No DJ experience? No Problem: Your Shot, the ‘no experience required’ DJing competition lands in the US this fallThink you need years of practice, expensive gear, or insider connections to become a DJ? Well, think again. Your Shot, the DJ competition first launched in Australia 15 years ago, is heading to the US, giving complete beginners the chance to spin, learn, and perform on a global stage.

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Launching this September in Los Angeles and New York City, Your Shot aims to remove the traditional barriers of entry to DJ culture. Since 2010, the program has trained more than 12,500 participants in Australia and New Zealand, and now it’s bringing its beginner-friendly formula stateside.
“Your Shot is about giving people a platform to challenge themselves, learn the basics, build a community outside their bedrooms, and take their passion for DJing and dance music to the next level,” says Your Shot founder and CEO Steve Pillemer. “That’s what young Americans are asking for today, just like young Australians, and it’s so exciting to finally be able to answer the call.”
Participants don’t need any prior experience nor expensive gear or industry connections. Selected entrants will receive six weeks of expert DJ training, culminating in a showcase judged by industry professionals. Winners earn a coveted DJ slot “at one of the world’s top music festivals”, following in the footsteps of alumni who’ve performed at San Diego’s CRSSD, Croatia’s Hideout, Costa Rica’s BPM, and more.
The program also boasts an impressive alumni roster, including SIPPY, Tigerlily, and Go Freek. According to Your Shot, 62% of past participants now perform regular gigs. For the US launch, the initiative comes with advisory support from LP Giobbi, the trailblazing DJ and founder of FEMME HOUSE.
Registration for the inaugural US program is now open. In-person selections take place at Los Angeles’ Catch One on 13 September and New York’s Elsewhere on 20 September, with each city selecting 200 participants.
For aspiring DJs looking for their first big break, this is it: no experience required, full training provided, and a chance to take your music from your bedroom to the festival stage.
Learn more about the program at Your Shot.
The post No DJ experience? No Problem: Your Shot, the ‘no experience required’ DJing competition lands in the US this fall appeared first on MusicTech.

Ableton Live 12.3 is in public beta – featuring Stem separation, Splice integration and moreAbleton isn’t slowing down. Just months after rolling out Live 12.2, the Berlin-based company has launched the public beta for Live 12.3, and it comes stacked with features fans have been asking for.
At the top of the list is Stem Separation, powered by algorithms from Music AI, the creators of Moises. Users can now split vocals, bass, drums, and other sounds from any audio clip in Arrangement or Session View, or within the Browser. It’s a feature that has been creeping into other DAWs like Pro Tools and Logic Pro, and Ableton’s take opens up a ton of new options for sampling, reworking and inspiring ideas.

READ MORE: Best MIDI controllers to buy in 2025: 12 best Ableton Live controllers to buy

Splice integration is another major upgrade. Instead of juggling between apps, Splice users now get direct access to Splice’s full library of royalty-free sounds inside Live’s Browser – making it easier to filter, search and audition Splice samples in sync and in key with your project.
With the new ‘Search with Sound’ feature, you can even capture audio from your project and have Splice suggest samples that fit the grooves and harmonies of your track. Once you land on something you like, you can drag it from Splice and drop it straight into your session.

Live 12.3 also expands on 12.2’s Bounce to New Track tool with a new Bounce Group feature, which lets you bounce an entire Group track in place, including all its processing, to a new audio track. The new Paste Bounced Audio shortcut (just hit cmd/ctrl + opt/alt + v) makes it easy to paste clips as bounced audio into any track or take lane, perfect for quickly committing to ideas or stacking variations.
Meanwhile, Auto Pan has been renamed Auto Pan-Tremolo, and now features an updated interface, including dedicated modes for panning and tremolo effects. The new tabbed layout lets you switch instantly between the two modes, and each has deeper modulation controls and a wider range of time modes for greater rhythmic control.

