Soundtoys support Vermont flood victims On 2 and 3 August 2023, Soundtoys will donate all of their sales proceeds to non-profit organisations providing relief to flood victims in Vermont, USA.

Bitwig Studio 5 continues to innovate with a new tranche of creative toolsBitwig enjoyed an entirely blank canvas when designing its eponymous DAW, Bitwig Studio. It made strong use of it too, combining some of the best features found in rival workstations with unique and innovative features of its own devising.
READ MORE: Beginner’s Guide: Everything you need to know about music production

The results speak for themselves, driving an ever-growing user base that includes many die-hard users of other DAW. The newly released version 5 is set to make Bitwig Studio even more tempting still.

Extension of the creative process
In his video of 15 tips for Bitwig Studio beginners, Venus Theory illustrates the features of the DAW that drew him in and makes it stand out from its peers. “I use a lot of different DAWs and audio programs” he explains, “but what continuously keeps me coming back to Bitwig is that it feels like an extension of the creative process, and is kind of an instrument in-and-of itself, which is really inspiring.”
Perhaps what makes Bitwig Studio feel like an instrument is its Modulators – synth-style LFOs, envelopes and the like – that can be attached to practically any device, where they provide a creative and musical alternative to using automation lanes to drive parameter movement.
Bitwig Studio 5 main view.
Having these synth-like tools available outside of the confines of a synth or effect really does make Bitwig Studio feel more intimately entwined with the sounds and music you are creating, compared to Logic Pro and Pro Tools. Boundaries between Bitwig and the musical elements it’s hosting can become quite blurred, but in an intuitive way, loaded with creative potential.
Modulators and remotes
New to Bitwig Studio 5 is the ability to create project-wide Modulators. This sees a project device stub added to the Device panel, to which you can assign Modulators. This makes it super-easy to share the same Modulators across multiple devices, and ties into the newly acquired ability to modulate mix- and project-level parameters. This goes so far as allowing the project tempo to be modulated… strange and infectious grooves are waiting to be explored!
Similarly, the Remote Control pages included on most device panels, which map incoming controller messages to device parameters, are now available at the project level too, and this is ideal for managing mix parameters. More to the point, it allows you to easily combine the most important parameters from anywhere within a project into top-level controller pages, eliminating the frantic search for the track you wish to control before you waggle the knobs on your controller.
Modules and MSEGs
Bitwig 5 comes with a bunch of new modules for use in the Grid, a modular environment for creating custom synths and effects, and some of these are also available to use as Modulators and within the modular synth, Polymer. The most attention-grabbing of these new modules is Wavetable LFO which – you guessed it – sources its LFO waveforms from wavetables. Add another Modulator to control the wavetable position and you unleash ever-shifting LFO patterns that never get boring – the creative potential is practically limitless!
Bitwig Studio 5 MSEG Curve Browser.
Alongside this are a new family of “MSEG” (Multi-Segment Envelope Generator) modules. MSEGs allow the user to draw point-to-point curves of any length using a common set of tools, with these curves sharable amongst all MSEG modules.
The MSEG modules themselves are incredibly intuitive to work with, helped in no small part by their resizable, pop-up editing panels. Nodes can snap to a timing grid or be set completely freehand, lines between nodes can be straight or curved, and a set of editing tools simplify the creation of common shapes such as ramps and steps.
The sheer flexibility of this MSEG system makes it an excellent feature. Complex oscillator and LFO waveforms, envelopes, sequences and keyboard tracking responses can all be created with ease using a common toolbox, and it’s great fun to explore how the same curve works in all of these different contexts.
Bitwig Studio 5 MSEG Curve.
Launch time
One of Bitwig Studio’s most compelling features is Clip Launcher, which allows you to trigger and sequence audio and MIDI loops, snippets and scenes in a non-linear fashion. Jamming with these clips and scenes – typically using a Launchpad-style controller – is perfect for creating spontaneous, organic arrangements of your musical ideas. Such an approach to arranging has received a big boost in Bitwig Studio 5.
Clip launch modes have been overhauled, with two new modes that allow a clip to pick up playback immediately relative to either the currently-playing clip or the project timeline. Better still, you can now define alternate launch modes that are triggered by holding down the shift button on an external MIDI controller, or the computer keyboard’s ALT key if triggering with a mouse click.
Bitwig Studio 5 Launcher Gesture and Next Action List.
Bitwig Studio can also now react when you release a launch trigger, and this works whether you are launching clips using external hardware or the mouse pointer. Continue leaves the clip playing (i.e. the usual action), Stop stops the clip, Return returns to the previously playing clip, and Next triggers a further action selectable from a list of 20 possibilities.
All of these new options provide tons of flexibility when performing and jamming, and are easy to manage too. Project-level Clip Launcher settings govern the default behaviour of the Launcher’s slots, however these can then be overridden on a per-slot basis as required.
New content browser
The most visually noticeable change is the re-imagined content browser. This is markedly different to its predecessor, with a smarter appearance, more focused layout, and improved filtering and searching. The new browser might take some getting used to and, although it’s a clear improvement, there is little carry-over from old to new, which may be frustrating, albeit temporarily, for existing users.

