Minimal Audio’s Current might just be your new favourite synth$200 (perpetual licence), minimal.audio
$15/month, $120/year (rent-to-own, with access to all Minimal Audio plugins, updates and sound packs)
Minimal Audio kicked up quite the fuss in the industry upon announcing Current, its new flagship synth. The American company is best known for its feature-rich effects plugins primed for creative sound design but has turned its attention to sound creation, with a tremendous synth that includes multiple synthesis types, some exceptional effects, and a built-in cloud preset system. It’s not a cheap investment – as potential buyers quickly found out – but the high sound quality and flexible feature set make it more than a match for the competition.

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Rocky start
Minimal Audio initially launched the synth as a subscription-only model. This decision was unanimously met with widespread negativity online, with many referencing the infamous subscription proposal made by Waves earlier this year. Thankfully, the company made a swift U-turn, apologised, and is now offering the synth as either a perpetual licence for $200, or as part of a rent-to-own scheme that also includes all of Minimal Audio’s other effects plugins, plus an expanding collection of samples, presets and wavetables.
These extras are accessed via a section of Current called The Stream, which doubles up as the instrument’s browser. You have tabs for presets, wavetables and sounds where you can preview, download and load individual files or entire packs. You can also switch between listing the files available on the cloud or on the local hard drive, and use a tagging system to search and favourite particular presets. It remains to be seen how this page will function in the upcoming perpetual version, but the company has said that you will be able to purchase additional packs as needed, so the functionality will probably remain largely the same.

Start your engines
Moving on to the main sound engines, you have two wavetable oscillators, a granular engine, a flexible sub-oscillator, and a sampler. Editing controls for each are fairly extensive, so we can’t list them all, but they strike a strong balance of being incredibly flexible but not totally overwhelming.
The wavetable oscillators have main controls for scanning Position, Pitch and Spectral, with the latter two offering around 20 different modes each that can dramatically change the resulting sound. There’s also a fat-sounding unison option with up to 16 voices and detune. Anyone who’s used a wavetable synth such as Xfer’s Serum will know what to expect here, as this type of synthesis is prime for patches that have movement such as neurofunk and d‘n’b basses, or evolving pads.
The granular engine is perhaps the most interesting of the bunch; it’ll let you load any sample and turn it into something beautiful and mysterious. You can choose up to eight layers of grains that dance around the playhead of the sample, and then edit the playback to loop and move in a multitude of ways. These can be synced to the DAW or move freely, and you can add stereo offset to create a nice, wide sound.
The excellent visual feedback helps to understanding which parts of the sample are being triggered, as different dots, lines and regions sweep across the waveform. It’s quick and fairly easy to get interesting results, no matter what audio you throw at it.
Minimal Audio Current granular engine
Sub level
Current’s impressive sub-oscillator is much more than a mere simple waveform. It generates a root note and then gives you the option to add up to eight partials to shape the sound and help it sit perfectly in the mix. You can tilt the harmonics and add subtle pitch dive, modulated detune, and six flavours of saturation.
It’s clear that Minimal Audio has thought carefully about how this oscillator can interact with the rest of the synth, with options to bypass the effects section for the sub, and to remove the fundamental from the wavetable oscillators to make space. You can also engage sub lock, which means the sub will play the same low octave, no matter how high up the keyboard you go. This is a great feature for basslines with a lot of movement up the keyboard, as you can dance around with different octaves using the other oscillators, whilst retaining a solid low-end.
The final oscillator is the sampler, which doesn’t do anything especially fancy, but is a nice option for adding more organic sounds or drums to your palette. It has options for looping, triggering and reversing, and can be run in classic Repitch mode, or in Flex mode with three time-stretching algorithms. There’s also a tab that shows frequency and amplitude modulation options for all five of the sound sources.
