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March 2024
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256 articles
- March 31
- March 30
- March 29
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- “Packed full of high-end features to deliver a hugely versatile, head-turning instrument”: Gordon Smith unveils the Grandé, its new flagship small-bodied electric
- The best new microphones, audio interfaces and mixers coming out in 2024
- Chase Bliss and Bilt Guitars team up for a one-off custom electric with an onboard Habit delay/echo circuit, integrated amp and speaker – and they are giving it away!
- “They’re gonna see someone who’s hell-bent on being the most respectful guitar player to the legacy of Eddie”: Joe Satriani issues update on his mission impossible – nailing Eddie Van Halen’s guitar parts
- “Jump on the fuzz bus!”: Jam Pedals launches the Fuzz Phrase Si – a dynamic, handmade tribute to a two-knob classic packing BC107 silicon transistors
- Listen up: here are the best new studio monitors and headphones making waves in 2024
- "When we were recording it I thought it would get bigger with strings and drums. It was really tempting, trust me. But I think that was probably the best decision I ever made": Nuno Bettencourt on the story of Extreme's More Than Words
- The biggest names on the biggest brands: the best new signature guitars of 2024
- From optional to essential: the best guitar accessories of 2024
- “I have my sound; 98% of the tone comes from me. I can plug into most amps and make it sound like me”: Rich Robinson on the guitars, tunes and focus behind the Black Crowes’ comeback
- March 28
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- Gibson's CEO has just revealed some guitar-shaped easter eggs: Three new Epiphone models with 'open book' headstocks are on their way
- Kelly Moran: "An important aspect of my work is trying to preserve my own humanity, even if I'm using technology to help me do it"
- Bored of your 'board? Stomp this way for the must-have new guitar effects pedals of 2024
- "Collage is a thousand audio effects in one": Randomize your effects and get unexpected results with this quirky, colourful multi-effects plugin from Kalide
- “I had enough money for one last demo and sent it off to 24 companies, then figured I’d sit back and wait for the rejection letters": How Tom Scholz's years of dogged determination and intricate guitar tracking paid off for Boston and More Than A Feeling
- The most exciting new samplers, grooveboxes and drum machines for 2024
- 8 of the best new immersive audio plugins for 2024
- "It went a bit too poppy, a bit too happy… I used to really cringe when I heard it": Def Leppard's Hysteria is a perfect $4.5 million rock album – but guitarist Phil Collen had issues with one of its songs in particular
- "I started hallucinating whispers that weren't part of the composition - it was intense": Maria W Horn on spectral synthesis, recording in a former prison and her love of SuperCollider
- March 27
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- The 9 best creative and mix effect plugins coming your way in 2024
- The essential new electric guitars you need to play in 2024
- "Nobody's gonna tell me that a hunk of wood with strings stretched across it is sacred": Pete Townshend reveals all about why he became a guitar smasher
- “We spend a month on the sound and five minutes on the chord changes”: Remarkable classic interview with Kraftwerk reveals how the band created their iconic electronic tunes, and what really went on in their mythical Kling Klang studio
- Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios opens its doors for a residential masterclass featuring Ken Scott, Adrian Utley and Swindle
- The best new pianos and home and classic keyboards to look forward to in 2024
- "AC/DC made 50 albums, but all their albums were the same. It wasn’t the way the Who worked. We were an ideas band": Pete Townshend admits he doesn't enjoy playing live with the band much anymore but still wants to release new music
- "There’s still so much work to be done": A third of women working as musicians say they’ve been sexually harassed, and more than half have experienced gender discrimination
- "I remember him coughing and spitting up blood, probably from smoking too many cigarettes. But in my mind, Jim was indestructible": Robby Krieger looks back on the making of The Doors' LA Woman
- March 26
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- “We were just kids playing together and then he built the song around that”: Joe Satriani says Steve Vai wrote a track for the Satch/Vai album featuring restored audio of the pair jamming as teenagers
- The best new acoustic guitars coming our way in 2024
- “I want people to get creative with this guitar… I just hope it inspires others to write more songs”: Orangewood Guitars teams up with Alejandro Aranda for the Pomona Live signature acoustic
- “A monumental leap forward in sampling technology”: MPC Stems, Akai Pro’s new audio extraction technology, is now available in the MPC Desktop Software, but you'll have to wait for standalone operation
- As easy as MPC: Blipblox myTRACKS is a simplified groovebox for kids (and big kids, too)
- “It’s an exciting guitar and it has stood the test of time”: Gibson restores the Everly Brothers J-180 signature acoustic to its core Custom Shop lineup
- "I know that is a 25-year-old's spirit just burning – like a Chevy engine": The story of The Gaslight Anthem's classic song, The '59 Sound
- “The most advanced professional monitors in their class”: KRK’s new Rokit Generation Five studio monitors have dedicated modes for mixing, creating and midrange focus
- Google's AI-powered Instrument Playground lets you play and sample over 100 instruments from across the globe: "Have you ever played the Dizi from China?"
