Warm Audio goes bling with a limited gold version of the WA-8000 condenser microphoneWarm Audio has released a limited edition all-gold version of its best-selling WA-8000 large-diaphragm tube condenser microphone.

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As with the standard black model – which takes inspiration from the legendary Sony C-800G, the WA-8000G boasts a “natural and open top end, supremely clear midrange, and the ability to render brilliant detail”.
At its core, the mic is built using the same carefully selected, premium components, including Swedish-made Lundahl transformer, NOS (New Old Stock) 6AU6 tube, all-brass K67-style capsule, and custom-designed external tube mount and heat sink.
The WA-8000G also comes in a professional-level, hard carrying case to ensure safe transport of the microphone and accompanying components – wherever you record.
Image: Warm Audio
The limited-edition microphone will cost you $1299/£1199/€1399 and is now available for purchase while stocks last at authorised Warm Audio retailers.
In related news, Warm Audio recently launched the WA-14SP, a stereo pair package edition of its WA-14 microphone, available previously only as a standalone mic.
Per the brand, the WA-14 is modelled on AKG’s C414 EB, a now-rare large-diaphragm capacitor microphone launched in 1976, heralded as “the most truthful studio mic of all time”.
The mic costs $462 on its own, while the stereo pair package is priced at $749.
Here at MusicTech, we’ve broken down some of the best microphones for rappers and MCs, with the Warm Audio WA-8000 placing firmly on the list.
Learn more at Warm Audio.
The post Warm Audio goes bling with a limited gold version of the WA-8000 condenser microphone appeared first on MusicTech.

Yamaha SynthFest UK announcement Yamaha have released a statement regarding the products being showed at this year's SynthFest UK show.

Murlo’s desert island music tool? “A field recorder and a bunch of batteries”Music producer, illustrator and sculptor Murlo makes music in Manchester, but his mind was far from any human world we know when he produced his second album, Puckle.
Driven intensely by a fictional sci-fi narrative, tracks on this album sound at times like UK grime if it was created in an alien bunker in the early 3000s, rather than Jammer’s basement in the early 2000s. Murlo draws further from any conventions in UK club music, falling into four-by-four territories that are by no means straightforward, boasting eerie vocal phrases, otherworldly samples and distinctly ‘Murlo’ synth parts.

