Waves Gems Now Shipping


Waves Audio let us know that Gems, a collection of creative effects, each designed with a unique sonic signature, available in Waves Creative Access.

Each ‘Gem’ includes a few simple intuitive controls that enable you shape vocals, create motion in instruments, add character to drums, and more.

At launch, the collection includes 10 Gems: five included in Waves Essential, and all ten included in Waves Ultimate.

What they say about the Gems in both Waves Essential and Waves Ultimate:

  • RockVoc: Take your vocal sound back in time with vintage mic tones and retro 60s/70s effects.
  • Sunsets: “Instantly mesmerizing ambience”, with a lush and dreamy sound, for synths, vocals, and any instrument.
  • The Neighbor: “Make your tracks sound like they’re coming from the loudest party in town”. A unique filter for building tension in songs and for post-production.
  • Liquid Glass: Make your tracks drip with the smooth, unpredictable textures of swirling liquid in a glass. Bring your music to life with edgy turbulence and a touch of unexpected motion.
  • Fan Only: Rev up your synths and instruments with one-of-a-kind fan-induced textures. Track sounds dull? Feed it through Fan Only and let your creativity fly.

What they say about the Gems available in Waves Ultimate:

  • Shine Vox: Make your vocals pop like a superstar with this vocal enhancer. Get that lit-up vocal performance with big, bright, in-your-face vocal sound, without the harshness.
  • Corroder: Create sonic mayhem and add grit and grime to your tracks with this must-have tool for audio destruction and sick sound design.
  • Solar Drone: Transform any instrument into an infinite, otherworldly ambient soundscape. Infuse eerie motion, dramatic space, and dark shimmer onto any track.
  • GT16 Mini: Add some serious vintage cool to your productions. This gaming console will pixelate your tracks for a retro vibe that’s straight out of the golden age of gaming.
  • Pow! Turn up the knock of your beats with POW! Add extra punch, dynamic drive, and fat subs to any kick, snare, tom or drum group. Your drum tracks will be BIGGER than ever before.

Find out more on the Waves website.

RØDE says PodMic USB is its “most versatile mic ever”


Could this really be ‘the only mic you’ll ever need’? RØDE says that the PodMic USB is its “most versatile mic ever”

RØDE has released many microphones over the years, but looks like the new PodMic USB is more versatile than its previous microphones. In fact, the company says that this is its “most versatile mic ever”.

Offering both XLR and USB outputs, the PodMic can be hooked up to many devices such as mixers, audio interfaces, computers and mobile devices (iOS and Android). In fact, RØDE believes that, if you’re a do-it-all creator, this could be the only mic you’ll ever need.

Besides that the PodMic USB is very much optimised for speech recording, with its high-power neodymium capsule being tailor-made for this purpose. There is a built-in pop filter for minimising plosives, and we are promised an even flatter frequency response than the original PodMic  and low self-noise. A cardioid polar pattern would ensure that the focus is on the audio you want to record and not background noise.

When used in USB mode, the PodMic USB makes use of its built-in Revolution Preamp, while built-in DSP provides you with a compressor, noise gate and high-pass filter, along with Aural Exciter and Big Bottom effects. These can all be tweaked using the VoxLab editor.

The headphone output offers zero-latency monitoring, and the built-in volume control can be used to adjust levels and – via its switch – turn zero-latency monitoring on or off. Additionally, it serves as a mic mute button when you are using RØDE Connect or Unify, the company’s software control solutions.

Given that this is a mic that is designed to be used when you are on the move, RØDE says that rugged build quality was high on the agenda at the drawing board stage. To this end, it has an all-metal construction, from the body to the stainless steel mesh grille. An integrated swing mount is designed to provide easy positioning and improved isolation, and the capsule’s internal suspension should help to protect the PodMic USB from bumps and bangs.

Designed and built in Sydney, Australia, the PodMic USB comes with a 5-year warranty and is available now priced at $199. Find out more on the RØDE website.

Tempera Granular Instrument is now available to Pre-Order


Vector Synth has announced that Tempera, a new granular instrument, is now available to pre-order.

Tempera is a tactile, cross-sample granular synthesizer and resampler with a unique interface and approach to sound manipulation. The developers describe it as “a novel instrument”, designed for live performance, sound design, sound recording and manipulation, soundscapes, looping, sample triggering and more.

Official intro:

Tempera is a compact instrument in a coarse-grain powder coated metal chassis, with 4 RBG backlit encoders with anodized aluminum knobs, and 4 128×64 monochrome OLED displays. The touchgrid is an in-house developed sensor grid with a vibrant RGB backlight under each cell.

Tempera has a global grain pool of over 4000 stereo grains, freely allocated to a 16-voice polyphony. Each voice has capacity for 64 concurrently playing emitters of 4 configurations, a multimode filter, and 5 assignable LFO or envelope modulators. The instrument has a built-in reverb, and additional effects are planned.

The layout of the 8×8 touch grid – the canvas – represents 8 stereo samples in vertical columns. When a finger is placed somewhere on the canvas, an emitter is created under the finger and grain playback begins. The placed emitters will generate grains from nearby audio, with brush width, height, movement, size, density and other parameters. Additionally, the parameters can be assigned as modulation destinations.

When another voice is added from a MIDI controller or the onboard virtual keyboard, the whole stack of grain-generating emitters is duplicated for the new voice.

The samples can be loaded from the internal memory of 8GB, from an SD card or a USB thumbdrive. Many audio formats are supported, and it is recommended to use WAV or FLAC.

In addition, you can record a sample directly into Tempera. This can be done either through the stereo audio input, which supports instrument input, dynamic microphone or line in, or live sampling “record what you play”. This can be done repeatedly back and forth. A built-in microphone is also present for quick sketching.

Further connectivity includes 6.3mm stereo headphone output, and main output mono left and right, USB host, USB device, MIDI input and output on TRS.

Tempera Synthesizer is available now to pre-order, with an intro price of €642 through May 26th, 2023.