- “It’s the perfect pick for those desiring innovative features in a light, ergonomic guitar”: Enya Music’s Nova Go Sonic is a single-cut smart guitar with a carbon fibre build and 10W built-in speaker
- How to choose the right piano sound for your track
- "Hands down the best Amiga emulation I've ever used!": This old-school sampling plugin gets you the retro sound of the Commodore Amiga for only £10
- The 15 most exciting new hardware synths of 2024: analogue and digital instruments from Korg, Behringer and more
- “No previous experience required”: Roland puts its ZEN-Core synth engine into the beginner-friendly GO:KEYS 3 and 5 “music creation” keyboards
- March 25
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- "I like your version better than ours!": Acoustic fingerstyle guitarist covers Toto's Rosanna and wows Steve Lukather
- "Platforms don't need to be complex, or for someone to be hoovering up that much of the income": Wavetick on their new artist and producer-focused sample marketplace
- 8 things I love about Logic Pro (and 2 that I really don't): "There are very few things I can't do with Logic's stock plugins"
- “I never looked at it as a single 'til everybody started saying it was great”: The Wham! song that George Michael called his favourite and he made on his own with a Roland Juno-60 and a LinnDrum
- These crazy newly unearthed Gibson archive guitar designs from the '50s prove just how bold it was in the golden era
- Aodyo's Loom is a "multi-dimensional" MPE MIDI controller with four different performance modes, and you can even design your own
- The best of the past, the best of the future: the hottest guitar amps and amp pedals coming out in 2024
- The 8 most innovative new music making gadgets of 2024
- A magnificent 7 softsynths to look out for in 2024
- March 22
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- Clapton, Iommi, Bonamassa, Tedeschi, Trucks, Townshend, Slash... New video for Mark Knopfler’s Guitar Heroes version of Going Home reveals who played what and when on the all-star charity single
- “It’s not about suicide, although I can see how people can think that, but that’s not where it’s at": Donald ‘Buck Dharma’ Roeser on why Blue Öyster Cult’s (Don't Fear) The Reaper is unlike anything else he's made
- Josh Freese confirms return to A Perfect Circle after 13 years: “APC has always been a very special band for me…”
- “Probably one of the greatest Strats I’ve ever played… and I can see through it”: Watch Marcus King play a cardboard Stratocaster as he previews new track from Rick Rubin-produced album
- Alesis Strata Prime: we’ve got our hands on Alesis’ brand-new, BFD-loaded electronic drum set - here are our first impressions
- “Good power is absolutely key… it is going to last you forever and you are just not going to have any problems with your pedals:” Brian Wampler’s 5 pedalboard essentials
- Set up your electric guitar: how to adjust action, truss rod, string height and radius, pickup height and clean your fingerboard and frets
- Get the holy grail of guitar tone for less in the huge Andertons Spring sale with a massive £600 off a Gibson Les Paul - plus 4 other deals we rate
- If you're restringing your acoustic guitar for the first time there's one thing you might need to avoid doing
- "Would Fleetwood Mac have been able to make Rumours if they had to spend all their time trying to make content?": Have streaming and social media killed the album?
