All the petrol’s gone, your electricity bill looks like an accounting error, and winter is very much coming. Cheer yourself up with the past months stand-out new music tech releases…

Studio One 5, FL Studio 20 And Live 11 Go Native

Before September, there were only three Apple Silicon-native DAWs available to producers toting Cupertino’s swanky M1 Macs: Logic Pro X, Bitwig Studio 4 and a beta version of Reaper. With the Rosetta 2 translation layer proving so effective at running Intel-native DAWs and plugins on Apple Silicon, developers clearly haven’t felt pressured to prioritise conversion to the new ARM-based architecture for optimal performance. However, the last few weeks have seen things kick up a gear in this department, most notably with the release of PreSonus Studio One 5.4, but also Image-Line FL Studio 20.8.4 and the public beta of Ableton Live 11.1, all of which introduce native Apple Silicon compatibility to their technical arsenals.

For us, Studio One 5.4 is the biggest story, and we’ve taken a deep dive into it here on the website, as well as in a recent Production Expert podcast. With FL Studio and Live being two of the most popular DAWs for electronic music production, though, those updates seem likely to trigger more than a few hardware upgrades, too, particularly when Apple unveil the second tier of Apple Silicon MacBook Pros in what is widely predicted to happen in October.

There are still major issues with quite a few non-native VST plugins in all Apple Silicon native DAWs that might mean you still need to run yours in Rosetta 2 mode for a while yet, but dang, the improvements in performance across the board when everything is native are absolutely stunning. No doubt about it, the future of music production on Mac has never looked brighter!

Synchro Arts Sort Out Your Singer

Earlier this year, Synchro Arts set a new bar for vocal ‘fixing’ with the amazing VocAlign Ultra, bringing the time alignment of VocAlign Pro together with the pitch alignment of Revoice Pro in a comprehensive plugin for the straightening out and syncing of multitrack vocals and dialogue tracks. September saw some of that technology trickle down into version 5 of the entry-level VocAlign Project, including the time-saving SmartAlign, which ensures that doubles and harmonies starting at different points on the timeline to the main vocal are handled correctly; the Max Difference control for one-knob tightening/loosening; and ARA support for deep integration with Logic Pro, Studio One, Cubase and Reaper. 

With a greatly improved feature set beyond those three headlines, and a completely redesigned interface, VocAlign Project 5 represents a huge upgrade over VocAlign Project 3 (there was no v4, thanks to Synchro Arts’ ‘alternating’ version numbering), providing music and media producers with a phenomenally powerful but supremely intuitive system for time-aligning voice and instrumental tracks of all kinds. Find out more in Eli Krantzberg’s video overview.

Accusonus Take Our Breath Away

Having perfectly positioned your vocals using VocAlign Project 5, the next step might well be to clean them up – and on that front, the latest addition to Accusonus’ ERA Bundle of audio restoration and repair plugins should come in very useful indeed. As the name makes clear, De-Breath is dedicated to the removal of breath noises, working alongside its siblings, DeEsser, Plosive Remover, Mouth De-Clicker, Voice Leveller et al, to maximise the quality, cleanliness and clarity of your sung and spoken vocal recordings.

Like all ERA plugins, De-Breath keeps things effortless with its one-knob (plus a couple of sliders) interface – simply turn it clockwise to increasingly dial out those unwanted gusts, from mild attenuation to total elimination. It’s available now in both the Standard and Pro versions of Accusonus’ ERA 6 Bundle, which also adds native Apple Silicon support and makes improvements to the Audio CleanUp Assistant.

Arturia Bring Back The ’80s

They can stuff their catalogue with as many groovy effects plugins, hardware synths and audio interfaces as they like (those new MiniFuses sure look nifty, mind), but for us, Arturia’s main draw will always be the ever-expanding array of classic synthesisers and keyboard instrument emulations with which they first made their mark on the music technology landscape. (No, we’re not counting the weird Storm DAW.)

September brought with it the introduction of a new synth to this stellar line-up, and it’s one that anyone even remotely influenced by retro dance music is going to want to get their hands on. SQ 80 V is a virtual recreation of the legendary Ensoniq SQ-80 – heard on many a late ’80s banger, perhaps most famously Adamski’s ‘Killer’ – accurately modelling the hardware’s three digital oscillators and analogue filter, and bolstering its original 75 waveforms with those of the ESQ-1, the ‘Transwaves’ of later Ensoniq synths, and a ton of new ones. As ever, the Grenoble gang have also thrown in plenty of modern extras, including eight-voice unison, multi-stage envelopes, an arpeggiator and more, and made the skeuomorphic ‘hardware view’ expandable out to an even more accessible multi-panel interface.

Fabulously gritty and evocative, and a fine partner to the likes of Emulator II V, CZ V, Jun-6 V and DX7 V, SQ 80 V is out now and surely destined to be rolled into the next version of Arturia’s all-inclusive V Collection.

Tone2 Supercharge Their Monster Synth

Standing apart from its overtly – and, it must be said, spectacularly – ‘digital’ sounding stablemate synthesisers RayBlaster, Nemesis, Icarus, Electra and Gladiator, Tone2’s much under-appreciated Saurus two-oscillator/sub virtual analogue hasn’t seen an update in over six years. The arrival of v3.0 (announced in July) at the start of the month, then, had us more than a little intrigued.

As it turns out, Saurus 3 could hardly be described as a massive step up from Saurus 2, but the ability to randomly generate patches is a lot of fun, the four GUI scaling options make it comfortable on displays of all dimensions, the new soft clipper is handy, and the overhauled chorus effect sounds ace. There’s also a bit more welly and oomph to the sound in general, taking the wall-smashing punch for which the synth has always been known to new heights. Oh, and 192 new presets have been worked into the library, taking the total to 1022.

Saurus 3 is a free update for existing owners, and well worth a look by anyone else on the hunt for quick and easy high-gloss, powerful analogue tones. Indeed, this new version has put it back towards the top of our plugins list – somewhere along the line, we’d lost track of Saurus’ superlative sonics, impressive adaptability and refreshing simplicity, distracted by flashier, more architecturally ambitious alternatives. Welcome back!

What primo gear caught your eye (and ear) in September? Let us know in the comments.