“No matter where I lived, I was still an insecure, anxious little weirdo”: Moby says money from Play success did little to change his personalityElectronic music legend Richard Melville Hall aka Moby has reflected on the unexpected success of his breakthrough album Play and the effects (or lack thereof) of all that money on his personality.

READ MORE: Steve Albini’s four-hour Mix with the Masters lesson is now available to watch for free

With the release of Play in 1999, Moby’s life was forever changed — along with the public’s consciousness of a genre referred to at the time as “electronica”. Despite its slow commercial start, Play would go on to become the biggest-selling electronica album of all time, with over 12 million copies sold globally, and all 18 tracks licensed for commercial use.
Asked about how the windfall from the record had changed things for him at the time, Moby tells Billboard: “When I started licensing music and making money from it — and it’s tricky because it might sound self-serving or even self-aggrandising — the deal I made with myself was, ‘Make money so you can do something good with the money.’”
“So It seemed creepy to draw too much attention to that, so I’m very hesitant to mention it. But my idea was, ‘if I have money, I can try and use it to a good effect.’”
The musician credits his upbringing for his relationship with money, having grown up in “in the world of hardcore punk rock in and around New York in the early ’80s”, where one of his favourite bands, “like everybody’s”, was Minor Threat.

“One of my musical and spiritual heroes was Ian MacKaye from Minor Threat who famously would only charge $5 for a show,” he explains. “As you know, the straight edge punk rock scene of the early ’80s was aggressively non-capitalistic.”
That said, Moby concedes that there were some “very selfish, stupid things” that he’d spent money on, though he soon realised that “no matter where I lived, I was still an insecure, anxious little weirdo.”
“So I was quickly disabused of the idea that buying a giant house was going to fix any of my problems,” he says. “Rather, I said, okay, I’ve made some money. Let me figure out how to live a comfortable, simple, life then ideally use the money to sort of move the needle away from this current, terrible status quo, this current terrible system regarding food production, environmental destruction, attacks on democracy, voter suppression. In my way, I’ve been trying to stay true to that.”
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Warm Audio’s WA-44 expertly revives a vocal microphone design from the 1930s£999, warmaudio.com
With a portfolio of over 40 products, mostly recreations of classic microphones, analogue preamps and processors from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, we wondered where Warm Audio chief Bryce Young would go next. The answer is, of course, even further back in time…to the 1930s!

READ MORE: IK Multimedia’s iRig Stream Mic Pro is a hassle-free solution for all recording artists