- “I'm kind of a formalist as far as songwriting and guitar parts go, and I'm a way better rhythm guitar player than I am a soloist:” 5 of Peter Buck's greatest R.E.M. guitar moments
- “I’ve never shared my sound design secrets,” says Hardwell, but with his free Apple Producer Pack for GarageBand and Logic Pro for iPad, he’s breaking that habit
- “You can almost hear The Beatles influence and the Led Zeppelin influence at the front of the song”: How Dave Mustaine channelled unlikely influences for Megdeth's Hangar 18
- “Redefine what it means to take music on the road”: Harley Benton rolls out the TravelMate and TravelMate-E, affordable weather and climate resistant guitars for players on the go
- Minimal marvel or beige and boring? Vongon's Replay is likely to divide synth-heads with its unique aesthetic
- 6 synth bass mixing tips: "If you are cutting your track to vinyl or likely to have your tracks played out, then ideally you should keep your bass in mono"
- March 21
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- SampleRadar: 493 free hardware drum machine samples
- "When I heard you play, I said, 'that sounds something like Guitar Slim, BB King and myself'. I've got to talk to you, to get to know you" – when Buddy Guy met Christone 'Kingfish' Ingram
- 5 quick EQ and dynamics tips: "On heavily dynamic signals like guitars and vocals, which go from loud, powerful spikes to low, detailed moments, try serial compression"
- “We don’t think we’ve ever made anything that sounds remotely like this track before”: Justice enlist Miguel and an E-MU synth guitar sound on new single, Saturnine, and confirm the full tracklisting and list of collaborators for new album, Hyperdrama
- "I’m telling you, I have a hit record here. I’m going to tour the world for the longest time and if you don’t give this to me, I have another company that will!”: Triple-neck guitars, modern-day cowboys and the story of Bon Jovi's Wanted Dead Or Alive
- James Blake launches Vault, a direct artist-to-fan streaming platform for unreleased music: "The concept of subscribing to an artist directly can change the game"
- March 20
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- Thomann has slashed prices on guitar gear for its huge 70th birthday sale - here are the 3 deals we’re considering
- "I'm just a soul trapped in this circuitry": Listen to a scarily realistic AI-generated blues song produced by "ChatGPT for music"
- James Blunt says that AI left him feeling “totally humiliated” when he read the “absolutely mundane” lyrics that it came up with after he asked it to impersonate himself
- Floyd Rose: "Many people ask if this would have happened without Eddie Van Halen and I think it would have, but certainly not as quickly"
- “Every time I opened a music paper it said, ‘Johnny Marr – jingle jangle’. I'd just had enough”: How The Smiths defied expectations on their final album, Strangeways, Here We Come
- The three epic keyboard deals you should consider in Thomann's colossal 70th anniversary sale
- “We believe music is central to humanity”: Roland and Universal Music Group announce their 7 Principles for Music Creation with AI as they confirm new strategic partnership
- Minimal Audio flexes its modulation muscles with Flex Chorus, a 24-voice, multi-band chorus plugin with two unique modes
- 6 of the most ridiculously large synth workstation plugins that can handle every part of a track: "This powerhouse of a synth has all of the sounds you need"
- Issue 333 of Computer Music is on sale now
- March 19
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- Phil Manzanera on being sampled by Kanye West and Jay-Z: "Who knew that I would earn more money from a short guitar riff that I wrote one evening on a sofa in front of the telly in 1978 than I ever earned in the entire 50 years as a member of Roxy Music?"
- "It has a riff that gives Matt Cameron the opportunity to be as great as we know him to be": Stone Gossard reveals the new Pearl Jam song that has "probably one of the greatest drum fills of all time"
- “It smoothens out the transients, enhances harmonic richness and adds a hint of ‘growl’”: J Rockett Audio Designs launches the Airchild Six Sixty Compressor – a Fairchild in a stompbox?
- “They are simple to use and have controls that will be familiar to everybody”: Line 6 unveils the Catalyst CX series – affordable digital combos with 12 Helix amp voicings
- 5 essential EQ & filter tricks for DJs
- GForce Software delivers another dose of seductive ‘70s sounds with Virtual String Machine 4, “the perfect solution for creating the sound bed of your next track”
- Alesis announces Strata Prime: its new flagship electronic drum set with a BFD 3 sound engine built into the module, and here's El Estepario Siberiano putting it through its paces
- Epiphone gives its super-versatile Modern Figured SG and Les Paul a Mojave and Purple Burst makeover
- 6 vintage polysynth emulations we recommend for authentic analogue tones: "The UI looks so real that you can almost smell the wood varnish"
- 6 of the best software polysynths of 2024 so far: "Kult stands out from most of our choices by trying very deliberately to do something different"
- “A great entry point into ambient exploration”: Walrus Audio unveils the Fundamental Ambient, a $129 reverb pedal for dreamy, affordable soundscaping