Another sleeper hit in this update is the new A/B feature, which allows you to quickly set and compare two parameter states for every built-in instrument, audio, and MIDI effect in Live. You can, for example, use state A for tweaking values while leaving state B at the device’s default settings, and then switch between the two (with the tap of the ‘P’ key) to assess the differences.
Live 12.3 also adds fresh Packs and Max for Live tools. The new Generators Pack gives Live Standard and Suite users access to Patterns, a percussive MIDI tool designed to spark rhythmic ideas, along with Sting, an acid bass pattern generator inspired by a popular Max device of the same name.
Push 3 users also score big. In addition to Stem Separation, Bounce Groups, and the updated devices and Packs – all of which are coming to Push 3 Tethered and Standalone – Live 12.3 offers Push 3 users new ways to play with the instrument’s expressive pads.
A new XYZ layout transforms the controller’s pads into an expressive touchscreen for your racks, instruments, and effects – simply slide your finger across Push’s pads to shape the sound, and press to trigger punch-in effects. The Rhythm Generator Drum Rack layout brings Live’s generative beat-making straight onto Push, while touch-sensitive step editing makes humanising beats faster than ever. Plus, with class-compliant audio interface support, Push Standalone can now handle more complex setups, like recording using your interface’s mic preamp or running live rigs through DJ mixers.
To view the full list of updates, check out the release notes on Ableton. Users who own a Live 12 license can sign up for the Ableton beta program to try Live 12.3’s new features now.
The post Ableton Live 12.3 is in public beta – featuring Stem separation, Splice integration and more appeared first on MusicTech.