Minimal Audio Current wavetable oscillator
Make it move
All of the sources can be routed to the two filters, with a whopping 59 modes, a stereo offset, and the ability to run in series or parallel. The modes include various formant, comb, phaser and morphing settings that can dramatically alter the sound in interesting ways. And all of these oscillators and filters can be modulated via nine modulation slots to further shape your sound.
For each of the nine slots, you can choose from an AHDSR envelope with slopes, a simple LFO with a cool randomise function that can change with every repeat, a comprehensive curve editor for more complex sequences, and an envelope follower. There’s also an additional envelope that’s hard-wired to the amp.
Nine modulators should be enough for most preset building tasks, although some more hardcore sound designers may wish for a few more. To use them, you simply drag and drop to your control of choice and then adjust the ring that appears. You also have keyboard mod sources like keytracking, velocity and pitch bend, plus MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) controls to help make your patches nice and reactive, and four assignable macros on the side of the user interface.
50 shades of grey
Speaking of which, the plugin screen is clean with useful visual feedback, but the commitment to a grey and purple colour scheme can make it feel a touch flat. You get a splash of colour when you select a modulator which highlights yellow along with a yellow ring to show the destination, but it feels like the more colourful mod system of something like the brand’s own Rift might have made it slightly easier to chase sources and destinations. That said, it’s possible they didn’t want it to look too similar to Vital and Pigments, two competing soft-synths.
The final part of the main page is the keyboard at the bottom, where you can select a key for your track, along with mono, legato and glide options. There’s also a comprehensive chord mode with plenty of presets and a strum function, plus a decent arpeggiator with multiple playback modes and preset sequences. It’s a useful feature to have these built-in and the chord presets are especially welcome to help with inspiration. You can also rearrange their order to give different playback results.
Minimal Audio Current chords
Finishing touch
We’ve saved the best for last: Current comes with an exceptional set of built-in effects that are essentially Minimal Audio’s separate plugins, reshaped to work inside the synth. These include Rift Distortion, Cluster Delay, Morph EQ and Fuse Compressor, plus an extra filter and new algorithms for chorus, phaser, and reverb.
It’s fairly customary to use separate effect plugins when building synth parts into a track, as most built-in effects don’t quite cut it. Not so here though, as these are essentially full plugins (each worth $49) with extensive options that can be used and rearranged across nine effects slots. To get a slightly better idea of what’s on offer, read our review of Rift and Morph EQ. Suffice to say, they’re all excellent sound-shaping tools, with some useful additions like built-in ducking on the delay and reverb effects.
Put to the test, we find it especially effective using Morph EQ to control resonances in a bass sound, and then to modulate its position using the key tracking so that you retain the perfect sound at different notes. We then use the Fuse multiband compressor (which is a little like Xfer’s OTT) to help get a balanced, upfront, and professional-sounding patch that doesn’t require any further processing. The extra bonus here is that you can use all the built-in modulation options to add movement to the effects, creating some pretty wild results. In fact, it would be great if Minimal Audio could open up the sidechain input of the plugin so you could use the effects rack on external audio sources. Also of interest, is the fact that the company has said that it will be adding more effects in the future.
Minimal Audio Current The Stream cloud-connected platform
A new contender
Current is a highly flexible synth with well-designed sound sources and a superb effects section that makes it stand out from the competition. Although, this comes at the cost of fairly high CPU usage, especially if you run it at 4x oversampling. It might not be the synth you reach for more analogue-type sounds, but it does cinematic and modern, complex electronic sounds incredibly well.
Given the synth’s complexity, it would be helpful if the developers could add some explanations and tips when you hover over each element, and as Ian from the Alckemy Neuro YouTube channel suggests, it might be useful to have some sort of wavetable editor built-in. These things aside, it’s an exciting new contender in the synth arena.
Key features

