The Supernova II sound engine, now in a plugin
That late-90s trance and house pad sound you've been chasing — the one with the silky filter and the wide unison — just landed in your DAW as a free beta.
◢ free & gear
Supernova II in a plugin, from the original ROM
You load the original Novation ROM, pick from 56 FX algorithms, and stack seven at once. The 42-band vocoder is there too. It's a beta, but people are already making tracks.
Roland's AI melody generator: variations, not copies(free)
It generates new melodies from your reference, using Sony CSL's music information retrieval research — variations, not copies. The catch: no total recall. Commit to audio as soon as you find something you like.
◢ the word
Headphone calibration and three virtual monitoring rooms
If your headphones are in the 800+ model database, you get three virtual rooms: a treated studio, a living room, and consumer in-ears. A quick way to check your low end translation without unplugging.
Four pros, four DAWs: the Nektar Impact LX mk3's real velocity and clip trim
The pads aren't just on/off triggers — they're genuinely velocity-sensitive at this price. Clip trim deletes the empty bar after a late recording stop, and plugin mappings are saved via MaxForLive so you only map once.
Bicep — Glue
the soaring synth pad that blooms after the breakdown · if you're loading up the Supernova II emulator, this is the reference
| ▼ #67 | Cas — Southside (Extended) ▼ 47 · 1d |
| ▼ #100 | Andrea Maggino — Can You Feel It ▼ 46 · 1d · ▶ hear |
| ▲ #16 | Souler (ES) — L.O.L.A (Original Mix) ▲ 67 · 7d · ▶ hear |
| ▲ #30 | DAVI — Self R3B00T ▲ 69 · 7d · ▶ hear |
| ▲ #38 | AMMIL — Break Your Back (Extended Mix) back on · ▶ hear |
- sample: Loleatta Holloway – Love Sensation (vocal chop) — The 'all right' stab is a pitched-up slice from Loleatta Holloway's 'Love Sensation'. Felix and Simon chopped it in an Akai S1000, fired it on offbeat 8th notes, then pitched it down two semitones for the tense pre-drop call. Why it matters: One disco sample, re-pitched three ways, became the mnemonic that opens every old-school UKG set.
- synth: Korg M1 house piano stab — The M1 'Organ 2' patch played as a dusty Am7 stab (A-C-E-G). Velocity kept low so the transient crumbles. Run through a low-pass filter around 2.5 kHz and a gated plate reverb with a 200 ms tail. Why it matters: It proved a ROMpler preset could carry an entire track when you treated it like a sample.
- label: Atlantic Jaxx — Self-released as JAXX 001 on their own Atlantic Jaxx imprint. No PR, no big advance – just dubplates and a wall of bass bins. Why it matters: Built the foundation for a label that would later drop 'Red Alert' and 'Romeo' without ever leaving the warehouse.
🔮 Producer Horoscope (for fun) — Your DAW will crash, but the recovered version will be better than the original.
Go make something that slaps.
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covered in this issue: lewitt space replicator free