Why Hayla is ready to be more than the ‘featured vocalist’ on your favourite DJ’s biggest songsHayla’s voice has been heard by millions. Her soaring, operatic vocals are essential to some of the biggest songs in modern dance music.
Over the past few weeks alone, the Liverpool-born, London-based artist has dominated the stage at world-famous festivals and venues. She sang Shiver with John Summit to close out the Sahara tent during the second weekend of Coachella. Then, across the following two weekends, she performed deadmau5 and Kaskade’s charting single Escape at the Hollywood Bowl and the Brooklyn Mirage as a part of deadmau5’s 25-year celebration, restro5pective.

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In the years prior Hayla, real name Hayley Williams, performed these songs at other major venues such as BMO Stadium in Los Angeles, the electronic mega fest EDC Las Vegas, and Kx5’s set at the LA Coliseum. The latter was crowned “the largest single-day concert headlined by an electronic music artist in North America,” according to Pollstar.
But Hayla is so much more than a headline DJ’s accompanying singer. On top of the extreme power of her voice, she is a songwriter who co-writes all of her major vocal collaborations. She is also adding “producer” to her resume, as she continues to experiment with making music from scratch.
Now, with her debut (currently untitled) album dropping this year, she is standing firm in her identity as a solo artist.
Hayla
“It’s my time to try something for me. I’ve found the confidence,” Hayla says in a strong and expressive Northern English accent. “It’s so nice to have complete creative control over something.”
I’m sitting with Hayla in the dimly lit and effortlessly chic lobby of the Moxy Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles. We’re chatting in the days leading up to her debut performance at Coachella. She was in Southern California for a couple of weeks before the show, working in studio sessions all around town.
When Hayla works on a track, she’s in the room building the music from the ground up, whether she’s the featured vocalist or the primary artist.
“The nice thing about this album is I’ve been in the room exactly when we’ve been creating it from nothing,” Hayla explains. “It’s great to be in the room and have that electric feeling.”
Hayla
One artist with whom Hayla has shared that spark is the UK dance DJ and producer, Will Clarke. Hayla and Clarke first connected when they wrote Escape, which was originally going to be Clarke’s song but, through the nature of the industry, ended up in the hands of Kx5. Since then, they’ve had multiple sessions and written 20 songs together.
“The thing I love about Hayla is every session is like a therapy session. I have a really good relationship with her. We can both open up and talk about life, which for me, in a studio session in music is super important,” Clarke says from his studio in London. “That means even if you come out of the session and the record’s not that great, you’ve had the best day. There’s no pressure — that’s important for when I want to write for people.”
“[Will is] so great at what he does. Working with him is great because we can bounce ideas. I feel very confident and comfortable with him. That creative energy and flow—It’s very easy to work with him,” Hayla says.
As Clarke describes, he and Hayla work rapidly during their sessions. He comes in with some foundations – “like four or five ideas, and I mean ideas like very bare-bone chord progressions.” She creates the vocal melody and they hit record. From there, they write lyrics and form up the song. The whole process can be as fast as 30 minutes.

Clarke calls it standard songwriting, but he acknowledges that Hayla brings something to the sessions that no one else can:
“Her voice is just fucking amazing,” Clarke says. “It’s dangerous because her voice is so good that you can rely on the voice too much. It can make everybody lazy in the room on making the actual best song because her voice is so good.”
Hayla records her voice completely dry with no reverb. Once they have the recording down, Clarke adds what he calls “fairy dust” on the back end. He does slight tweaks with a few plugins such as the Waves JJP Vocals and TAL Reverb 2. But for the most part, he lets her sound exist as he heard it in the room.
“I want to hear the rawness of vocalists singing. I want to hear the dips in their voice. I want to hear when they go out of tune. I want to hear all the imperfections of the human voice is beautiful for,” Clarke says. “She’s not demanding as a vocalist. She just gets in and gets it done.”
Hayla was getting it done as a singer years before she was working with Clarke, deadmau5, Kaskade, or John Summit. But she never led her own project either.

For a long time, she sang in different cover bands in bars around the UK. She was a backup singer. She sang at weddings. She also spent many years as a ghostwriter for other artists and taught vocal lessons (she still teaches a 65-year-old man as she has for the past four years).
All of these experiences allowed her to express her love of different genres, but she also struggled to find her own voice.
“It took me a long time to figure out who I am and what I really wanted to say —if there was anything that I could put down on paper that people would be interested to hear,” Hayla says.
Now after writing songs that hundreds of thousands of people sing back to her, she knows beyond a reasonable doubt that people are interested in what she has to say on her album.
The two singles she’s released so far — Embers and Fall Again — live within the same melodic four-on-the-floor realm as her big collaborations like Escape, Shiver, and Where You Are, the last of which is another co-write with John Summit (that former President Barack Obama listed as one his favourite songs of 2023).