The WA-44 is an authentic replica of a classic figure-8 ribbon mic from the mid-30s, once (and still) used by professionals in the recording, broadcasting and film industries.
The original RCA 44 BX can be seen in iconic photos of a young Elvis Presley, who used the mic to record many of his classic early rock ‘n’ roll recordings, regarded as the foundation on which modern pop music is built. There’s no denying this is one seriously cool-looking microphone.
As usual, Warm Audio has cut no corners recreating this ancient design, with the WA-44 weighing almost 3 kg. It’s a large beast for sure yet, by nature, ribbon mics are extremely delicate so the sturdy, foam-lined case the company has designed for it should be used for protection when not in use.
Inside the hefty metal casing is the ribbon itself, a ‘true-to-length’ 60 mm design manufactured in Japan from 99.1% pure aluminium. This ribbon is bigger than those found in most other designs and is crucial to the lush, larger-than-life sound it delivers.
WA-44 with case
While this new 44-style microphone is authentic to the vintage design in most ways, it embraces modern technology with the choice of magnet in which the ribbon is suspended. Original RCA 44s used AlNiCo (aluminium, nickel and cobalt), however, the WA-44 employs a Neodymium magnet, which is more efficient, stronger and durable than the ancient type.
A custom, American-made CineMag output transformer is used (these transformers are premium designs as found in several Warm Audio products), which helps the WA-44 partner with modern mic preamps as well as providing a degree of protection against the accidental use of phantom power. Usually, the application of phantom power will destroy or badly damage a ribbon instantaneously, however, this circuit design offers protection for the delicate ribbon. Even so, the use of phantom power is best avoided.
The fragile nature of the ribbon should also be considered when subjecting it to large gusts of moving air. A thick, protective ‘sock’ is provided for transportation yet it’s also advisable to use a windshield or pop filter (not provided) when using the mic to record, say, close-mic’d horns or kick drum.
Like all ribbon mics, the WA-44 is relatively insensitive in comparison with other types of dynamic microphone and condenser designs, which means it requires a liberal amount – at least 65 dB – of amplification. Most decent outboard mic preamps will deliver adequate gain, however plugging directly into an interface will not provide enough juice to enable the mic’s true tonal quality to be appreciated. With that in mind, Warm Audio has created the WarmLifter, an inline active preamp that can be inserted between mic and interface to provide an additional 26 dB of gain. This is sold separately for £159, which could be a cost-effective way of providing gain without the expense of buying an outboard mic preamp.
WarmLifter
Also common to ribbon mics is the figure-8 polar pattern, meaning the back of the microphone captures audio as much as the front. This means care has to be taken when positioning the mic in a room. If it’s placed close to a boundary with a reflective surface, with a vocalist addressing the front for example, the mic will pick up reflections from the rear surface; this may even cause problems with phase cancellations. Placing the mic more towards the centre of your recording room will eliminate these problems but, if space is tight, some absorbent material (such as portable vocal booths) can help.
The figure-8 pattern is excellent at rejecting sound from the sides, though, so judicious positioning can eliminate unwanted spillage better than cardioid designs.
The sonic signature of the WA-44 is unmistakably vintage in character. Acoustic guitar is captured with plenty of mid-focused resonance and weighty low-end heft albeit without the top-end sparkle you get with many condenser designs. The mic has no onboard filters of any kind so a high-pass filter on a mic preamp (or the WarmLifter) would be useful for this and many other applications.
Many potential customers will want to use the mic for lead vocals and, here, a certain amount of mic technique comes into play. More than most, the WA-44 has a pronounced proximity effect, so the closer the sound source, the more low end will be captured. This can work particularly well when all the warmth and smoothness of an intimate, close-mic’d performance is desired, however for punchy rock and pop vocals, a little more distance than usual between performer and mic will give a brighter balance.
WA-44 in use
While the WA-44 lacks the super-top response characteristics of many condenser vocal mics, the ribbon provides a degree of midrange detail and transparency few others can attain. What’s more, it responds extremely well to a liberal boost of high-end EQ; a 16kHz boost from a Pultec-style equaliser sounds sublime, adding a halo of air to a full-bodied recording.
Despite the delicate nature of its ribbon, the WA-44 is capable of handling SPLs of up to 140 dB, so louder sources such as drums and amplified instruments can be recorded without fear of damage.
Amplified electric bass cabinets benefit from the inherently fulsome bottom-end response, while the WA-44’s use on double bass is a no-brainer. Smaller stringed instruments such as violins, which can often sound shrill and sharp, benefit from the smoother, slightly muted top-end response to bring out the body and phrasing of notes without the scratchiness of leading edges.
Warm Audio’s WA-44 is a world-class ribbon microphone offering warmth, detail and dynamic expression few can equal. Driven with sufficient good-quality gain, it delivers clarity and mid-range transparency as good as, or better than many more costly, boutique designs. While it doesn’t boast anything in the way of cutting-edge DAW-friendly technology, it expresses a rich, vintage vibe in a truly sumptuous package.
Key features

99.1% aluminium, 2.5 micron-thick ribbon
Custom CineMag USA transformers
Powerful Neodymium magnet
Pigtail XLR Gotham cable with Star Quad shielding
Polar pattern: figure-8
Frequency response 20 Hz – 20k Hz (+/- 12dB)
Max SPL: 140dB

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“I’m just a puppet when it comes to comping her vocal”: FINNEAS taught Billie Eilish how to comp vocals so she could record alone in new album Hit Me Hard and SoftIn a new interview, Billie Eilish takes us behind the scenes of the making of Hit Me Hard and Soft, and the evolving musical partnership she shares with her brother FINNEAS.
Diving into the album’s recording process, FINNEAS – Eilish’s longtime production partner – tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that he actually taught his sister how to comp her own vocals this time so she could record alone in the studio.

READ MORE: Steve Albini’s four-hour Mix with the Masters lesson is now available to watch for free

“She has such a good ear and I’m just a puppet when it comes to comping her vocals because she’s so meticulous,” says FINNEAS. “And I can comp a vocal, no prob, I’m doing it forever. But she got better and better at knowing like, ‘I like this take and I like this word from this, taking like this word’.”
“And so I was just like, well, let me teach you how to do this. It’s not that hard. And so I taught her how to record herself and how to comp herself.”
“[Sometimes] I’d get a call to come downstairs, she’s like ‘something’s wrong come downstairs and fix it’,” he continues, “but one of the reasons I did it is because I’ve always recorded alone and there’s stuff that I am just not brave enough to do in front of somebody else. It’s like I know I’m her brother but…”
It’s a sentiment Eilish shares in. Highlighting a vocal moment near the end of the track Birds Of A Feather, the singer says that she “could never have done that” had FINNEAS been in the room.

“This is the most I’ve ever written and contributed,” says Eilish. “I did some production stuff, even. And I did all my own vocals.”
Watch the full interview below.

In other news, Billie Eilish has released an isolated vocals version of HIT ME HARD AND SOFT for producers to get creative with. Fans are invited to remix the album via BandLab and the winner will get to “take home an exclusive merch pack with a HIT ME HARD AND SOFT vinyl autographed by Billie, and a pair of tickets to her upcoming tour.”
The post “I’m just a puppet when it comes to comping her vocal”: FINNEAS taught Billie Eilish how to comp vocals so she could record alone in new album Hit Me Hard and Soft appeared first on MusicTech.

