Max Richter

The heart of Max Richter's current system is formed by his Apple Mac G5, with dual 2GHz processors and 4GB of RAM. "I dislike OS X, because it's much less stable than OS 9," says Richter, "but in order to run the VSL library, I have to run OS X. Logic is sequencer-wise the way to go. It's really very evolved. You can set it up any way you want, it's very quick and very easy to use, and it's pretty stable. Melodyne is by far the best pitch and time tool out there — massively better than, er, the one everybody uses, which sounds phasey and nasty. I don't really like messing with people's pitch and timing — I'd rather get good takes — so I don't use it for that, more for abstract type stuff like changing the tempo of audio from say 80bpm to 0.003bpm.

"I don't have many plug-ins in my new system, because I've only just migrated to it, but one that I use a lot is Altiverb, which is an amazing-sounding convolution reverb. Another great plug-in is the TC Master X5, which is fantastic for doing things for film and TV, because it makes everything sound huge, and TV and film people love things to sound huge. Also, [Camel Audio's] Supercamel Phat is a lovely compressor/EQ/band-pass filter plug-in that is cheap and sounds great on everything, especially bass and kick drums. I love the GRM Tools band-pass filter, and the Camel complements it nicely."

"I don't have many plug-ins in my new system, because I've only just migrated to it, but one that I use a lot is Altiverb, which is an amazing-sounding convolution reverb. Another great plug-in is the TC Master X5, which is fantastic for doing things for film and TV, because it makes everything sound huge, and TV and film people love things to sound huge. Also, [Camel Audio's] Supercamel Phat is a lovely compressor/EQ/band-pass filter plug-in that is cheap and sounds great on everything, especially bass and kick drums. I love the GRM Tools band-pass filter, and the Camel complements it nicely."

"I also use Altiverb a lot, which is a game changer."

"Reaktor and the Virus Pro Tools plug-in are my main synths, and particularly Reaktor 3 is my synth of choice. It's grittier than Reaktor 4. The washy sound you hear on 'Shadow Journal' is the shredded viola loop I spoke about. It's a viola player playing the chord sequence in arpeggios, and I've treated it, cutting off the low end below 400Hz and the top end above 1500Hz, using a GRM band-pass filter plug-in that's very dirty and very brutal. This left only the inner harmonics of the viola part, so it gets this nice whooshy, rather mysterious analogue feel."

The composer calls the VSL library "a huge leap forward sound-wise, even though I still can't get it to work properly." He also uses the orchestral libraries of Peter Siedlaczek and of Miroslav Vitous ("great all-rounder, but a little too clean sometimes"), as well as Kirk Hunter's string library ("great sound, but very scrappy programming"). While these libraries are good enough for string and orchestral mock-ups in demos and for most film and TV work, Richter prefers to use real instruments on his albums. Similarly, few of the samples that make it onto his albums are canned. All outdoor environmental recordings on The Blue Notebooks are the real thing, recorded by him using DACS in-ear binaural mics.

“I use a big mix of stuff. Kontakt is the mothership and that hosts a lot of different things. For orchestral music I’ll mostly use Spitfire Audio, because it’s mostly recorded at Air Studios. They use the same musicians in that room that I often record with, so it has the same sonic fingerprint.

“Then there’s all the Native Instruments stuff running within Kontakt, and I also use Reaktor. In terms of plugins, it’s mostly the UAD stuff like Soundtoys and some of the Sonnox products.”

"Before I had this system I also used a load of Emu E4 samplers, but my current system, with Reaktor 3 and 4, Logic Platinum, EXS24, Melodyne and Sibelius as my main software, is fantastic. When I open the session, all the samples are there. This saves so much time. And Sibelius is a fantastic scoring program. There's no contest. When writing for orchestra I scribble on paper first, and then input things into the computer."

"I don't have many plug-ins in my new system, because I've only just migrated to it, but one that I use a lot is Altiverb, which is an amazing-sounding convolution reverb. Another great plug-in is the TC Master X5, which is fantastic for doing things for film and TV, because it makes everything sound huge, and TV and film people love things to sound huge. Also, [Camel Audio's] Supercamel Phat is a lovely compressor/EQ/band-pass filter plug-in that is cheap and sounds great on everything, especially bass and kick drums. I love the GRM Tools band-pass filter, and the Camel complements it nicely."

The composer calls the VSL library "a huge leap forward sound-wise, even though I still can't get it to work properly." He also uses the orchestral libraries of Peter Siedlaczek and of Miroslav Vitous ("great all-rounder, but a little too clean sometimes"), as well as Kirk Hunter's string library ("great sound, but very scrappy programming"). While these libraries are good enough for string and orchestral mock-ups in demos and for most film and TV work, Richter prefers to use real instruments on his albums. Similarly, few of the samples that make it onto his albums are canned. All outdoor environmental recordings on The Blue Notebooks are the real thing, recorded by him using DACS in-ear binaural mics.

The composer calls the VSL library "a huge leap forward sound-wise, even though I still can't get it to work properly." He also uses the orchestral libraries of Peter Siedlaczek and of Miroslav Vitous ("great all-rounder, but a little too clean sometimes"), as well as Kirk Hunter's string library ("great sound, but very scrappy programming"). While these libraries are good enough for string and orchestral mock-ups in demos and for most film and TV work, Richter prefers to use real instruments on his albums. Similarly, few of the samples that make it onto his albums are canned. All outdoor environmental recordings on The Blue Notebooks are the real thing, recorded by him using DACS in-ear binaural mics.