But overall, the album reflects Hayla’s comprehensive love of music.
“It’s a little bit eclectic, this album. It fits into the mould of who I am. Being able to show different levels of what kind of music I’m personally into. Also my journey in emotions throughout different things in my life. It’s gonna hopefully make people feel a bit closer to me as an artist on my own rather than me as a featured artist.”
Another reason listeners will feel closer to her on this album is because she is sharing original productions. She made the bulk of the tracks on the album with other producers, but she produced one of the tracks entirely on her own.
She describes the song as “ethereal,” “keys-and-synth-based,” and “very vocal harmony-led.” In the song, she layered 15 vocal tracks, recording them in her bedroom with an NT1A RØDE mic into Logic Pro X.
“It’s not a song. It’s more of a feeling, I suppose. It’s a nice breather.” Currently, she says she can produce well enough to get an idea across, but she wants to improve her production skills; she is holding herself accountable through the album. “I wasn’t sure if I was actually confident enough to put it on there, but I’ve just decided that I’m going to do it.”
Hayla performing
Hayla gives a lot of credit to her collaborators (whom she describes as “kindred spirits”) for helping her build her confidence. She thanks Summit and Kx5 for their support in welcoming her to the stage. But more than just her personal benefits, singing in these massive venues has allowed her to connect with an audience in a way she never had before.
“Being on those stages and being in front of that many people — you get addicted to that feeling,” Hayla says. “Something that I wrote and sang in a room far, far, far away from here is being played out and resonates with so many people. If I can share that emotion with people and that collective energy, it’s amazing.”
It might have taken years, but now Hayla is ready to share her most authentic emotions. She made her upcoming album with other people, but these songs represent who she is as an artist in her own right.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
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Erica Synths & Richie Hawtin introduce Bullfrog XL Sharing a similar design to the recently released Bullfrog educational synth, the new Bullfrog XL is three times larger in size and features some additional extras.

Price analysis 5/15: BTC, ETH, BNB, SOL, XRP, TON, DOGE, ADA, AVAX, SHIBRisky assets, including Bitcoin and altcoins, received a boost following today's CPI report.

Senate study proposes ‘at least’ $32B yearly for AI programsThe AI industry moves faster than the rest of the technology sector, which means it outpaces the federal government by several orders of magnitude.
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Designing A Quality Camera Slider Can Be Remarkably SatisfyingCamera sliders are great creative tools, letting you get smooth controlled shots that can class up any production. [Anthony Kouttron] decided to build one for an engineering class, and he ended up mighty satisfied with what he and his team accomplished.
As an engineering class project, this wasn’t a build done on a whim. Instead, [Anthony] and his fellow students spent plenty of time hashing out what they needed this thing to do, and how it should be built. An Arduino was selected as the brains of the operation, as a capable and accessible microcontroller platform. Stepper motors and a toothed belt drive were used to move the slider in a controllable fashion. The slider’s control interface was an HD44780-based character LCD, along with a thumbstick and two pushbuttons. The slider relied on steel tubes for a frame, which was heavy, but cost-effective and easy to fabricate. Much of the parts were salvaged from legendary e-waste bins on the university grounds.
The final product was stout and practical. It may not have been light, but the steel frame and strong stepper motor meant the slider could easily handle even heavy DSLR cameras. That’s something that lighter builds can struggle with.
Ultimately, it was an excellent learning experience for [Anthony] and his team. As a bonus, he got some great timelapses out of it, too. Video after the break.

Maze at the KIA Forum, L.A.For almost 50 years, Maze ft. Frankie Beverly has been one of the most iconic R&B groups. Before Maze, the band was known as Raw Soul which Beverly started in 1970 and he is the last remaining original member with the group. Original keyboardist Sam Porter and percussionist McKinley “Bug” Williams have both passed.

For Mother’s Day, the KIA Forum in Inglewood, CA hosted a special show with After 7, Anthony Hamilton and Maze ft. Frankie Beverly on their farewell tour. The last time Maze played L.A. was at the Greek Theater in 2019. For years the group closed out the Congo Square stage on the second Sunday of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. The majority of the crowd was dressed in all white as the band has for years. Between '77 and '93, the group released nine Gold albums. Although it has been 31 years since the last release, Maze has quite a catalog of hits to perform having over 30 charting singles and two which were number one on the US R&B chart. 

Maze took the stage around 9:30 P.M. and played an hour 15 with a set of classics like “Before I Let Go,” “We Are One,” “Golden Time of Day,” and “Happy Feelings.” Beverly, now 77 still sounds great and the band is incredible. Towards the end of their set, Beverly was presented a proclamation from the city of Inglewood marking May 12th Frankie Beverly day. There are just five shows left with the next one being in New Orleans, LA May 25th which the band has a long history with the city being the first group to sell out the Superdome back in 1982. The final show will be in Philadelphia, PA where the group formed July 6 at the Dell Music Center.

