WORLD OF MUSIC ; PORTABLE KEYBOARD - Latest Portable Music Keyboards, Synthesizers and Music News

Stuck in the 4-bar loop?

If you make electronic music, you’ve probably been there: you’ve got a nice little 8-bar loop going, but you’ve had it on repeat for what feels like hours, fruitlessly tweaking with no clue where to go next.

Described by creators Color With Live as a “colouring book for Ableton”, Stencils are empty, colour-coded projects that map out an existing song’s structure in detail.

Try Stencils, arrangement templates for Ableton Live based on tracks by Four Tet, Fred Again, Skrillex and more

The process of arrangement – structuring your loops, sketches and ideas into fully-fledged tracks – is one of the most difficult stages of finishing a song, and it’s something that even the most talented artists struggle with.

If that sounds familiar, music education company Color With Live has something that might help. Stencils are empty, colour-coded arrangement maps for Ableton Live based on existing tracks that the company describes as “like a colouring book for Ableton”.

Open up a Stencil in Live and you have a proven structure to work with while writing your own track: all you need to do is fill it with your own material, and the arrangement takes care of itself.

Every element of a song’s structure is mapped out in detail, from builds and drops through to fills and breakdowns. You provide the melodies and chords, the sound design and the effects, but the Stencil helps you mould this material into a coherent layout based on a track that you love.

Color With Live is keen to emphasize that a Stencil is not a recreation of a song or a way to copy another artist’s work. The raw materials are stripped out and what’s left is the structure, a template that you can use to create something that’s entirely your own.

Color With Live recently released a free Stencil Pack that features the arrangements behind Flip It by Levity, Fisher’s rework of World Hold On by Bob Sinclair and Dimension’s Once In A Lifetime.

Also on offer are more than 250 paid Stencils based on songs from artists like Four Tet, Fred Again, Calvin Harris, DJ Seinfeld, Metro Boomin, Skrillex and many more. Each Stencil is priced at £8, and there are discounted bundles available if you want to buy more.

The folks over at Color With Live are a generous bunch: they also have a number of free Ableton Racks available on their site, and a free Extension that can be used to save and organize YouTube tutorials in Live.

“We realized one of the biggest pain points in learning production is arrangement. The advice is always to pick apart your reference tracks, but there’s nothing visual to check your work,” Color With Live’s co-founder Kevin Rea said in a press release.

“Repetition is what makes learning click. Producers download Serum packs to practice sound design and MIDI packs to practice music theory. We were blown away that nothing like that existed for arrangement. Our mission isn’t for our stencil to be a crutch that you rely on for every song, instead something that you can learn from and then apply to future productions.”

Head over to Color With Live website to download the free Stencil Pack.

Maschine 3.7 adds probability and Euclidean sequencing, and launches alongside a new Maschine Expansion packs.

In May, following a turbulent few years of leadership changes, mergers and financial struggles, Native Instruments was acquired by InMusic, joining a roster of brands that already includes the likes of Moog Music, Akai, Rane and Alesis.

While some longtime users might be wary of the move, it promises to bring stability to a brand responsible for some of the most notable – and widely used – product lines in the music technology space, including Kontakt, Traktor and Maschine.

Against this backdrop Native Instruments is also approaching its 30th anniversary, having released its first software instrument, the Reaktor precursor Generator, back in 1996. To mark the anniversary the company is releasing Maschine 3.7, the platform’s first major update since the InMusic acquisition, as well as three Maschine-focused sound packs. (Maschine 3.6 did land after the announcement, focused mostly on compatibility, bug fixes and UI/audio improvements).

The main focus of Maschine 3.7 is a trio of sequencing tools designed to add spontaneity and variation to patterns. The first of these is a random note generator designed to generate patterns based on probability. This can be used to create randomised percussive, melodic or chord patterns. Users also get the option to control the level of velocity randomisation within the notes created.

This is joined by note probability, which lets users dictate a chance level for each note in a sequence. This dictates the level of randomisation for each note every time the sequence cycles. Probability Lock allows users to capture a cycle of randomised notes, offering another way to generate pattern ideas using the randomisation tools.

The third new tool is a Euclidean sequencer, a popular tool in the modular realm that lets users program sequences by distributing events as evenly as possible over a set number of steps. Here, a real time mode lets Maschine users alter the step length, events and rotation in real time to create shifting patterns. These are undoubtedly welcome additions to the Maschine toolkit.