Hiding behind all of these big-ticket changes are the expected tranche of smaller and less-visible tweaks. Amongst these are a new audio onset detection algorithm that improves beat detection and slicing, along with a bunch of new utility modules for the Grid, and new controller integration scripts for recently-released Akai and Novation controllers.
There remain some omissions that users have been asking for, most notably offline audio processing tools such as normalising, reversing and so on. A free external wave editor can deal with this, but it is preferable for such things to be integrated into the DAW. Users
Perhaps we will have to wait for the next major update for such tools to appear, but in the meantime, we’ll be very busy getting creative with all of the excellent additions to Bitwig Studio 5.
Learn more at bitwig.com.
Price
€399 / $399
Producer edition: €199 / $199
Essentials edition: €99 / $99
Key features
Modern DAW for macOS, Linux and Windows
Available in full, Producer and Essentials versions
Combines nonlinear Clip Launcher and linear Arranger Timeline
Powerful and flexible device chaining system
All devices feature modulation slots and customisable remote control mappings
Integrated, modular Grid for creating custom instruments and processors
Extensive content library included
Built-in support for many popular hardware controllers
Open-source scripting tools for creating custom hardware controller scripts
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The future of turntables? Pioneer DJ launches hybrid PLX-CRSS12Pioneer DJ has launched a professional digital-analogue hybrid turntable aimed at vinyl DJs, and digital-analogue turntablists alike. It’s called the PLX-CRSS12.

READ MORE: The Big Review: Is Pioneer DJ’s DJM-A9 the new monarch of DJ mixers?

While competitors such as RANE, Phase and Denon have dipped their toes into the world of DVSs (Digital Vinyl Systems) previously, PLX-CRSS12 is Pioneer’s stride into a new phase of hybrid DJing.
Why is this new digital turntable so special? Well, firstly, it’s the first-ever digital turntable to be made by the world’s leading DJ tech brand.
Secondly, the PLX-CRSS12 is the first turntable to allow both analogue and digital playback and thirdly, it has both tone-arm-free DVS control and a Magvel clamp, making it easier to scratch.
Pioneer DJ
By simply flicking a switch between analogue and digital, you can use the turntable in two ways. Analogue mode lets you use real vinyl records. The digital mode, however, lets you lay down your control vinyl (blank vinyl record emulation made for DVS) and play music from your digital collection in Serato or Rekordbox.
When in digital mode, the tonearm can rest in its holder, thanks to the PLX-CRSS12’s tone-arm-free DVS control ability. Without a tonearm, pesky needle skips are eliminated. This, along with a Magvel clamp that securely holds the vinyl and allows for direct control of digital music files during scratching, makes things sturdier for turntablists.
You can adjust the weight setting of the clamp and, via a nifty high-contrast OLED display, adjust the turntable’s torque settings. Here, you can also see the current track’s BPM, tempo range, key, deck number, and software name. Break speed adjustment is found externally on the side of the unit with three position switch.
Built-in MIDI-mappable Performance Pads below the platter offer quick access to favorite features, programmable for Hot Cues, samples, and more.
Talking of pads, Serato and Rekordbox’s stem separation technology is available to use These are selected via pads below the platter. This means you can play specific elements of your track, be it the bass, the melody, the drums or the vocal either in groups or by themselves.
Watch the PLX-CRSS12 in action, showcased by 2013 DMC Online World Champion, turntablist and producer Jon1st, below:

We asked Jon1st about what excited him most about the turntable. He said: “For me, it’s how intuitive the wireless clamp technology is to use, how sturdy it is locked onto the record and how reliable the tracking with it is. Plus, having MIDI pads available means if I’m in a situation where these are available and a DVS mixer isn’t, I’ll be able to use cue points and new features like stems from the turntable.
“My current setup is these paired with the DJM S11 mixer, and the MIDI pads mean I can have the turntables set to stems mode and keep cues active on my mixer, which makes things really streamlined for me.
Pioneer DJ’s PLX-CRSS12 is expected to be available in September 2023 and will cost around $1,399.
Find out more information at pioneerdj.com.
The post The future of turntables? Pioneer DJ launches hybrid PLX-CRSS12 appeared first on MusicTech.

AIR Music Technology Sprite Air Sprite, a modern take on the studio hardware staple of the 80s and 90s, the multi-effects processor. Sprite does things not possible in a hardware unit. Even better, Sprite is a plugin... Read More

EQ1979 Is A FREE Vintage Neve Equalizer Plugin By Belles Ondes
Belles Ondes has released EQ1979, a FREE vintage-inspired channel strip plugin for macOS and Windows. A quick glance at EQ1979 will tell you that Neve consoles are the inspiration behind the plugin, thanks mainly to the striking red drive knob. EQ1979 is a frequency-accurate model of the famous British module, the Neve 1073, credited by [...]
View post: EQ1979 Is A FREE Vintage Neve Equalizer Plugin By Belles Ondes

AIR launch Sprite multi-effects plug-in Pairing a quick and easy interface with a more advanced, in-depth editing page, AIR Sprite promises to be as simple or as complex as the user desires.

Researchers find that AI can turn brain scans into music Researchers have uncovered that AI can turn brain activity captured on a brain scan into music.
Google and Osaka University in Japan have published findings after some interesting results were produced when five volunteers were placed inside an fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scanner and played music as stimuli.

READ MORE: Meta’s MusicGen AI tool has been trained on 20,000 hours of music

Over 500 tracks across 10 musical genres were played to the volunteers while they were inside the scanner, and their brain activity created images that were captured and fed into Google’s AI music generator, Music LM.
The software was conditioned on the brain patterns and responses from the individuals, and results found that the music created from the test subjects’ brain waves were similar to the stimuli they were played, as reported by Mixmag.
The report’s abstract (summary) states that “The generated music resembles the musical stimuli that human subjects experienced, with respect to semantic properties like genre, instrumentation, and mood.”
So, where do these findings lead us? In the paper’s outlook it is written that with the amount of work required to obtain fMRI signals from the brain, the researchers do not have direct applications in mind.
However, they do state: “This work has been motivated by a fundamental research question: Does the MusicLM music generation model contain components that are mirrored in the human brain, and if so, which are those? And if such connections exist, how would music sound like that is inspired by signals from the human brain.”
Last month (July), scientists at Johns Hopkins University conducted research that found we perceive silence in the same way we perceive sounds: “We typically think of our sense of hearing as being concerned with sounds,” explained lead study author Rui Zhe Goh, a Johns Hopkins University graduate student in philosophy and psychology.
“But silence, whatever it is, is not a sound – it’s the absence of sound. Surprisingly, what our work suggests is that nothing is also something you can hear.”
Read the full paper from Google and Osaka University via google-research.github.io.
The post Researchers find that AI can turn brain scans into music  appeared first on MusicTech.