Photo credit - Ashley Osborn / Kia Forum Photos

How AI Large Language Models Work, Explained Without MathLarge Language Models (LLMs ) are everywhere, but how exactly do they work under the hood? [Miguel Grinberg] provides a great explanation of the inner workings of LLMs in simple (but not simplistic) terms that eschews the low-level mathematics of how they work in favor of laying bare what it is they do.
At their heart, LLMs are prediction machines that work on tokens (small groups of letters and punctuation) and are as a result capable of great feats of human-seeming communication. Most technical-minded people understand that LLMs have no idea what they are saying, and this peek at their inner workings will make that abundantly clear.
Be sure to also review an illustrated guide to how image-generating AIs work. And if a peek under the hood of LLMs left you hungry for more low-level details, check out our coverage of training a GPT-2 LLM using pure C code.

Google unveils ‘Music AI Sandbox’ with the help of Wyclef Jean, Justin Tranter and Marc RebilletWith these tools, "you’re able to move at light speed with your creativity," says Wyclef
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Sun Label Group launches under parent company Primary Wave Music, bringing together Sun Records, Gaither Music, Green Hill Music, Rural Rhythm and emeraldwavePaul Sizelove will oversee Sun Label Group as President
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Vavra Is A FREE Emulation Of The Waldorf MicroQ Synthesizer
Vavra, from the developer The Usual Suspects, is a plugin that supports emulations of the Waldorf MircoQ.  I’ll come out and say I have a heavy bias regarding the work being done by The Usual Suspects. Osirus, OsTirus, and Vavra, today’s focus, all feature quite heavily in my productions. There is something about the sounds [...]
View post: Vavra Is A FREE Emulation Of The Waldorf MicroQ Synthesizer

Spotify hit with ‘Cease & Desist’ from US Music Publishers Association: Read the full letterSpotify received a cease-and-desist letter Wednesday from the National Music Publishers Association regarding its use of lyrics in newly launched video functions and a remix feature that enables users to speed up and edit songs to create derivative works.....
The post Spotify hit with ‘Cease & Desist’ from US Music Publishers Association: Read the full letter appeared first on Hypebot.

iZotope launch major updates in RX 11 The latest iteration of iZotope's audio repair suite features innovative machine learning capabilities and tools tailored for music streaming.

Live Music Society adds $710,000 in grants to 24 small US music venuesThe nonprofit Live Music Society has awarded $710,000 in much-needed Music Action Grants to 24 small independent U.S. music venues.....
The post Live Music Society adds $710,000 in grants to 24 small US music venues appeared first on Hypebot.

Superbooth 2024: Befaco’s Oneiroi digital synth creates scarily good drone-like soundscapesSuperbooth 2024: Barcelona-based brand Befaco has introduced a new module called Oneiroi – a live performance-oriented, multi-functional and self-contained digital synth, focused on ambient pads and drone-like soundscapes.
Ideal for those looking to make sinister and scarily cool compositions, the Oneiroi gets its name from dark-winged creatures that each night emerge from their cave to deliver dreams and nightmares, according to Greek Mythology.

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It features a full stereo signal path: Stereo input, three oscillators, four effects, and a looper. It also includes LFO self-modulation and a randomiser. Its stereo input has three switchable gain levels and a two-colour LED for monitoring.
As for its three oscillators, these are sine, a stereo supersaw with detune control (inspired by the Roland JP-8000), and a 2048-sample dynamic wavetable oscillator that uses the looper buffer, with offset control.
There’s a single v/oct input for the three oscillators and unison control. Its filtering unit has four different types: low-pass, band-pass, high-pass, and comb filter. The filter can also be freely positioned along the effects chain.
The five-second looper has continuous speed control (from 2x in reverse direction, to 2x in forward direction) and a pre- and post-looping selector. There’s also a two-tap echo with controls over time and density, plus Reverb with macro control for size, filtering, and direction.
Check out more below:

Oneiroi is based on Rebel Technology’s OWL platform, and is being presented at Superbooth this year. You’ll find Befaco at booth Z170 from 16-18 May. Oneiroi currently has an estimated target release for early summer, and has an estimated price of 400€ (not including tax).
Find out more at Befaco.
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New Penalties for Artificial Streaming: What Musicians Need to KnowRecent changes at Spotify, Apple Music and other digital service providers introduce new penalties for artificial streaming. Find out how to navigate these changes and protect your music.....
The post New Penalties for Artificial Streaming: What Musicians Need to Know appeared first on Hypebot.