- Watch MPE unlock new dimensions of performance in this demo video for Phase Plant and Expressive E's new preset banks
- “Make your music sound more like you”: Forever 89, the new company from Teenage Engineering and Ableton alumni, has released Visco, a flexible sample-modelling drum machine
- "The only thing I could hear coming through the window was the bass": Eddie Vedder recalls the Ten single he co-wrote while being locked out of a Pearl Jam rehearsal
- Native Instruments’ Pro-53 synth returns for free as Pro-54, but only in your web browser
- Gibson’s Theodore enters regular rotation as the Standard, updated with a pair of 57 Classic humbuckers for “effortless sustain and a rich diversity of tones”
- Jeff Mills: “I’m waiting for instrument makers to make that simple piece of gear that does that one thing brilliantly… just like a 303. There’s no sound like it”
- Waves’ jam-packed Big March Sale has dropped key titles back down to Black Friday prices
- “A budget-friendly instrument with core RD features”: Roland launches the RD-08 stage piano, the most affordable RD model yet
- March 18
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- "We’re thinking, why would we do someone else’s song? Why can’t you take one of our songs?": How Simple Minds' Don't You (Forget About Me) eventually became the perfect meeting of worlds – but two other stars turned it down first
- “How do you play that right hand?”: Watch Toto’s David Paich and Steve Porcaro playing Rosanna and Africa on the Steinway grand piano that they were originally recorded on more than 40 years ago
- Punk Labs' OneTrick Keys is a lo-fi keys plugin based on a "vintage" physical modelling algorithm developed in the '90s
- "I have tremendous problems with some of my own tunes, unless they’re particularly simple": Remembering the musical mind, self-deprecation and wisdom of Allan Holdsworth
- Moog Music is leaving its iconic Asheville headquarters, as company president Joe Richardson says that the workforce had to be “rationalised” following the InMusic takeover
- “When somebody buys my signature Duesenberg in a store, they're buying exactly what I play on stage”: Dave Baksh of Sum 41 interview
- "What a talent. What a character": Tributes to Steve Harley, Cockney Rebel star, who has died aged 73
- March 16
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- The beginner keyboard checklist: all the essentials you need to start playing today
- "He wrote it for me, but the record company had the power to prevent any other record coming out and they said, ‘This is a number one smash: Beck doesn’t get this’”: The story of the Stevie Wonder and Jeff Beck connection
- “This one thing has replaced 95% of my rig”: ex-Guns N’ Roses guitar virtuoso Ron 'Bumblefoot' Thal picks his 3 essential pieces of gear
- Let’s make a track in the style of Fred Again.. and DJ Seinfeld
- The producer's guide to the Pultec EQP-1: "Its beauty lies in the the extraordinary character you get when you disobey what you’re told to do by the manual!"
- March 15
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- “Trying to get all of us in here was a game of Tetris”: Justin Timberlake and his 14-strong band, The Tennessee Kids, put on a sparkling Tiny Desk Concert
- “The lesser amount that the guitar shuts the string down the better the guitar is”: Paul Reed Smith explains what makes a good guitar – does yours pass his test?
- “Brian May did an entire section, about a dozen guitar harmonies:” Mark Knopfler’s all-star Guitar Heroes charity single, Going Home, is released – but who played what?
- What does the music from Star Wars sound like when played on an MPE keyboard controller? Something like this
- "When we saw the bill afterward, that's why we're in this room now": Joe Elliot offers a tour of the home studio he built to save Def Leppard money after the cost of making Hysteria
- “It’s noisy, it’s wild, and I’m by no means Jimi Hendrix, but we’ll get the gist”: Can Joe Bonamassa make a $1000 Band Of Gypsys rig sound like its vintage equivalent?
- The Great Synth Showdown: Oberheim OB-X8 hardware synth vs GForce Software OB-X
- How to fix three of your guitar's most easily overlooked issues
- The harmonic genius of Frey, Felder, Walsh, Henley, Meisner and Leadon: 5 songs you need to hear by The Eagles (that aren't Hotel California)
- Jon Batiste named Pianist Of The Year at the Pianote Awards, as Jordan Rudess, Yuja Wang and Cory Henry are also honoured
- The Great Synth Showdown: Roland JV-1080 hardware vs Roland Cloud JV-1080 software
- March 14
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- “When he left Death Row, Dr Dre was going to do an all-black heavy metal band, and I auditioned for it”: Trevor Lawrence Jr and Lauten Audio on getting hip-hop drum sounds from an acoustic kit
- "It captures the very essence of Page’s original instrument": Gibson drops $50,000 Jimmy Page EDS-1275 Doubleneck signature model, and each guitar has been played and signed by the Led Zeppelin legend himself
- DrumCraft launches seven-strong Vanguard Snare Series, “Developed for drummers who work both live and in the studio.”
- The Great Synth Showdown: Sequential Prophet-5 Rev 4 hardware vs Arturia Prophet-5 V
- Are software synths now better than hardware - and does it matter?