It’s time to meet Sudan Archives at her tempoIntroducing Gadget Girl: a valkyrie of technology who has soared to the pinnacle of music with her trusted machines by her side. Her Roland SP-404 sampler, MacBook Pro, Cantini Sonplus MIDI violin, DPA4088 CORE headset mic, and Sennheiser wireless transmitters have become her best friends. After an arduous heartbreak, she has receded into her laboratory, immersing herself in colourful wires and blinking lights. Finding solace after this separation, she moves into her next phase: one marked by creative technical mastery and fierce independence.
That’s the latest chrome-plated persona of MusicTech’s new cover star, Sudan Archives (real name Brittney Parks). Certain hallmarks – like her violin talent paired with her impressive ability to manipulate cultural genres with modern tech — have defined the vocalist, producer, and multi-instrumentalist’s artistic profile since she released her self-titled debut EP in 2017. However, she has been envisioning the Gadget Girl figure for many years, declaring the accompanying narrative as the “strongest story” upon which she’s built an album.
Sudan Archives is on the MusicTech Cover. Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
“I feel ready. I’ve always wanted to present [Sudan Archives] this way, but I was just afraid,” she says.
The album in question is her third full-length LP, THE BPM, out next month via Sudan’s longtime label, Stones Throw Records. The restaurant where we meet for our breakfast interview is across the street from the label’s office in Highland Park, one of the trendiest neighbourhoods in Los Angeles. As we chat, adventurous neo-soul artists like Erykah Badu, N.E.R.D., and Solange play on the overheard stereo. We’re in the exact kind of place that would play music from Sudan’s previous eras, which were defined by artsy beats with an orchestral appeal. THE BPM, though, is an expertly produced foray into fiery, genre-adventurous electronic music.
The lead single, DEAD, combines dissonant layers, electronic hooks, ghostly vocal harmonies, and muscle-flexing sound design, all atop a fast-hitting kick drum alternating its patterns throughout the four-minute runtime. It’s a lot, but with Sudan’s first-rate production skills, everything fits together with intricate detail.
Sudan also wrote her first full-on rap song, MY TYPE, on this album. Her smooth flow circles over a seething house beat punctuated by even more intentionally placed mechanical buzzes, scrapes, and percussion hits. As she deconstructs her bars in real time, she also breaks down the beat into syncopated fills and a raw, minimalist skeleton.
Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
“The album’s called THE BPM because I knew I wanted to make [music with] faster BPMs. I didn’t conform it to a specific sound, I just knew I wanted it to be a certain speed,” Sudan says. A central reason for picking up the tempo is her live show. “In the past, a lot of people viewed me as this spectacle. They weren’t really dancing. The music wasn’t really danceable either, because the BPM was more of [a] midtempo, trip-hop vibe. I was tired of people just staring.”
But the shift also went deeper. In the past, she executive-produced her albums alongside a collaborator, and though she did work with others on THE BPM – people she knew intimately – she was firmly in the driver’s seat for this record.
“I knew exactly what I wanted.” Sudan says. “All of the ideas came from my bare self. I wasn’t getting a bunch of beats from people and rapping and singing to them. It was coming from my heart.”
Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
The people Sudan did have around her, helping write and produce a significant portion of the album, were family. Years ago, she was in a group with her cousin and twin sister, which she describes as a Christian take on Destiny’s Child. As she developed her career, they followed other paths.
“Now, since my career’s gotten to this point, they don’t think of working with me that way, but I was like, ‘No, let’s all work together.’ We’re all still great songwriters,” Sudan says. “I wanted to show them how easy it is to still be in that world, and it really made them feel good. It just feels good to be able to write with your family. It was really fun to bring them on this project because we hadn’t done it in a while.”
By revisiting her formative musical experiences, Sudan felt comfortable expressing a part of her creativity and personality on THE BPM that she hadn’t in any of her prior professional applications. This side especially came out on boisterous banger MS. PAC MAN, which Sudan says would not have existed if she weren’t in the studio with her cousin.
“A lot of people viewed me as this spectacle. They weren’t really dancing”
“She was screaming, ‘Put it in my mouth!’, being silly and stupid. She literally did that as a joke, and I was joking back and started doing the song with her,” Sudan recalls. “I’m very silly, but I never really show that side.”
THE BPM was mostly made in Sudan’s home base of Los Angeles. But to further her familial connection to the album, she polished things off in two other cities, both historic incubators for American dance music: Chicago, where her dad hails from, and Detroit, her mother’s home city (and where her cousins went to school with the iconic producer and fellow Stones Throw artist, J Dilla).
Dance music wasn’t a major rotation for Sudan when she was growing up, but she feels a strong connection to the genre simply because of her parents’ respective hometowns. “On top of wanting to make faster records, I should pay homage to where they’re from. That’s why I wanted to finish it there,” she says.
Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
With the album mostly complete by the time she headed to the Midwest, Sudan focused on a specific characteristic of the album while in each city. In Detroit, she refined the drums, working with her cousin’s partner, Eric Terhune, an accomplished producer who’s made beats for prominent Detroit rappers such as Sada Baby. While he didn’t have any classic techno hardware like a Roland TB-303 or TR-909, he had plenty of emulators in his primary DAW, FL Studio.
“I would give him a song, he would rework it, and the drums would sound way more techno,” Sudan recalls. “The drums were there, but I really feel like he changed the sound. Going to Detroit changed the sound of the drums.”
Sudan went to Chicago for a session with Black chamber music collective D-Composed. Chicago is known for dance music with a string-driven flair, and this session ended up creating a compelling dichotomy between her initial recordings and the full quartet.
“I’m very silly, but I never really show that side”
“It needed to sound fuller. Half the strings [on the album] were me, quarter-inch [direct input] in with an acoustic/electric violin, and I did a lot of layering. Then we sprinkled in the quartet on top of it,” Sudan explains. “It feels like it was a lo-fi/hi-fi orchestral mix of these high-resolution sounding strings versus my lo-fi strings. Then we figured out ways to blend them together.”
Sudan specifically mentions the string work on A BUG’S LIFE, in which the glistening sound of the quartet balances perfectly with the wavy electric feel of Sudan’s contribution. Another is YEA YEA YEA, where the strings gracefully bridge the verses and choruses and close the song on a sombre note – above a full-bodied trap kick.
For Sudan, who has been playing violin since she was a child, the instrument is intertwined with a sense of technological advancement. She got her first electric violin around the same time she started making beats on her iPad, and had her life changed by African Electronic Music 1975-1982, the album by Cameroonian pioneer Francis Bebey. “It changed my whole perspective on incorporating your instruments with electronic music,” Sudan recalls. “That moment will never be forgotten, and I will always use that inspiration. It was so cool to me how he made things danceable but kept the sound of traditional instruments.”
Image: Ben Bentley for MusicTech
Sudan is continuing to experiment with the form and function of the violin as she prepares for an album tour that will take her to celebrated venues such as Paradiso in Amsterdam and Roundhouse in London. She’s developing a wireless system where she can point her bow at different objects to change lighting colours on stage or trigger a cracking effect in an LED screen. She’s also interested in syncing pieces of the songs within Ableton Live so she can control loops with the movement of her bow.
It’s no surprise Sudan would be keen to augment the violin – after all, it’s a key piece of the Gadget Girl’s arsenal and one of her closest companions. Just as Gadget Girl leaned on her technological cohorts to face hardships, Sudan relied on her musical instruments and tools to get through her own personal challenges as she was making THE BPM.
“All of the ideas came from my bare self… It was coming from my heart”
“I sold my house. I broke up with my ex. I was going through all of this during the album being made,” Sudan says. “Then, right when it was done, everything ended. It’s almost like the album was a reset.”
What comes after a reset? For Sudan, it’s her fastest body of work to date, backed by the strongest story she’s ever woven into an album, presented with her most ambitious live show of her career. Welcome to Sudan Archives’ new era.
Sudan Archives’ THE BPM is out October 17 via Stones Throw.
Words: Harry Levin
Photography: Ben Bentley
Styling: Justus Steele
Makeup: Selena
Location: StuSpaceLA
The post It’s time to meet Sudan Archives at her tempo appeared first on MusicTech.