Native Instruments is clearly aware of the need to reassure longtime users that Maschine hasn’t been forgotten with the move to InMusic, issuing a press release that pitches the update as: ‘New update. New sounds. Continued support. Maschine is alive and evolving, and this update packs in a host of fresh features.’

Alongside the new features for Maschine 3.7, the company is launching new Maschine Expansion packs. The first of these, Thirty, is a compilation of sounds ‘resampled’ from the company’s own back catalogue, drawing on samples from Reaktor, Spotlight Series, Play Series, Massive X and more to create 30 Maschine kits, 89 loops, 291 drum samples and 85 one-shots. Whether you call this a celebration of NI’s legacy or a bundle of repackaged sounds probably depends on how generous you’re feeling towards Native Instruments.

The second pack is named Paris Heat and focuses on the classic French house sound of the ‘90s and early-’00s. This totals 40 Maschine kits, 108 loops, 314 drum samples and 127 one-shots, aiming to capture the crunchy drum machines, filtered samples and warm synth tones that defined the sound.

The final pack is more forward-looking. Titled Rage Circuit, it focuses on the sound of the EDM-adjacent trap sub-genre associated with artists like Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti. The pack is created in collaboration with US producer Snipe Young, who has worked with the likes of Beyonce and Justin Bieber, and has created a variety of other NI and Akai sound packs in the past.

“30 years is a moment worth celebrating. This milestone couldn’t be reached without the producers and musicians who took NI’s instruments and made history with them,” says Tim Adnitt, Senior Director of Product Management at Native Instruments. “Maschine 3.7 gives those producers and musicians new ways to write, sequence, and perform, and with Thirty, Paris Heat, and Rage Circuit arriving together, this is one of the biggest weeks for Maschine sound content we’ve ever had.”

Maschine 3.7 is available now as a free update for Maschine 3 users. The new packs are all available now. Paris Heat and Rage Circuit are $49/49€ each, while Thirty is available for $30/30€. Visit the Native Instruments site for more info.

New Nova platform with five free virtual instruments but, bigger things are on the way.

The LA-based music software company behind the plugins Cube and Beam, Lunacy, has announced the launch of Nova, a cloud-based virtual instrument platform.

All of Nova’s instruments can be played in both your browser and your DAW via the free Nova host plugin, which gives you access to a growing library of instruments that currently includes ten titles – five of which are available for free. The plugin is available in AU/VST3/AAX formats for macOS and Windows.

Among the free instruments are Woodland Piano, a characterful sampled upright piano with a granular delay onboard and Chiptuner, a single-oscillator chiptune synth that delivers classic video game nostalgia in spades.

Also available for free is Good Vibes, a sampled vibraphone with four velocity layers and multiple effects, and Zephyr Strings, a string arp instrument based on recordings of the Budapest Strings Chamber Orchestra. Finally, Silhouettes is an ambient instrument with five presets and an XY-pad interface that’s ideal for atmospheric pads and eerie drones.

Alongside these free instruments, Nova’s marketplace features five paid titles that are a little more versatile than the freebies. These include Gleam, a modal resonator synth developed by Rainbow Circuit, Drift Cassette, a dual-deck tape-emulating multisampler, and Growl, a monophonic FM bass synth built for aggressive low-end tones. All five are currently available in a $99 bundle or can be purchased individually for between $19 and $35, and you can test them out for free in your browser.

The plan is to develop a platform for prompt-based plugin development and customization, synchronized across your browser and your DAW. Using Nova’s builder, creators will be able to design, edit, share and sell virtual instruments and effects without any programming experience, all with the aim of making plugin creation more accessible. Lunacy says the builder is currently in early access with a small group of developers, but hasn’t yet shared a date for an official release.

“Imagine if you could build any musical instrument you can imagine,” Lunacy CEO Casey Kolb said in a press release. “Soon, NOVA will let you. Once it is fully launched later this year, you’ll be able to dream up any sonic idea or playground, then turn that into a music tool, and then share it with the world with a single link.”

“Say someone makes a step sequencer and shares it. You open it and wish you could add a custom shimmer reverb to the end of the signal chain. You can add that, then you can share your new version with a friend, and that friend expands it further. The tools are never fixed; they are always evolving.”

While these capabilities are still a little way off, we’re curious to see how Nova develops. As it stands, the Nova plugin is worth downloading for the five free instruments alone, and we’re told that the library will continue to grow as time goes on.

Find out more on Lunacy website.