- Catch! When this metal guitarist confused a photographer for his guitar tech and threw his guitar at him, it didn’t end well
- Is the Zoom MS-70CDR+ MultiStomp 2024's compact multi-effects pedal bargain? 149 reverb, delay and modulation effects suggest it might be
- “I have dreamt of this moment all my life”: Dua Lipa, Coldplay and SZA confirmed as Glastonbury headliners, with Shania Twain set to play the 'legends' slot
- AlphaTheta pivots from Pioneer DJ with high-end rotary mixer, the first under its new brand name
- "What we need is a song that is just really simple that everyone can sing": Paul Rodgers on the mission statement and magical musical combination that fuelled Free classic All Right Now
- Boss aims to redefine the headphone guitar amp with the $120 Katana:Go – but has it got enough features to take on its existing competition?
- March 13
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- The guitar magic of Peter Green, Jeremy Spencer and Danny Kirwan: 5 underrated songs you need to hear by early Fleetwood Mac
- "It’s very, like, trippy Rubber Soul vibes": Ariana Grande reveals how a classic Beatles album inspired her new record, Eternal Sunshine
- Leapwing Audio: “The first person I asked for an opinion on our products was Bob Katz. I was convinced he’d find something wrong with it - he came back and said that it was the best-sounding thing he’d heard”
- Fender's Strat and Precision Bass enter the world of Fortnite for its Guitar Hero-esque Festival
- “It’s not just my job, it’s literally what I do for a hobby, too!”: Brian Wampler talks pedal culture, cork-sniffing, and the never-ending search for better tone
- Softube’s VCA Compressor plugin has serious dbx appeal and is free for a limited time
- “We did turn a corner. But it must have been the biggest corner in the universe, ‘cos it took ages to turn it”: Inside the protracted creation and glorious guitar work of The Stone Roses' Second Coming
- Loukeman: "I put a pitch-shifter on the master bus. I love how it glues everything together and f*cks everything up"
- Neil Young returns to Spotify as other streaming services begin hosting "disinformation podcasts": "I cannot leave all those services because my music would have no outlet to music lovers at all"
- Can James Blake really fix the music industry? Artist teases "solution" to issues addressed in viral tweets: "The brainwashing worked and now people think that music is free"
- March 12
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- “This is probably damn near better than having my guitar, having him playing my guitar”: Fender unveils the Raphael Saadiq Telecaster – watch the Grammy-winning R&B maestro demo it with Eric Gales
- “These three new pedals dip into Keeley’s decades of experience in modding classic circuits”: Keeley Electronics unveils the 4-in-1 Series, offering legendary drive and distortion in hybrid configurations
- "This isn't just a piece of equipment; it connects me with my dad”: Universal Audio’s Bill Putnam Jr confirms that he’s bought the classic Caesars Palace console that was built by his father and used to mix Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland
- iZotope takes Trash out of the trash and relaunches fan-favourite distortion plugin with free Lite version
- “The Nomads can get super heavy without any unwanted spikiness, but also respect the original early ‘50s tele tones”: Rabea Massaad and Bare Knuckle team-up again for signature Telecaster pickup set
- 5 ways to change tempo in your DJ set: "Big tempo changes can lift a dance floor, surprise your audience, or help you perform a reset"
- “This definitely needs Moog bass”: Watch Snarky Puppy keyboard player Justin Stanton jamming over just the vocals and drums of Dua Lipa’s Don’t Start Now, a song he’s never heard before
- “Striking limited edition reissues of the very first ES-335”: Gibson celebrates its 130th Anniversary with the Custom Shop, Murphy Lab-aged 1958 ES-335 Reissue
- "If you put those time limits on things, you're never gonna get to where you want to be": Joe Bonamassa has some solid advice for any musician working to be successful but doubting themselves
- Roland’s new premium digital pianos look like uprights, but are designed to sound and play like acoustic grands
- “He didn’t just work here; he lived and embodied the spirit of the brand”: Mike Lewis, legendary head of the Fender Custom Shop, has died
- “It was the tune that changed everything” for Noel Gallagher and Oasis, with his greatest guitar solo – but it turns out that Live Forever got a serious guitar edit in the control room
- World Party and The Waterboys star Karl Wallinger has died, aged 66
- March 11
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- “It was just another riff, like Into The Fire. We didn’t make a big deal out of it and it wasn’t being considered as a track for the album": Ian Gillan on the unlikely success story of writing and recording Deep Purple's Smoke On The Water
- 10 mistakes every DJ makes: "DJing is a job and you’re likely better at it when you’re not incapacitated"
- What would the Nintendo Switch look like if it was designed by Teenage Engineering? Possibly something like this
- Beyoncé, A Tribe Called Quest, Madonna and Kanye West engineer/producer Gloria Kaba offers a tour of the legendary Power Station Studio in New York – and her own insight on what it takes to succeed in the job
- How to collaborate effectively as an electronic musician: "Remote collaboration can be a great way to break through creative roadblocks and broaden your musical horizons, but it’s also a way to open up new revenue streams"
- “My God, it’s hard to get in tune when they’re booing": when Bob Dylan faced down his detractors with a Strat and made rock n' roll history
- Not just Ken: Slash, Wolfgang Van Halen and Mark Ronson join Ryan Gosling as he delivers a showstopping performance of his Barbie anthem at the Oscars
- The ultimate guide to modern dynamics processors: "Where does this technology go from here? Have we pushed it to its potential, or is there more to come?"