Sonarworks Autumn Sale Sonarworks have just launched their Autumn Sale, savings of up to 40% being applied across their range of SoundID Reference and SoundID VoiceAI software packages until 21 September 2025.

Release details
Release title:
Милый Котик
Main artist name:
Alice MassLove
Release date:
20th Aug, 2025
https://publme.lnk.to/371552
#newmusic #Release #Music #indepedent #artist #pop #dance

A Fine Line Between Stupid and Clever: The Origins of Spinal TapBack in the '80s, before the internet, Spinal Tap fans could only speculate at the real-life inspirations for the many unforgettable scenes and set pieces in the film. Now, at last, we can reveal the truth. Here are the stories behind some of the finest moments in Spinal Tap.

Microsoft says Azure affected after cables cut in the Red SeaIt's not clear who cut the cables or why.

El Salvador celebrates Bitcoin anniversary amid mixed results 4 years onEl Salvador was the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender, but it has since scaled back its Bitcoin laws and public sector involvement.

Maurice Brings Immersive Audio Recording to the MassesImmersive audio is the new hotness in the recording world. Once upon a time, mono was good enough. Then someone realized humans have two ears, and everyone wanted stereo. For most of us, that’s where it stopped, but audio connoisseurs kept going into increasingly baroque surround-sound setups — ending in Immersive Audio, audio that is meant to fully reproduce the three-dimensional soundscape of the world around us. [DJJules] is one of those audio connoisseurs, and to share the joy of immersive audio recording with the rest of us, he’s developed Maurice, a compact, low-cost immersive microphone.
Maurice is technically speaking, a symmetrical ORTF3D microphone array. OTRF is not a descriptive acronym; it stands for Office de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française, the fine people who developed this type of microphone for stereo use. The typical stereo ORTF setup requires two cardioid microphones and angles them 110 degrees apart at a distance of 17 cm. Maurice arrays four such pairs, all oriented vertically and facing 90 degrees from one another for fully immersive, 8-channel sound. All of those microphones are thus arrayed to capture sound omnidirectionally, and give good separation between the channels for later reproduction. The mountings are all 3D printed, and [DJJules] kindly provides STLs.
This is the speaker setup you need to get full use of Maurice’s recordings. Now let’s see Paul Allen’s speakers.
Recording eight audio channels simultaneously is not trivial for the uninitiated, but fortunately, [DJJules] includes a how-to in his post. We particularly like his tip to use resistor color coding to identify the DIN cables for different microphone channels. Playback, too, requires special setup and processing. [DJJules] talks about listening on his 7.1.4 stereo setup, which you can find in a companion post. That’s a lot of speakers, as you might imagine.
There are high-end headphones that claim to reproduce an immersive sound field as well, but we can’t help but wonder if you’d miss the “true” experience without head tracking. Even with regular department-store headphones, the demo recordings linked via the Instructable sound great, but that probably just reflects the quality of the individual microphones.
Audio can be a make-or-break addition to VR experiences, so that would seem to be an ideal use case for this sort of technology. Maurice isn’t the only way to get there; we previously focused on [DJJules]’s ambisonic microphone, which is another way to reproduce a soundscape. What do you think, is this “immersive audio” the new frontier of Hi-Fi, or do we call it a stereo for a reason? Discuss in the comments!

