’t it? It truly feels like an evolution of the MIDI controller. While the Kontakt Complete does do something very close to this, the light up drum pads is quite inspiring and honestly just a ton of fun. In an area that lacks innovation, its refreshing to see something new like this come along. Its innovative lay out allows the user access to a new way of perceiving music, making it the ultimate hack for production and composition. Never before has a MIDI controller given us this level of insight into the language of music theory. In the two weeks that we’ve had this, we can honestly say that it has indeed quite ironically, improved our sense of theory. This may really be down to the intuitive and fun way that everything is laid out. By merging color and sound the Theory Board provides a synesthetic experience for anyone interfacing with the product. Diatonic scales, chord groups, and the correlations between them are expressed through color giving the user a unique advantage by allowing visual reference points while playing. The Theory Board houses every scale known to man. When the user selects a scale they have full access to every note and every possible chord within that scale. This removes any doubt from what can, or can't be used... All the right combinations are right there at your fingertips. The Theory Board is for anyone interested in composing or producing music. A complete novice could pick this up and instantly level up their un-derstanding of theory, while advanced producers could use this to derive new inspiration.
Kush Omega Transformer Model TWK
Kush audio has long been one of our favourite manufacturers of audio tools. Mostly due to the fact that they operate and think very differently to others. Gregory Scott is well known for his alternate views on mixing and mastering techniques. One of his favourite tools has to be saturation/distortion. He says its useful for adjusting signal clarity and im-pact when he needs an element to be more present in a mix — without resorting to EQ — as well as for grit and excitement. This new plugin borrows from the famous Tweaker unit. It is a single-channel VCA dynamics processor. One of the best features of the Tweaker is the Drive control, the first knob in the audio path section. It can bring a lot of soul and life to an element in a mix. There is a full range of tones that can be achieved with Drive, from gentle presence to quite aggressive tube-amp-like sound. The Tweaker distortion module offers just that, a simple one knob solution to your saturation needs. Its the most simple plugin you could possibly use. It has a drive knob in the centre to dial in the grit along with a phase flip switch, a button to pad by -20dB and some volume control. And it just simply works! It works on most sources and scenarios. You could use it to add a ton of grit to a drum parallel, some more presence to guitars in a mix or even a nice subtle saturation on your mix buss. It does is all and the best part is its just one knob! It really is a little bit of magic in a digital box. This particular plugin has also been freed from the iLok ecosystem so feel free to go check it out and have fun!
Leapwing Audio DynOne
Continuing the recent trend of new tools that are in the market, lets talk about this one, the DynOne which recently got a third version with some really good updates to the al-ready amazing piece of software. We first heard of this one from none other than Bob Katz, one of the greatest mastering engineers and among the ones who wrote a lot of the rules we follow today. DynOne is a 5-band, linear phase dynamics processor that can be used directly on the audio, or in Parallel Compression mode, with custom-built crossover filters that have been designed to avoid phase alignment issues.
The original version of DynOne was actually released last year, and this v3 release con-tains a handful of subtle, but useful tweaks. You have five faders in the middle of the GUI that control the volume of each band so you can subtly alter the tonality of your material by bringing up the parallel compressed versions.
Straight off the bat, we were able to load a mixbus preset that added some excitement to the top end and controlled the lows, and adjusted each fader to taste, giving us a great sounding result in less than a minute! Not only is this excellent for multi band compres-sion, where it really shines is in parallel. If what you are looking for is a transparent level or loudness raise the DynOne has the most transparent parallel compression I’ve heard. It can “invisibly” raise the level of a recording a considerable amount without creating any artifacts. In fact, it’s so invisible you may have a hard time believing it’s actually in your chain. In that case, bypass it, and suddenly the level will drop and your jaw will drop, too. It works almost as well as bringing up a fader, but without overloading the peak level, which a regular fader would cause if the source material is already near full peak level.
A lot of people claim that it competes if not sounds better than the 10,000$+ boxes that mastering houses have been using for decades. Its certainly is as transparent and has the depth but it never lacks the warmth. Transients are preserved far better than many other compressors and the sound retains depth and dimension far better.
DynOne is very transparent at reasonable gains, but sooner or later you’re going to start hearing tonality changes or compression pumping, if you push it too far. The more purist the source, the less level boost you can get away with. This stands to reason, but you may even like some of the sound quality that comes from raising the faders very far. It’s ok to use it for an effect if that’s what you are going for. Or if you need as much transparency as possible, If you need to make things louder or denser, to bring up soft passages, for example, it’s always best to combine multiple processes — do a little lifting in the Dy-nOne, and add a little lifting using other processors in your mastering chain.
This barely scratch the surface of DynOne’s capabilities. It can also do downward com-pression, or upward expansion. The only downsides are the cost of the plugin itself and the face that DynOne uses up a tremendous amount of CPU power, because the quality of its filtering and internal resolution are impeccable. And impeccable DSP is very costly in system resources.