Music Tech Magazine

back from the future…

I write this fresh from MusicTech’s annual sojourn to Anaheim, California where, once again, we were lucky enough to spend some hands-on time with a wealth of brand-new music technology, set for release at various points throughout 2019. The show was an eye-opening experience for various reasons: aside from the pure, giddy thrill of getting to see and hear what the industry has in store for us this year, it was wonderful to see so much eagerness, across the industry, to empower today’s music maker, whatever their budgets and creative ideas may be. This has always been our own modus operandi and it’s heartening to see the same mindset pervading the music-technology landscape. That’s not to say there weren’t still those products that cater for the higher, pro-end of the…

the musictech experts

ANDY JONESEditor At Large Andy has an MA in Music Technology and has been writing about it for 25 years. He has launched and edited several magazines in the subject and was editor of MusicTech for four years. Naturally, he has far too many synthesisers.DAVE GALEDave is an award-winning orchestrator, media composer and producer, with a passion for synths and modulars in all their forms, whether software, hardware, vintage or modern. Dave is MusicTech’s resident Eurorack expert, as well as a soundtrack composer.ALEX HOLMESAlex has been an electronic musician for many years and has a passion for beats, bass and all forms of electronic music. He’s currently involved with three different dance-music projects. Alex creates our sample-filled DVD each month.MARTIN DELANEYMartin was one of the first UK Ableton Certified Trainers.…

dvd

VIDEO FEATURE/40 MINSLive 10 Production Tricks, Guitar FX Plug-insLoop+ has provided another batch of software and production content, including four Ableton Live 10 videos presented by Joshua Casper. Topics include making pitched riser FX using the Simple Delay device, sound-design techniques for creating explosions and impact SFX, ghost sidechaining and more. There’s also producer Tim Cant on his Top 5 plug-ins for guitar FX.Size 1.38GB Format MP4 loopmasters.com/loopplusVIDEO FEATURE/37MINSCatching Flies Drum Production, Pad Sound DesignHere’s some tutorial content taken from Producertech’s latest releases. To accompany the review (on p119), you’ll find drum-production techniques in Logic from Catching Flies. There’s also pad and LFO bass sound design in Serum and Spire with Rob Jones, tips on how to record and comp guitars using Studio One, and Neuro bass production techniques from…

alan r pearlman

We were saddened by the news that synth pioneer Alan Robert Pearlman passed away in January in Newton, Massachusetts, after a long illness. He was 93.From an early age, Alan R. Pearlman was named ‘ARP’ by his school friends, and the company that he founded took his nickname. In his earlier years of employment, Pearlman worked as a designer of instrumentation amplifiers for NASA, working on both the Gemini and Apollo space programmes. It was in 1969 that he started ARP Instruments, Inc. with $100,000 of his own money and investor funds. Originally named Tonus Inc, ARP Instruments entered the then-fledgling synth industry with the production of the ARP 2002, going head-to-head with the other synth companies of the day.Pearlman drew upon his previous experience designing op-amps, utilising a dual-transistor…

news

SOUND AND VISIONIf you’re a regular visitor to musictech.net, you’ll undoubtedly have noticed that we had something of a visual and structural update at the start of the year. Driven by the desire to provide our readers with faster access to our archives of content, as well as to increase the functionality and searchability of the website, the new and improved version of musictech.net is now up and running, looking and performing better than ever (even if we do say so ourselves…)Hand in hand with our updated website launch comes the news that we’re also re-energising our video output.This approach was inaugurated by a huge selection of hands-on product demos and interviews shot and uploaded during the NAMM Show this year. We’re looking forward to kickstarting a range of new…

kit out your studio

NAMM, aka the National Association of Music Merchants, offers us the chance to leave our studios and get some colour on our skin each year. It’s the extravaganza where all the music-gear companies announce their products for the year ahead, across all instrument types: guitar, drums, orchestral, piano, acoustic… you name it.With last year’s addition of two extra halls for high-tech music making, it has easily become our number-one destination every January. If you’ve been reading www.musictech.net over the last few weeks, you’ll have caught up with many of the announcements. So rather than bring you all that again, we’ve decided to round up the best bits – the bits you really need to see – and then asked the question: what 10 things did we learn from NAMM 2019…