AI Music Co. CEO on Future of Music Creation (and Streaming Fraud)Listen on your favorite podcast platform: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Stitcher | Acast Alex Jae Mitchell is the founder and CEO of Boomy Corporation (boomy.com), an AI-powered music creation and distribution platform where over 500,000 creators make, publish, and monetize instant songs. Mitchell is a serial music entrepreneur who previously founded Audiokite Research, the leading market research platform for independent […]

“Stanley Kubrick level of planning” went into Daft Punk’s RAM, says Chilly GonzalesChilly Gonzales has spoken about the “Stanley Kubrick level of planning” that supposedly went into Daft Punk’s 2013 album, Random Access Memories.

READ MORE: Julian Casablancas suggested Stevie Wonder as Daft Punk’s Infinity Repeating vocalist

The pianist, who first worked with Daft Punk on the 2003 track Too Long, was speaking in the latest instalment of their YouTube docu-series Memory Tapes. Spanning a total of eight episodes, the series features interviews and unseen studio footage on the making of the French electronic duo’s last album, Random Access Memories.
In the new video, Gonzales praises Daft Punk’s songwriting prowess, saying the pair would have been making “timeless masterpieces” anyway had they been “songwriters back in the 70s”.
“When a song is divorced of its production and you play something on a piano there, you see if it passes the test of just being musically sound,” Gonzales explains. “And Daft Punk songs do work on the piano so you realise that when songwriting is that good it doesn’t matter how it’s dressed. It’s always going to create that emotional response.”
“Now looking back on Within and if I just play the melody itself… I mean that is just such classic writing and storytelling. You could basically play it on any instrument in any era. It just so happens the one that they chose has a crying robot and a Rhodes piano and some other elements.”
“The robots had a vision for how to use me,” he says. “So we kind of laser-focused on what was going to happen between Giorgio by Moroder and Within.”
The musician also shares that he was “really impressed” at the time given that it was a “solid maybe two or three years before [Random Access Memories] even came out of my session.”
“But they already had the track order,” Gonzales recalls. “So for me it was almost a Stanley Kubrick level of planning that was going into this project.”
And while working with your heroes can often turn out to be a disappointing experience, Gonzales says that “with Daft Punk it far surpassed even my greatest expectations on Random Access memories, especially when they themselves willfully removed some of those sonic elements that had made them so famous.”
“It was as if they were also saying now that we have access to all these traditional musicians, let’s see if we can still make it sound like Daft Punk without necessarily resorting to those elements that people associated them with.”

The post “Stanley Kubrick level of planning” went into Daft Punk’s RAM, says Chilly Gonzales appeared first on MusicTech.

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross share new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soundtrackAs Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem hits theatres this week (2 August), Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have unveiled the full soundtrack to the highly anticipated animated film.

READ MORE: Can plants sing? Here’s how they can be used to make music

Among the 30 tracks released, many feature some pretty wild titles, including names like “Dipshits On A Roof,” “Murder The Shreks!,” “What’s The Worst That Could Happen?,” “(The Worst That Could Happen),” “Grand Theft Ice Cream Truck,” “I Just Met You And You Almost Killed Me,” “Puke Girl,” “Megamind, Gru-Type SH*T,” “Better Than Mark Ruffalo,” and more.
Produced by Seth Rogan, the latest TMNT film gathers some of Hollywood’s biggest names including Jackie Chan, John Cena, and Ice Cube. It also boasts a stellar voice cast, with Rogen voicing Bebop alongside Micah Abbey (Donatello), Shamon Brown Jr. (Michelangelo), Nicolas Cantu (Leonardo), and Brady Noon (Raphael).