- Does Slipknot’s broken drumstick photo confirm that Eloy Casagrande is their new drummer?
- "It’s not one of my favourite things. It’s stupid because I produced it, but the keyboards just hit me as wrong": Van Halen's Jump is 40 years old. Here's how the most famous keyboard riff of all time was created (and how you can do it, too)
- Avid plays catch-up with Ableton as new Pro Tools update brings "music creators powerful new ways to work with MIDI"
- What makes an Oscar-winning song? We break down the music theory behind Billie Eilish's What Was I Made For?
- Sampling meets AI: How artificial intelligence can help you manage and organize your sample library
- March 10
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- “I know Pagey made me mix the outro section half a dozen times: ‘Not enough of me, dear boy! Not enough of me, make me louder!’” – Andy Johns on the challenges of engineering Led Zeppelin's Rock And Roll
- "I have no technical ability, and I know nothing about music": Yet here are 5 Rick Rubin-produced songs you need to hear
- March 9
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- “They just risk everything – every song starts from a point of absolutely no safety net”: Queens of the Stone Age engineer and producer Robert Adam Stevenson on working with Josh Homme, Jeff Beck, Johnny Depp and recording a very '80s Taylor Hawkins
- Behringer says that it plans to “turn the synth world upside down” with a desktop version of its Oberheim-inspired UB-Xa
- Juno Reactor's Ben Watkins on the 1997 Goa trance classic Bible of Dreams: "What really gave the album its sound was the Raindirk Symphony desk. It was like another member of the band… suddenly we had a three-dimensional sound in the studio"
- March 8
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- Watch Slash cover Howlin’ Wolf’s Killing Floor on first single from new blues album, with AC/DC’s Brian Johnson on vocals, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler on harmonica
- “I just got some prototypes in different colours… It sounds really good”: Foo Fighters guitarist Chris Shiflett has a new signature Telecaster incoming – here’s everything we know about it so far
- “I didn’t think I was really producing anything because I was writing and singing over drum ‘n’ bass beats”: PinkPantheress says she never thought she'd be recognised as a producer and that “even now, people don’t want to take my music seriously”
- “There were so many demos that sounded like major songs, but that one was near the top of the list": The making of the 1995 Radiohead classic that became one of their all-time greatest anthems
- Julia Holter on the Yamaha CS-60, Kate Bush and the parallels between composition and production: "So much of production is thinking about organising sounds in a similar way to on a sheet of music"
- “When people went in to look at the gear they went in on jet skis… So many people lost their guitars”: Peter Frampton says he lost 44 guitars in the 2010 Nashville flood
- Jack Antonoff jams with Zane Lowe on his analogue synths, and says he doesn’t know where the “spark” he has with Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey comes from
- “This pedal isn’t just a piece of gear; it’s a journey into the soul of timeless studio tones”: Wampler unveils the Ego 76, a feature-packed compressor inspired by the legendary 1176 Peak Limiter
- 4 guitar upgrades we're considering in Fender's mod-friendly official parts and pickups sale - save up to 20%
- Death By Audio resurrects the Octave Clang, with the new and improved V2 offering “discordant ringing drones, visceral octave scrapes, and ground-shaking distortion”
- How Daphne Oram's Oramics machine paved the way for the modern DAW: "I want machines and computers to be an extension of the arm of the composer"
- March 7
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- “Holy sh*t, that's good!”: Foo Fighters’ Chris Shiflett on replacing his amps with the Quad Cortex for his solo tour – plus, the lowdown on the other essentials in his current rig
- "For me it was either the beginning of the beginning or the beginning of the end": the night Eric Clapton guested with Joe Bonamassa at the Royal Albert Hall and changed his career
- SampleRadar: 475 free drum 'n' bass essentials samples
- Paranoid London: "Our 808 is completely different to everybody else’s in the world. The snare and kick are ridiculous. When we had it fixed they opened it up and said someone had done a load of weird stuff - instead of using glue they’d used hairspray"
- Anemond's Factoid 2 is an experimental sampler plugin that uses machine learning to "decompose", remix and manipulate sounds
- Steely Dan pianist and keyboard player Jim Beard has died, aged 63: “He was the glue and such a great presence on so many projects,” says drummer Peter Erskine
- Ben Frost on working with Steve Albini: "As a recording engineer, he’s the equivalent of a war photographer – he’s not composing images and dictating proportions, he’s documenting what’s occurring in a space"
- Gibson has filmed an Adam Jones Tool guitar lesson – and it's exceptionally good
- Critter and Guitari's cute little looper/sampler just got a whole lot cuter - and much more powerful: "Something as straightforward as a guitar chord can get looped, time-stretched, reversed, have a melody recorded over it, effected, and reversed again"
- March 6
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- "It was a dark place, and we realised we didn't want to go back there": is Radiohead's King Of Limbs not just their most underrated record, but the one that helped save them?