Revealed Recordings Revealed Serum 2 Big Room Techno Drops Vol. 1Revealed Serum 2 Big Room Techno Drops Vol. 1 is a collection of 64 festival-powered presets, designed to deliver maximum energy and impact into your drops. Organized into 3 main categories: Acid (2), Leads (48), and Synths (14), this pack equips you with the freshest Big Room Techno sounds on the market. From blistering acid to explosive drop leads and gritty stabs & screeches, these presets are crafted to deliver high impact and cut through the mix with precision and power. Among every preset having modwheel assignments, each preset is assigned all eight macro controls, providing quick modulation options to customize and evolve your riffs. With Serum 2 Big Room Techno Drops Vol. 1, you'll have an arsenal of source sounds to create tracks built for the mainstage. Reveal Yourself. Revealed Serum 2 Big Room Techno Drops Vol. 1 - Details 3 Main Preset Categories: ACID (2) LEAD (48) SYNTH (14). Total: 64 presets. Read More

VSL introduce Synchron Prime Sections VSL's entry-level offering has just been renamed to Synchron Prime Orchestra, and is now available to purchase in six individual sections as well as a complete bundle. 

Why is an Amazon-backed AI startup making Orson Welles fan fiction?This is a bad idea.

Phishing scams cost users over $12M in August — Here's how to stay safePhishing scams continue to impact crypto and Web3 users, prompting the need for vigilance and personal online safety countermeasures.

No Plans for the Weekend? Learn Raytracing!Weekends can be busy for a lot of us, but sometimes you have one gloriously free and full of possibilities. If that’s you, you might consider taking a gander at [Peter Shirley]’s e-book “Learning Raytracing in One Weekend”.
This gradient is the first image that the book talks you through producing. It ends with the spheres.
This is very much a zero-to-hero kind of class: it starts out defining the PPM image format, which is easy to create and manipulate using nearly any language. The book uses C++, but as [Peter] points out in the introduction, you don’t have to follow along in that language; there won’t be anything unique to C++ you couldn’t implement in your language of choice.
There are many types of ray tracers. Technically, what you should end up with after the weekend ends is a path tracer. You won’t be replacing the Blender Cycles renderer with your weekend’s work, but you get some nice images and a place to build from. [Peter] manages to cram a lot of topics into a weekend, including diffuse materials, metals, dialectrics, diffraction, and camera classes with simple lens effects.
If you find yourself with slightly more time, [Peter] has you covered. He’s also released books on “Raytracing: The Next Week.” If you have a lot more time, then check out his third book, “Raytracing: The Rest of Your Life.”
This weekend e-book shows that ray-tracing doesn’t have to be the darkest of occult sciences; it doesn’t need oodles of hardware, either. Even an Arduino can do it..

Karanyi Sounds Vapor Dimension modulation plugin is FREE for a limited time
Karanyi Sounds offers the Vapor Dimension ($39) modulation plugin for free when you sign up for their newsletter. This offer is available for a limited time Originally developed as an in-house effect for their Vapor Keys and Lofi Keys instruments, Vapor Dimension was later released as a fully standalone plugin designed to add movement, color, [...]
View post: Karanyi Sounds Vapor Dimension modulation plugin is FREE for a limited time