With Mutant Mayhem, Reznor and Ross continue their impressive streak of soundtracks, having recently worked on Bones and All, Soul, and Mank. Their next project will be composing music for David Fincher’s upcoming film, The Killer.
Fans of the band, however, may have to wait for new music, as Reznor recently opined that the industry isn’t in a good place for Nine Inch Nails to be putting out songs.
“The importance of music — or lack of importance of music — in today’s world, from my perspective, is a little defeating,” he said. “It feels to me, in general — and I’m saying this as a 57-year-old man — music used to be the thing that, that was what I was doing when I had time. I was listening to music. I wasn’t doing it in the background while I was doing five other things, and I wasn’t treating it kind of as a disposable commodity.”
Reznor added, “I kind of miss the attention music got, I miss the critical attention that music got. Not that I am interested in the critic’s opinion, but to send something out in the world and feel like it touched places, might’ve got a negative or positive [review], but somebody heard it, it got validated in its own way culturally.”
“Culturally, that feels askew. Like I can’t think of any review I care about today that I even trust. I could write it before it comes out because it’s already written. In fact, ChatGPT could probably do a better job, you know? Or is currently doing the job. That makes for what I feel is a less fertile environment to put music out into — in the world of Nine Inch Nails.”
Listen to the soundtrack below.

The post Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross share new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles soundtrack appeared first on MusicTech.

Graphic EQ Is A Free Graphic Equalizer By Viator DSP
Landon from ViatorDSP has just announced his latest freeware plugin, called Graphic EQ. This must have been a busy period for him since he recently released a trio of freeware vocal processing plugins. Graphic EQ is an analog emulation plugin aiming to bring the classic character of analog EQ hardware to your DAW. While the [...]
View post: Graphic EQ Is A Free Graphic Equalizer By Viator DSP

New AI plugin TextToSample lets you generate samples for freeThe developers behind AI-based sample editing software Samplab have released a new plugin that allows you to generate samples from texts — for free.

READ MORE: Aphex Twin shares two archival tracks via ‘secret’ Soundcloud account

As its name suggests, TextToSample works by producing samples in response to the user’s text prompt.
All you have to do is describe the kind of sound you want — e.g. ‘trap with drum fill’, or ‘rock guitar solo’ — and the software will generate a sample based on your commands. Users can also drag and drop pre-existing audio files into the plugin along with a prompt and have it generate new samples.
According to Samplab, TextToSample uses Meta’s open-source, AI-powered text-to-music language model, MusicGen, and was trained using data provided by the algorithm.
“Our goal with TextToSample is to enable the producer community to experiment with state-of-the-art generative AI models,” reads the FAQ on Samplab’s website. “We want to show what’s currently possible with these models, especially when running them locally on your computer.”
The tool has a fairly simple UI which makes it extremely beginner-friendly, though it also comes with some interesting features, such as the “context” dial, which “allows you to adjust how many seconds of audio the model looks at when generating the next bit” (via MusicRadar).
Check out a demo of TextToSample below.

Samplab is but one of many companies that have jumped on the AI music-making software bandwagon in recent months. This May, Google announced the arrival of MusicLM, the company’s very own AI-powered tool that turns written text prompts into high-fidelity music.
Simply type in a prompt like “soulful jazz for a dinner party” or “a calming violin melody backed by a distorted guitar riff” and MusicLM will create two versions of the song for you. Users can then vote on which one of the two tracks they like better, which serves to “help improve the model”.
The tool is also capable of transforming whistled and hummed melodies to the style you want.
The post New AI plugin TextToSample lets you generate samples for free appeared first on MusicTech.

Tracktion Releases Waveform Free 12.5 Digital Audio Workstation
Tracktion Corporation released Waveform Free 12.5, a new version of the industry-leading free digital audio workstation. Now, there are more than a few free DAWs out there available for users. However, there are usually trade-offs associated with using them. Some, like the fan-favorite Cakewalk, are going the way of the dinosaur, unfortunately. This is not [...]
View post: Tracktion Releases Waveform Free 12.5 Digital Audio Workstation

PLX-CRSS12: Pioneer DJ finally made a hybrid turntable + motorized DVS controller
Pioneer DJ has finally made a hybrid DVS controller and vinyl deck
The post PLX-CRSS12: Pioneer DJ finally made a hybrid turntable + motorized DVS controller appeared first on DJ TechTools.

The Sound of Love Lost Kontakt instrument Created by meticulous sampling and creative effects processing, The Sound of Love Lost is pitched synth/guitar hybrid instrument that can be played like an organ.