- Bad news for bassists? Sony researchers have created an AI bassline generator that responds to the “style and tonality” of the music you feed it
- "If you were to listen to anything I do you will see how big the blues influence is": Slash readies blues solo album featuring multiple vocalists – including Demi Lovato
- Coated vs uncoated guitar strings: What’s the difference?
- 5 great songs with questionable mixes: "The more you look at it like some tech-boy producer, the less you get it"
- The new era of the Line 6 POD is here: say hello to the POD Express Guitar and Bass
- “We made somebody 8 million dollars”: Wyclef Jean reflects on The Fugees’ version of Killing Me Softly earning big money for someone else, and how he ended up on “the other side of the game” when DJ Khaled revived a 1999 song he wrote for Santana
- Carl Craig: "People said techno was always supposed to be about the 808, the 909 and the 303. When I use a live drummer, they say it’s not techno because there’s no 808"
- "Doesn’t sound like much when I play it... Maybe someone can get something good out of it": Bob Moog didn't think much of the "Abominatron", his first ever Moog Modular prototype
- March 5
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- “Jimi once said he’d been imitated so well that people had even copied his mistakes”: Watch Nile Rodgers, Tom Morello, Rebecca Lovell and more celebrate 70 years of the Strat in an all-star cover of Voodoo Child
- “He had two Twins, and he smoked both by the end of the night… the guy was on another planet”: Buzz Osborne of the Melvins reveals the loudest guitarist he has ever seen live
- “I’m old enough to know that the Top 40 is a fickle mistress. I have no desire to get caught on that treadmill”: Bruce Hornsby on The Way It Is, having a hit with Don Henley and being “the Sid Vicious of the accordion world”
- “I almost flipped a coin between the two songs”: New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander reveals his original demo for Murder On The Dancefloor, and says that it almost replaced You Get What You Give as his ‘90s band’s first single
- “We thought of a couple extra variables you could use to craft your perfect EP-3 experience”: Catalinbread adds the versatile Epoch Bias preamp pedal to its Echoplex-inspired lineup
- Is the Boss TE-2 Tera Echo its most underrated delay pedal?
- “What if we could rebuild the legendary K2000 VAST synthesizer, but using today’s technology?”: Kurzweil goes back to the ‘90s with the new K20 series synths
- Ableton Live 12 is here: everything you need to know - new devices, MIDI additions, workflow changes and more
- Issue 407 of Future Music is out now
- “This is one of the most requested models in Epiphone’s history”: Foo Fighters fans rejoice – the Dave Grohl DG-335 is finally here and it’s got Gibson USA pickups
- Pittsburgh Modular's Taiga analogue synth just got upgraded with a keyboard and expansion bay for Eurorack modules: "Install a 4th or 5th oscillator and create truly monster sounds"
- March 4
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- Steve Albini weighs in on amp modelling and effects pedals: "I know some old school guys are like, ‘Plug the guitar straight into the amp, and if you can’t get it done with that, you’re not a real musician,’ or whatever. That’s horses***"
- Live sound and Talk Box pioneer Bob Heil has died, aged 83: “I can never thank him enough,” says Peter Frampton
- "I experimented with that technique because I saw everybody else doing it, but I just never got good results with it": Steve Albini explains why he decided to break from traditional speaker miking methods in the recording studio
- “Why you typically don’t lead a six-piece band with an acoustic guitar is because you can’t be heard! I am shocked that we are able to pull that one off”: Julian Lage on the electric shuffles and engineering miracles behind his most daring album yet
- Does your guitar sound out of tune, even though you just tuned it? You might need to make these extra adjustments
- Apple’s new MacBook Air has an M3 chip and can drive two external displays, making it suitable for use in a multi-monitor music production setup
- Guitarist covers The Doors, Zeppelin, Clapton, Beatles, Hendrix and more in the style of Dire Straits, sounds like long-lost Mark Knopfler demos
- "Brit was Blackberry Smoke’s True North, the compass that instituted the ideology that will continue to guide this band": Blackberry Smoke drummer Brit Turner dies, aged 57