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In our chat with the artist – real name Chris Pell – we catch a lucky glimpse into the creative space of one of the most artistic producers out there right now. His space is full of strange home-made figurines, books on mythology and, not forgetting, a MIDI keyboard.
Puckle by Murlo
Hey, Murlo. You just came back from Korea. How was it?
Korea was great. I spend a lot of time visiting my partner who lives there. It’s become a second home for me, and I wrote half the music from my latest album there. I do find myself less distracted spending time in public spaces due to the language barrier; I can read Hangul, the Korean alphabet, but when it comes to speaking the language, I’ve got a long journey ahead of me.
In the UK, I find it a bit of a sensory overload to try and work in a cafe or public space, but as my Korean is very limited, I can tune out and find my thoughts a lot easier over there.
Tell us more about the rich narrative behind your second album, Puckle.
The world-building was a big part of the album, and the visual side of things, such as the sculptures, were an integral part of it. The story centred around a cult that lived in the forest on the outskirts of a city. They were enamoured by a god they discovered in the wells of an old bathhouse, which began changing their physical form, but it turns out it was actually a sentient AI that escaped from the city.
Murlo’s workstation. Image: Murlo
Does it add another layer to an album when you revolve it around a story and a world?
Yeah definitely. For me, it’s been a way of helping me push my music into directions away from these arbitrary rules I gave myself. Creating music for characters or moments from the story meant I wasn’t so hung up on the functionality of the music as it was much more expressive.
 Tell us a bit about the studio.
My studio is in my flat in Manchester. I once tried having a dedicated music studio in 2016 when I used to live in London, but I realised I couldn’t afford it and it didn’t really gel with how I work. I’ve tried to instead integrate a studio around my daily life. I live alone, which helps a lot in that respect as I’m able to fully surround myself with things that help me write.
Mini sculptures in Murlo’s studio. Image: Murlo
How do you use your studio?
Having a studio in my small flat has broken down the work/home life barrier. It’s not for everyone; I know people like to separate the two to have a healthy balance, but for me, they are now indistinguishable. I don’t view them as separate things. I actually find I’m most relaxed when I’m drawing or sculpting, so the idea that I would have a place away from home with all my gear would be detrimental to me.
What atmosphere do you try and create in the studio, and how does the studio environment help you with your creativity?
I like to be surrounded by things. I collect records, miniatures, books, and I like to have them at arm’s reach to my desk. Not only as references but also to help me give myself breaks to stare at when I hit a creative block.
Mini sculptures in Murlo’s studio. Image: Murlo
You’ve used vocals in an interesting way throughout this album…
From a purely musical point of view, I use voices like any other synth. I have a lot of layered sung chords mixed in with my other synths. From a narrative perspective, I used voices as a mark of the cult in the story, so they appear like chants or choral verses in the music.
Which DAW do you use?
Ableton Live. I’ve dabbled in other DAWs, but for how I work, I think Ableton is the best fit, and I’ve never really strayed from it. It’s great that you can choose to go a lot of different ways to achieve the same desired effect; it feels like a lot of musicians find their way of doing certain things in the program and it encourages people to experiment.
Mini sculptures and plants in Murlo’s studio. Image: Murlo
What is your favourite piece of gear and why?
I’m a very straightforward musician when it comes to hardware. Most of what I do relies on VSTs and software. The only physical kit I rely on is my Akai MPK225 controller. If I’m allowed to broaden the scope, I’d say my Wacom Cintiq tablet. For music production, I use it as a second monitor, but it’s absolutely integral to all the visual work I do alongside it.
What synth or effect can be heard the most on Puckle?
Some VSTs I used were Native Instruments’ Massive X, Pharlight, Straylight, and Errorsmith’s Razor, so a lot of Native Instruments stuff. For effects, I instantly go for Replika XT for any type of delay or reverb; it offers so much quickly. I also enjoyed using Output Portal a lot; it really helped me deconstruct melodies and drums when needed.
Books in Murlo’s studio. Image: Murlo
Your synth riffs are so precise and complex. It sounds almost like you’ve been trained in jazz piano.
Funnily enough, I’m not trained at all. I find chords I like, edit them, run them through arp VSTs like Xfer’s Cthulhu, and write melodies on top. It’s a fun process that helps me quickly develop ideas. After I’ve worked on something a bit further, I go back and look at the chords and do micro edits.
Early on, I used to be embarrassed, especially around people who studied music, but I know there are many people like me. I think all you need to do is train your ear and have personal taste in what you want to create.
What is your dream piece of gear?
I mentioned before that I never really use hardware, but I did once have the opportunity to write music on the Sequential Prophet 6 polysynth. It was incredible. That would be the one I get; I really enjoy working on sounds with sequencers, and I could play with it for hours.
Murlo’s sculpting table. Image: Murlo
If you were left on a desert island, what one item would you take with you to make music with forever?
A field recorder and a bunch of batteries. I cannot sing at all, but there are a bunch of things in nature I can make sounds from.
What is your top piece of production advice?
Don’t let a purist approach stifle your ideas. YouTube tutorials are an amazing source of information but can give the impression that there is a wrong way and a right way to do something. Experiment, and if it works, it works; you can worry about mixing and mastering once the idea is there.
Enter the world of Murlo by heading to his Bandcamp.
The post Murlo’s desert island music tool? “A field recorder and a bunch of batteries” appeared first on MusicTech.

Mastering The Mix’s Fuser helps clean up your mix and reduce frequency clashesEveryone has trouble producing a clean mix from time to time – especially in the low end. One useful way to create space in a mix is to dynamically duck a bass part when the kick plays, for example. Sidechain compression is one way to achieve this but arguably the most transparent way is to only duck the frequencies that are clashing, rather than the entire signal. But plugins using this technique often take a broad approach – Mastering The Mix’s Fuser lets you dial in exactly where you want to clean up your audio.

