Max Cooper

To design the sound of Yearning for the Infinite, Cooper used both a trusted synthesizer and a new machine. He says most of the album was made using a Dave Smith Instruments Prophet 6, an analogue synth that builds on the iconic Sequential Circuits Prophet, and the new Moog One polyphonic analogue synthesizer. The Prophet 6 has been Cooper’s go-to synth over the last couple of years because of its ease-of-use and his familiarity with it. As he recalls, it got a bit more use on the album than the Moog One.

https://www.ableton.com/en/blog/composing-infinity-max-cooper-his-new-album/

Below picture 7/8 he mentions that he use Synplant to produce some weird noises.

In the first picture of Max Cooper's London studio featured on MusicRadar, the studio monitors appear to be Genelec 8240A models.

“I use Lemur on the iPad as a control surface. With that, you can have all these bouncing balls, which control lots of different parameters and, again, you get some emergent behaviour coming from that because you have all these parameters, which, as the balls are bouncing around, there is a deterministic form, although it’s not easy to tell what that is. You’ve got lots of parameters following these complex paths so you get, to some degree, a generative result.”

“I use the Strymon Blue Sky for a lot of the reverbs, and I just love the plate reverb on it..."

Beyond synthesizers, Cooper is an admitted pedal fanatic. Lots of delays and distortion effects populate his board. For extreme coloring of sound on Yearning for the Infinite, Cooper used a Fairfield Circuitry Meet Maude analogue delay...

In second picture Prophet 08 Module can be seen.

In an article on Ableton's website titled "Composing Infinity: Max Cooper on his new album," Max Cooper discusses using Ableton Live as a key tool in creating his music.

"But, I also like the Strymon El Capistan – the emulation tape echo is pretty good as well."

“One of my favorite noise pedals is the Industrialectric RM1N [Reverb Fuzz], and it gives some really extreme feeding back chaos,” says Cooper.

We can see an Akai Apc 40 MK1 in the video.

To destroy his sounds, Cooper often turns to a WMD Geiger Counter, a pedal with no wet-dry signal with a wavetable modulator that can do everything from a bit of gain to glitchy and lo-fi degradation. Indeed, Cooper has a thing for noise.

We can see an Apogee Duet on the table in first picture.

"Cooper also used another old standby, a Moog Minitaur, obtained years ago while playing shows in in San Francisco."

He mentions that he uses some iPad applications(like Lemur) below the last picture.

Below picture 7/8 he mentions that he use ValhallaRoom Reverb Plugin.

Below picture 7/8 he mentions that he use Massive from Native Instruments.

Below picture 7/8 he mentions that he use Reaktor from Native Instruments.

As seen on the picture, taken in his studio.

"...Arturia’s Moog Modular V is quite a nice analogue emulation and I’ve done some tracks with that. Generally, I tend to be a bit behind with these sorts of things as I find something that works for me and I stick with it. There are so many new soft synths and plugins out there that it’s really hard to keep up with it, and most of the time I’m probably not the best person to ask about the newest, best thing.”

“I use the Strymon Blue Sky for a lot of the reverbs, and I just love the plate reverb on it, and then of course the Roland Space Echo..."

"I’ve also been using the Metasonix F1, which has a couple of valves on it that get nice and red and make distortion.”

For extreme coloring of sound on Yearning for the Infinite, Cooper used a Fairfield Circuitry Meet Maude analogue delay, and a Moogerfooger MIDI MuRF (Multiple Resonance Filter Array).

In 6th picture we can see Sennheiser HD 650 there.

In 6th picture we can see Saffire 6 there.

“I use a lot of the Native Instruments stuff like Absynth, Reaktor, Massive and Kontakt. I quite like Synplant - it’s a really fun little thing and I use it to make weird noises."

“I use a lot of the Native Instruments stuff like Absynth, Reaktor, Massive and Kontakt. I quite like Synplant - it’s a really fun little thing and I use it to make weird noises."

“Recently I’ve been using the Animoog, which is great."

In second picture we can see AIAIAI TMA-1 headphones.

At 1:15 in this video interview, Max Cooper states:

The Trigon-6, again another Dave Smith (R.I.P.), has also become one of my favorites. It's much one of the more newer synths they've come up with and it's a similar level of complexity. Again, it's quite a simple synth but one that you can jump in and build and you don't get lost in the complexity.

To be honest, I hate patch diving and I hate, you know, menu diving, and having shortcuts. The synths that are my favorite ones, like those, there is no digital display. It's just, you know, you can do presets and it's just like an old-school LCD watch sort of display, but there's no menu diving, you don't need shortcuts, everything's there. You can just jam and play and you got this real tactile sort of interaction with it. And that's what I look for, to be honest, with hardware synths.