- James Blake on the music industry's broken economics: "The brainwashing worked and now people think that music is free"
- ‘Synth map of the world’ reveals that Roland and Behringer dominate other brands when it comes to Google searches
- Listen to an incredible remake of Daft Punk's Face to Face made with modern samples from Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead and Lady Gaga: "What a love letter to sampling"
- March 3
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- Classic interview - Giorgio Moroder: “If you want to make a good dance song, you still need the 303, an analogue drum machine and a Minimoog”
- The producer's guide to the Roland TB-303 (and its clones)
- "Fine for off-the-cuff sequencer basslines, otherwise you have to plan what you're going to do before even switching it on": Here's what the reviews said when the dance-music-defining Roland TB-303 was released in 1981
- Speedy J on the 30th anniversary of ambient techno classic Ginger: "My approach was to take more time for tracks to develop - be less focused on the impact of the drums, and give everything a bit more space"
- 10 of the best Roland TB-303 tracks of all time: Fatboy Slim, Voodoo Ray, Aphex Twin and more
- Roland and Serato come together to celebrate 303 day with a double control vinyl set that also honours the TR-606 drum machine
- SampleRadar TB-303 Day special: 252 free 303-style acid samples
- March 2
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- "It sounded completely out of place in the chart it was in, and the year it was released": 5 Prophet-5-powered tracks by Radiohead, Gary Numan, Japan and more
- "If you absolutely hated Stairway to Heaven, nobody can blame you for that because it was so… pompous": The glory and burden of Led Zeppelin's Stairway To Heaven, over half a century on
- March 1
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- “People that get this guitar, it’s really going to make an impact on them because it doesn’t only look awesome, it sounds amazing”: Gretsch’s Chris Rocha signature Broadkaster Jr is a ltd edition stunner
- “Musical comedy is a weird one, isn’t it?”: Taskmaster’s Alex Horne on global fame, Ferraris and trying to write funny songs with “GarageBand and a really crap microphone”
- “The riffs are tougher, and there are hooks! Yes, hooks!”: Black Country Communion announce new album and Joe Bonamassa’s guitar is pure fire on the supergroup’s new single, Stay Free
- “They’re not my strings, not my pickups, not my anything, but I just thought, ‘Well, it’s eight o’clock, just make a show!’”: Julian Lage says using rented Telecasters to perform live freed him from gear anxiety
- Canblaster: "The idea is to go back and forth – to have the computer sequencing the synthesizers and then the synthesizers being destroyed by plugins - creating a weird conversation between them all"
- This nuts AI-powered effects plugin uses neural synthesis to let you "play another artist's brain like an instrument"
- A jazz guitar classic returns as Harmony unveils the H62 Reissue – a handsome archtop hollowbody “delivering deliciously warm tones that snap”
- “He comes in with this absolute reckless spirit and just takes it to the edge”: St Vincent’s new single, Broken Man, features “three drummers”, and one of them is Dave Grohl
- The producer's guide to the Teletronix LA-2A: "It's one of the few pieces of vintage gear that can have grown producers weeping into their mixes, such is its ‘magic dust’ reputation"
- Free Native Instruments plugin lets you conduct a choir of 1,000s of Jacob Collier fans "polyphonically across many different chords, keys and soundworlds"
- Thomann’s massive 70th birthday celebrations include platinum-quality deals on big-name brands - including Squier, Korg, Yamaha, Akai and more
- "Musicians like to test their gear in the shops – online retail will never catch on": Thomann celebrates 70 years and proves the naysayers wrong with 100,000 products and well over a billion dollars in sales a year
- Music theory basics: Master modulation, or how to use key changes in your songwriting (without resorting to cliché)
- u-he at Gear Expo 2024: 'We are u-he. We make synthesisers and effects"
- Acoustica at Gear Expo 2024: The New Mixcraft 10.5 – The DAW Where Innovation Meets Value for Desktop Music Producers
- E-Instruments at Gear Expo 2024 : Desolate Guitars provides ultra-realistic, timeless guitar sounds, through iconic amps and real, recorded spring reverb
- Flattley Guitar Pedals at Gear Expo 2024: Meet the award-winning boutique effects pedal builder dedicated to tonal excellence