Hybrid virtual instrument with effects suite and cloud content platform
Sound Engines: Wavetable; Granular; Sub; Sampler; Filter; FM/AM
Modulation: AHDSR, LFO, curve, follow, MIDI and MPE
MIDI Effects: Keyboard; chord; arpeggiator
Effects Rack: Rift Distortion; Flex Chorus; Fuse Compressor; Cluster Delay; Morph EQ; Hybrid Filter; Ripple Phaser; Swarm Reverb
The Stream cloud-connected content browser for presets, wavetables and samples
New royalty-free content added every month
30-day free trial

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How CRSSD Festival is using synths to transform electronic music fans into producersIt’s a story as old as the rave: A fan is on the dancefloor having one of the best nights of their life. Soon comes the transcendent moment where that track erupts through the loudspeakers and, in that moment, the fan decides to pursue a dream of being a professional artist.

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For fans who find themselves in that experience at CRSSD – the celebrated San Diego electronic music festival that’s just held its 16th edition – they can begin their story in immediate fashion at the CRSSD Lab.
The CRSSD Lab is the festival’s on-site activation produced in partnership with Roland and other respected forces in electronic music. It provides attendees opportunities to try synths, samplers and software, and engage with the craft that brought them to CRSSD in the first place.
The Lab has been present at CRSSD in different forms since the festival’s inception. It’s offered a variety of different seminars and activities including Q&As with artists – like the instrumental house performer Life On Planets – workshops on sampling and drum production in Ableton Live, and tech demonstrations using the newest machines from Roland.
“Roland sees CRSSD as an education medium that allows lovers of electronic music to familiarise themselves with the technology and instrumentation behind the music,” says Mar Keith Anthony, Roland’s global brand relations manager, speaking to MusicTech via Zoom.
Roland booth at CRSSD Festival. Image: Izzy Hassan
As a world leader in music gear, Roland has maintained a global presence at various live events for decades. This includes trade shows such as The NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Show in Anaheim, California, Superbooth in Berlin, Gearfest in the UK, and the Tribeca Film Festival in New York City.
But when it comes to music festivals like CRSSD, Roland is more of a newbie. Over the years, the brand has been invited to produce activations similar to the CRSSD Lab at various festivals including Coachella and Rolling Loud, but it’s kept CRSSD as a primary focus, being involved since 2018.
“CRSSD is an event that allows lovers of electronic music something to look forward to,” Anthony says. “To see the reactions on their faces after they get that introduction – ‘What is this machine? What does it do? How do I use it?’ Once they get past that point and get directly into the creativity piece of it, they believe they can do it. They believe that they can be a producer.”
This year, Roland brought an SH-4d desktop synthesizer, an SP-404 MKII, a TR-8S, and their new AIRA Compacts for attendees to experiment with. One of Roland’s product specialists, Jay Ybarra, was also there to answer any questions and provide tech demonstrations throughout the weekend.
People trying out gear at CRSSD Festival. Image: Izzy Hassan
Beyond Roland, CRSSD also partnered with Chapter One Records, a boutique record store in Los Angeles. The team brought several crate full of vinyl and a pair of listening stations, in addition to hosting all-vinyl DJ sets from selectors such as Dylan Payne.
According to Anthony, this year over 1,000 people visited The Lab over the two days, due in part to its new location within the festival grounds.
In past editions of CRSSD, The Lab was tucked in the corner near the artists’ area. This year it was slap bang in the middle of the festival. Chairs and couches were set up so, whether you were eager to try the tech or looking to take a creative break before getting back to dancing, The Lab was thrumming with activity day and night.
And it’s not just attendees who take advantage of the lab either. Numerous artists stop by to conduct live demonstrations. This year, piano house maven LP Giobbi stopped by after her uplifting main stage set.
DJ setup at Chapter One Records’ booth at the CRSSD Festival. Image: Izzy Hassan
Artists also come to The Lab to enjoy the same kind of hands-on experience as the attendees, as was the case with the ascending alternative electronic artist Mary Droppinz, real name Alyssa Johnson.
Johnson wasn’t even booked to play at CRSSD this year, but she went to the festival to support her friends and submerge in the culture. Like many, she couldn’t pass up the opportunity to check out The Lab while she was there.
“From my experience, 90 per cent of the people at a festival want to, in some capacity, express themselves with music,” Johnson says. “To have a lab set up where you can test gear out, talk to actual industry professionals is really cool. Who’s more confident to have a moment and chat when you’re vibrating high at a festival?”
In addition to being an artist, Johnson has extensive experience in both the educational and commercial sides of music.
On the education front, she is a frequent tutor for LP Giobbi’s FEMME HOUSE, teaching courses across DJing and production (she and Giobbi are currently curating a course on etiquette for back-to-back DJing).