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To use Fuser, put an instance on the track you’d like to make space in (such as a bass bus), and then feed the sound that you want more prominent (like a kick drum) into the sidechain input. After a few seconds of listening, the spectrogram in the centre will show any frequency collisions, with red areas indicating clashes in the mid-channel, and yellow in the side channel. You can then hit a Resolve Conflicts button, and Fuser will add one or more parametric bands that focus the processing where it’s needed.
At its most basic, this is all that’s required to make a noticeable improvement to the audio without overdoing the processing – but you can go deeper and tweak things to refine the results. You can have up to ten bands, each with controls for quality (Q), attack and release, and where it’s placed between the mid and side channels. You simply pull a band down further to increase the amount of ducking, which is then clearly shown via a reduction curve on the spectrogram. There’s also a mix dial to help quickly pull back on the processing and a useful Delta function that lets you listen to just the clashing frequencies.
Mastering The Mix Fuser main GUI. Image: Mastering The Mix
To get the best results, MTM suggests you do a little gain staging work first. As plugins can’t detect DAW volume fader levels, there’s a feature called Gain Stage Fix, which lets you input an offset for the input and sidechain channels, in case they’re not set at 0dB. There’s also a Level Match Pointer, which moves up and down around the Input level dial, offering a suggestion to help volume-match the two signals. You could choose to ignore it, but it’s possible that the mix collision issue might be improved by having the two tracks sounding more balanced.
The obvious way to test Fuser’s effectiveness is to compare it to other spectral ducking plugins. We place instances of Fuser, Wavesfactory TrackSpacer, and iZotope’s Neutron 4 Unmask plugin on a bus with lots of mid-range music content, and then set each sidechain to receive a vocal. All three capably carve out space to let the vocal shine, but when pushed a little harder, you can start to hear that Fuser has cleaner-sounding filters. Both Neutron and TrackSpacer can sound a little phase-y when you increase the amount of ducking. This is less true of Fuser, especially if you go into the settings and switch the filters from zero latency to linear phase FIR mode. Of course, this will increase your CPU load and latency – and linear phase isn’t always the best option for transient material – but as you’ll potentially be affecting an entire bus, it’s nice to know you can easily increase the sound quality.
Fuser has an interesting feature called Automatic Phase Rotation. At the click of a button, the plugin will listen to your two sources and rotate the track audio phase to find the closest fit. This is a much more nuanced approach than simply flipping the phase 180 degrees, and although it doesn’t have such a noticeable effect on higher frequency content, it’s incredibly useful and effective at increasing punch on kicks, basses and tracks with low-end.
Mastering The Mix Fuser Phase Rotate. Image: Mastering The Mix
Alternatively, you can switch Fuser into Phase Match mode to massage the sound into an exact match of the phase shape at different frequencies. This one is a bit more hit-and-miss, but it’s nice to have the option, and it can double up as a fantastic sound design tool.
Tucked away in the graph above, you also get low-cut and high-cut sliders that let you focus on the region where the phase tool is working.
To fully put the Phase Rotate function through its paces, we load up a mix project that has a ridiculous number of kick drum tracks. In normal circumstances, it would take a lot of work to get these to sit well together and we would likely end up scrapping some of the layers. However, after selecting a single kick as the sidechain input and then using the Phase Rotate (and a small amount of Phase Match), we are able to get a large-sounding and surprisingly usable kick sound.
Our minor gripe with Fuster is that the minimum attack speed for the ducking is 1ms and there’s no lookahead. This means you may find small transients slip through when working on certain percussive sounds. To be fair, it’s unlikely you’ll be using Fuser to duck in this extreme way; it works best when used subtly.
Ultimately, Fuser does what several other plugins already do, but it does it with more finesse and accuracy. TrackSpacer is five years old now, but is still an effective plugin that gets the job done quickly. If you feel like you’d like a little more control though, then Fuser is another step up that lets you hone your ducking with more precision. It also has the excellent Phase Rotate function which is a must-have for anyone who likes to layer drum sounds.
The post Mastering The Mix’s Fuser helps clean up your mix and reduce frequency clashes appeared first on MusicTech.

US Treasury sanctions crypto wallets as authorities crack down on fentanylAccording to Deputy Treasury Secretary Wally Adeyemo, the sanctioned wallets "received millions of USD funds over hundreds of deposits" used for illicit drugs.