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.

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.

Parallel compression: What it is and how to use it
In this in-depth guide, learn about what parallel compression is, how it works, and how you can apply it effectively in your own music.

Tencent Music’s AI-powered tech can ‘predict the next hit song,’ and 5 other things we learned from its latest annual reportTME is also facing 695 copyright infringement lawsuits, and it's negotiating a 10% stake in an 'overseas entertainment company'
Source

Ircam Amplify unveils AI tool to detect AI-generated musicIrcam calls the AI detector, targeted to stakeholders in the music industry, a "game-changer"
Source

Jack Dorsey departs Bluesky boardBluesky’s most prominent backer has left its board. On Saturday, Jack Dorsey posted on X about grants for open protocols from his philanthropic Start Small initiative. This prompted someone to ask Dorsey if he was still on the Bluesky board, and he responded with a terse “no.” Dorsey did not answer any of the follow-up […]
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This Windows Installer Installs LinuxIt may be a very long time since some readers have installed a copy of Windows, but it appears at one point during the installation there’s a step that asks you which OS version you would like to install. Normally this is populated by whichever Windows flavours come on the install medium, but [Naman Sood] has other ideas. How about a Windows installer with Alpine Linux as one of the choices? Sounds good to us.
You can see it in action in the video below the break. Indeed Alpine Linux appears as one of the choices, followed by the normal Windows licence accept screen featuring the GPL instead of any MS text. The rest of the installer talks about installing Windows, but we can forgive it not expecting a Linux install instead.
So, the question we’re all asking is: how is it done? The answer lies in a WIM file, a stock Windows image which the installer unpacks onto your hard drive. The Linux distro needs to be installable onto an NTFS root partition, and to make it installable there’s a trick involving the Windows pre-installation environment.
This is an amusing hack, but the guide admits it’s fragile and perhaps not the most useful. Even so, the sight of Linux in a Windows installer has to be worth it.

How to prepare your mix for mastering: 5 essential tips
From leaving headroom to best practices for exporting, here are five essential tips that will help you prepare your mix for mastering.

Arturia release Augmented Yangtze Arturia’s Augmented series offers a combination of sampled acoustic instruments and synthesis, providing music makers with a comprehensive range of sounds that range from authentic to abstract.

Swifties drive 1M streams with Sationhead listening party as more Artists take noteLast week, Taylor Nation, the official Taylor Swift fan account, hosted a listening party for her new album "The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology" on Sationhead, which drove over 1 million streams on Apple Music and Spotify in under 24 hours.....
The post Swifties drive 1M streams with Sationhead listening party as more Artists take note appeared first on Hypebot.

Behringer’s Vintage plugin is now out and available to download for free – for real this timeWe thought we’d be able to get our hands on it earlier this month, but now Behringer really has released Vintage, its first synth plugin, for free.
Earlier this month, some people were able to download it for free, but the Behringer Vintage webpage seemed to be broken, and it turns out there was an “accidental leak”. Behringer explained in a Facebook comment addressing the confusion: “The Vintage VST has not been officially launched and the Weblink for our testers has accidentally leaked. We’re in the process of finalising the plugin and launching it soon.”

READ MORE: Save nearly $2,000 on Brainworx’s Heritage Bundle at Plugin Boutique

And now, it’s finally available for real.
The plugin, which is “based on meticulous modelling of legendary analogue vintage synthesizers,” now has a proper page on the Behringer website. While it’s free, Behringer says that it’s valued at $99, and you can make a donation to the Playing for Change Foundation, which supports music education and works with artists around the world,  if you wish.
It was created with Stefano D’Angelo of music DSP company Orastron, and offers two oscillators with hard sync and a choice of five waveforms, two 12/24 dB filters, a noise generator, as well as two amp modules and dual LFOs.
Meanwhile, Tone2 Audiosoftware clarified that it wasn’t involved in the development of Vintage after some people found similarities between Vintage and Tone2’s Saurus, saying, “The look and feel of the recently released Behringer Vintage has caused confusion among our customers. Behringer Vintage is not a new version of Tone2 Saurus. Both products have a different synthesis architecture and sound different. We are not involved in the development of Behringer Vintage.”
Vintage is available for PC and Mac, and runs in VST/AU/AAX formats.
If you want to get your hands on the plugin, head to Behringer.
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TikTok will shut down rather than sell to U.S. owner, Reuters reportsTikTok owner ByteDance will shut down the app rather than sell it if legal options fail to combat legislation to ban the app in the U.S., but the reasons behind. Continue reading
The post TikTok will shut down rather than sell to U.S. owner, Reuters reports appeared first on Hypebot.