DJ spinning vinyl at Chapter One Records’ booth at the CRSSD Festival. Image: Izzy Hassan
Her commercial experience surrounds another celebrated music tech company, Native Instruments. There, she was a user engagement and education manager for almost three years, running activations similar to the CRSSD Lab at other trade shows, including NAMM.
“Having that access at a festival is really cool because not everyone can get tickets to NAMM. Not everybody has access to try out gear. I do realise how hard it is to get access to education like that,” Johnson says.
While she was at The Lab, Johnson was making beats on the equipment and showed her friend and fellow artist Juliet Mendoza (who performed at this edition of CRSSD) how to use the Roland TR-8S. But more than The Lab being a creative space, it’s also an opportunity to build connections in the industry.
Prior to her visit to CRSSD, Johnson was working with Roland’s editorial platform to publish an article, and so she had been in the same virtual sphere as Anthony, whom she met thanks to CRSSD’s The Lab.
“It was cool to meet her in person,” says Anthony. “Artists usually come over with their entourage. Sometimes that entourage includes producers and PR and media and friends and other aspiring artists under their camp.”
CRSSD Festival-goers checking out Roland merch at the booth. Image: Izzy Hassan
So for aspiring artists who may be dipping their toe into the professional side for the first time, The Lab presents an opportunity to expand their network immediately – which at least one person did with Johnson.
“I met a girl [at the Chapter One Records booth] who also liked to spin breaks so we were geeking out over some of the wax over there,” says Johnson. “She was just checking it out, then she came pretty much everywhere I was going. We had a mutual friend and we basically went around the whole festival together after.”
Similar to the Roland side, Chapter One Records curated their addition to the CRSSD Lab in such a way that anyone, whether they were already avid collectors of vinyl or had never once placed a record on a turntable, could come and appreciate what was there to offer.
Eddie Vela launched the shop in late 2019, just before the pandemic. Vela is an established figure in the Los Angeles underground dance music community, throwing events under prominent brands such as Dialogue and You Know What. Stemming from this association with events, Vela has curated pop-up shops at various different parties.
“Every pop-up is curated for that crowd. Depending on the music genre and type of people we expect to run into our shop, that’s what inventory we bring,” says Vela. “[For CRSSD] we’ll buy a lot of main-stage artists who are performing. They’re big on big-stage techno. We had a few Charlotte De Witte records and Amelie Lens [records].”
CRSSD Festival-goer with vinyl at the Chapter One Records booth. Image: Izzy Hassan
So while fans may come to The Lab to impulse buy the new album from the artist they just saw perform, Vela curates an experience that is authentic to the spirit of underground record shops with premier technology.
The listening stations at the booth featured Technics SL-1200 MK2s, and the DJs were spinning on a setup that included a Varia Instruments RDM40 rotary mixer and two Technics SL-1210 M5Gs.
“The record shops that are more underground are more keen on an experience,” says Vela. “It’s all about hearing new music and listening and touching and feeling and getting that experience of vinyl, and that’s what we wanted to bring to CRSSD.”
For Chapter One, CRSSD remains the biggest event where they have ever set up a pop-up shop. One reason many more commercial record stores don’t offer that same hands-on experience is that vinyl are inherently fragile. The more people handling them, the more likely they are to get damaged.
But after three pop-ups at the CRSSD Lab, Vela has seen that the crowd and environmental CRSSD find a balance where there is significant interest, but still respect for the inventory.
Vinyl crates at Chapter One Records’ booth at the CRSSD Festival. Image: Izzy Hassan
“At a bigger festival, the experience can get lost with so much going on. At CRSSD there’s just the right amount of side activities and vendors,” says Vela. “Even though CRSSD is still a big festival there is still a really good vibe of intimacy.”
“The music heads come and dig, but over the past three years at CRSSD, I’ve noticed there are more younger kids who haven’t been exposed to the artistry of turntablism, or even seen records and turntables up close,” says Dacia Blass, a partner in running Chapter One.
“We’re happy to be a part of someone’s first experience of musical growth, and I think that happens a lot at CRSSD,” says Vela.
As Anthony describes it, the attendees who stopped by the CRSSD Lab were having their “A-ha” moments – learning that some of the music they just spent their day dancing to was created using the machines that were there, ready to be used.
The moment when an attendee decides to become an artist is also an “A-ha” moment. All it takes is one of those moments to start a journey that can lead to world-shifting music.
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DIY Spotlight: Vera BloomAlternative rock/punk singer, songwriter and musician Vera Bloom saw her musical journey start when she was just six years old.