Electric Hydrogen is the green hydrogen industry’s first unicornInvestors have historically been skeptical of green hydrogen. High production costs, expensive infrastructure builds, competition with batteries and minimal government support have made the green hydrogen sector a risky bet. But at least one company, Electric Hydrogen, seems to have found a way to convince investors that its tech is a bet they should take. […]

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JH Audio Introduces Pearl Tri Amp Macro Speaker Management System JH Audio, innovator and manufacturer of leading in-ear monitoring products for professional touring artists and audio engineers, announces the availability of its new Pearl Tri Amp Micro Speaker Management System, the latest innovation in IEM audio technology. The system includes the brand’s PC-based Pearl Control Software and Pearl Loader program, which offer functions that allow users to precisely control gain, phase, time and equalization of low, mid and high frequencies of an in-ear monitor. The system is available exclusively with a pair of JH Audio’s new Ruby in-ear monitors, which when used together will make it possible to reproduce any frequency response or audio signature.  



In addition to its control benefits, the Pearl system utilizes an actively controlled passive crossover (ACPX), keeping the latency low ― between .60 and .80 milliseconds. This is especially important to live performers, who require a latency of less than five milliseconds. 

“Pearl processing provides unparalleled control to shape and optimize the audio and performance of any in-ear monitor solution,” says Jerry Harvey, owner of JH Audio. “The system’s low-latency benefits are the result of a passive crossover in the IEM, and active control over the low, mid and high speaker circuits, which each have their own amplifier and processing. We sweeten the passive crossover slopes with equalization, which does not increase latency.”

Spotify adds free Audiobooks to Premium Subscriptions at no extra costSpotify is adding more than 150,000 audiobooks as part of existing Spotify Premium subscriptions in the UK and Australia starting today and in the US this winter. In the announcement,. Continue reading
The post Spotify adds free Audiobooks to Premium Subscriptions at no extra cost appeared first on Hypebot.

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JME: Spotify should create “unlockable music” only available by attending eventsJME may have stepped back on regularly releasing new music in the past decade, but he’s still full of ideas. The UK grime MC, songwriter and record producer recently shared on social media a vision for a Spotify tool that could help re-introduce a “tangible” dimension to new music consumption.

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The idea, according to JME, would require fans to go to a physical event or location in order to “unlock” albums, EPs or singles on streaming platforms rather than just being given them instantly. This would mean the music is only listened to by the biggest fans who are willing to put in the effort in order to be able to listen to it, rather than just being delivered as part of a recommended playlist, for example.
“I don’t want to throw music into the communal abyss,” JME writes in an X post, referring to the vast swathes of new music going on Spotify and Apple Music on a daily basis. “But I want people that actually care and love music to have it. I miss the days of tangible music. The process of going somewhere to get the music meant you actually cared.
“So I had an idea… Spotify & Apple Music should make streaming music slightly more tangible by having unlockable albums/songs. Make it so that some songs are available only by attending an event/location.”

This one comment made me think,
I don’t want to throw music into the communal abyss,
But I want people that actually care and love music to have it.
It’s not all about money either, even though we get 0.005p per stream…
I miss the days of tangible music.
So I had an idea… pic.twitter.com/L6f4T479kA
— Jme (@JmeBBK) October 3, 2023

Big Zuu responded with “That would be cold.” One fan, however, wasn’t entirely sold on the idea, writing, “Issue is though, some people may not be able to get there if it’s an event. Maybe if you had to get down to your local HMV or something but then that’s just buying a CD basically, isn’t it?” Another said, “you have to think of accessibility and fans that aren’t privileged geographically to benefit from this.”
“If they can’t get there then they can’t get there,” responds JME, “That’s the point? If I make a song and I want everyone at Wireless [festival] to have it, and you can’t get there, then you don’t get it.”
Recent statistics in vinyl record purchases show an uptick in music fans looking for more tangible ways of consuming music. MusicTech’s recent feature, How the vinyl industry weathered pandemic disruptions to emerge stronger than ever, highlights that record stores are “places to get in touch with new music in an accessible way”. A recent Luminate report also showed that US vinyl record sales increased by 21.7 per cent in the first half of 2023.
Follow JME on Twitter/X.
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