“I’ve always been a bit of a rebel without a cause, so as I grew up I spent a lot of my practice time improvising and writing my own songs instead of practicing what I was supposed to,” Bloom says. “Since I could write, I’ve been an avid writer of poetry and journaling, and it was my father who introduced me to the idea of songwriting and adding lyrics to music. The piano was my instrument for writing, but I made the switch to guitar at age 18 and something really clicked. I performed in classical piano recitals throughout elementary and middle school, but in high school I performed my own song on the piano with a drummer in the school talent show and won first place. That’s when I knew this could be something and that my songs could reach people.”

She describes her sound as unpredictable, skirting around the punk sub-genres. That can all be heard on the recent It’s Me EP.

“It’s Me is a compilation of six songs I had written over a year and a half that all belong in the same chapter of my life,” Bloom says. “The common themes are self-love, owning and recognizing self-worth, and reflection and growth. All the songs except "Boxes" were recorded here in Nashville at Battle Tapes Studio, and engineered by Jeremy Ferguson, who also recorded my first EP. The lead guitarist on the songs, Jacob Carey, engineered "Boxes" in his home studio. The tracks feature Brian Chinino on drums, Levi J Miller on bass guitar, Jacob Carey on lead guitars, and me singing and playing rhythm guitar.”

For Bloom, “DIY” means being true to yourself and keeping it real.

“It means doing what you like versus what you think you should do or is expected of you,” she says. “I really strive to maintain this in my music and my music videos, and I think that’s something that people really like about me. That’s why my sound is a bit unpredictable, really, because I do what I want and what I like and what the songs want versus shaping it into something that fits in a box to ‘stay on brand.’” 

For more, visit verabloom.net.

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Warm Audio’s WA-1B all-tube, transformer-balanced optical compressor “accurately recreates one of the most legendary compression styles”Warm Audio has launched a new transformer-balanced optical compressor, the WA-1B, which the brand says “accurately recreates” renowned Scandinavian compression.
The compression style the WA-1B takes inspiration from was originally found in Tube-Tech’s CL 1B from 1987, and it’s been hardwired to recreate the sound of its original circuitry.

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Warm Audio says that the WA-1B delivers “forgiving” compression with added speed and control functionality. It utilises a 270v circuit with handwired, through-hole circuitry, and a “100 percent discrete analogue signal path.”
It has custom large-core transformers from Lundahl, Sweden, and high-powered vacuum tubes that deliver the compressed signal to the output of the compressor. It features all of the same classic controls, including variable threshold and infinite 2:1 – 10:1 ratios.
The WA-1B also features a three-setting metre switch with input, compression, and output levels, and an on/bypass switch to activate or bypass the compressor. Additionally, Attack/Release controls can be switched from a fixed setting, manual (variable) setting, or a combined setting.

“The WA-1B has been on our wishlist for quite some time and we are very excited to accurately deliver one of music’s most sought-after styles of compression. The sound of this compressor has been a key part in shaping so many hits over the years and we are beyond thrilled to release such an incredible design affordably,” says Bryce Young, founder and CEO of Warm Audio.
“This type of product has been one of the most requested pieces of analogue gear from our customers and fans and we knew we had to nail the tone, character, and functionality. To accomplish this, we rely on the Warm Formula to bring together elite components and sonically accurate circuitry to achieve such legendary analogue tone.”
Some original CL 1B compressors are retailing for over $3,000, but Warm Audio’s WA-1B comes in at $1,199/£1159 (inc. VAT)/1349€ (Inc. VAT). Find out more via Warm Audio.
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Listening to “moving” music can help to reduce pain, study findsA new study suggests that listening to emotional music can affect how we feel pain. Researchers have found that listening to “moving” tracks that produce “chills” can link to feeling a lower pain intensity.
In fact, listening to our favourite tracks can approximately offer the same impact as an over-the-counter pain relief remedy such as ibuprofen.

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The study, which was reported on by The Guardian, was carried out at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and involved 63 participants. Researchers used a probe device to heat an area on their left arm to recreate a similar sensation to a hot cup of coffee being held against the skin.
Meanwhile, the participants either listened to two of their favourite tracks, relaxing music selected for them, scrambled music, or silence. As the sound or silence went on, the participants were asked to rate the intensity and unpleasantness of the pain they were feeling.
“We can approximate that favourite music reduced pain by about one point on a 10-point scale, which is at least as strong as an over-the-counter painkiller like Advil [ibuprofen] under the same conditions. Moving music may have an even stronger effect,” says Darius Valevicius, the first author of the research from McGill University.
Participants rated the pain as less intense by about four points on a 100-point scale, and less unpleasant by about nine points, when listening to their favourite tracks compared with silence or scrambled sound. However, moving music that produced more chills was associated with lower pain intensity and pain unpleasantness, with lower scores for the latter also associated with music rated more pleasant.
“The difference in effect on pain intensity implies two mechanisms – chills may have a physiological sensory-gating effect, blocking ascending pain signals, while pleasantness may affect the emotional value of pain without affecting the sensation, so more at a cognitive-emotional level involving prefrontal brain areas,” adds Valevicius, though he clarifies that more work is needed to test these ideas.
The post Listening to “moving” music can help to reduce pain, study finds appeared first on MusicTech.

Spotify says new model will shift $1B to ‘working artists’ in 5 yearsSpotify is making major changes that it says will shift $1 billion in royalty payments over the next five years to ‘legitimate’ artists and rightsholders. Spotify has confirmed to multiple. Continue reading
The post Spotify says new model will shift $1B to ‘working artists’ in 5 years appeared first on Hypebot.

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The post $500,000 Cash or Lunch with JAY-Z? The rapper/entrepreneur weighs in [VIDEO] appeared first on Hypebot.