“This is not an assembly line. I’m literally just a girl making art”: For DJ_Dave, there are no musical shortcutsAny lifelong muso knows well the joy of finding their chosen instrument: the first time you hear the growl of an analogue synth, the frets of an electric guitar. For DJ_Dave, or Sarah Davis to her friends, it was the sight of an LCD screen – blank, save for a few lines of multi-coloured text.
“There was totally a ‘click’ moment,” Dave enthuses. “I was like, ‘oh my god, this is it.’ I knew this was exactly how I wanted to make music, exactly how I wanted to express my creativity.”
DJ_Dave on the MusicTech Cover. Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
What looks like creativity to Dave looks like an extremely strong online banking password to most others: (“bd bd hh bd rim bd hh bd”) is a drum sequence, and (“c2, eb3 g3 [bb3 c4]”) denotes both melody and harmony. You see, Dave is a live music coder by trade, and her instrument is Strudel. Using this open source programming environment, she’s able to conjure up a world of airy synths, angelic vocal chops, and thumping beats. Now based in Los Angeles and hard at work on her first full-length album, Dave is gearing up for a tour of the US, Europe and the UK alongside horsegiirL in the second half of the year.
If you’re wondering exactly what ‘live coding’ is, you’re not alone. Up until recently, this stuff was largely confined to experimental music meetups, academic hubs, and aptly titled ‘algoraves’ where practitioners take turns showing off their skill at manipulating command line interfaces for real-time music making.
Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
“It’s an environment where you write code and the output is sound,” Dave says simply when asked to explain how it all works. Skipping all the fancy graphic user interfaces you might get in Ableton Live or Bitwig, live music coding relies on written instructions to generate everything from simple sine waves to complex sequences. “It can be any type of sound, any genre of music. My specific genre of interest has always been dance music.”
Emerging in the mid-90s as an offshoot of Europe’s Demoscene – a DIY-centric subculture where digital visual arts and computer music combine to produce weird and wonderful results – live coding has grown into a vibrant, albeit niche, community. Dave first encountered it by chance during her college years; while completing a degree in fashion she decided on a whim to enroll in a class on live coding. By the end of it, she was hooked.
“Screen-sharing is nerve-wracking… I don’t always remember to clean up my files before I perform!”
The Covid pandemic initially kept Dave from performing live, but over the coming years she built a reputation as a skilled performer – and one unafraid to push against scene norms.“I was predominantly performing outside of live coding spaces,” Dave recalls. “Not even intentionally – I also played at algoraves – but I would go play at these random clubs in New York. That just hadn’t really been done before.”
It was also the kind of music she was making: dance tunes with more than a dash of pop sensibility. Dave went from playing small NYC venues to multi-night stints at buzzy joints like The Echo in LA and even Grimes’ Met Gala afterparty. She began performing live vocals during her sets, and also to automate parts of her code, which allowed her to step away from the laptop and take centre stage when needed.
However, there’s one area where Dave holds true to the ‘traditional’ aesthetics of live coding: sharing her screen to allow the audience to see the code as it’s being written.
Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
“It is nerve-wracking,” she concedes. “My coding process feels intimate, similar to how anyone would probably feel about their music production process. And I don’t always remember to clean up my files before I perform!”
Despite the understandable anxiety of having thousands watch you programme a musical algorithm on the fly, Dave emphasises that transparency lies at the very heart of live coding’s appeal. “The way it’s performed is so direct,” she states. “I’m cueing these sounds, people are watching them be triggered, hearing the music be created in real time. It’s such a cool way for audiences to see the full production process, start to finish, happening right in front of them.”
For a time, Dave experimented with bringing some of the now-standard EDM spectacle to her shows, with visual art overlays atop her lines of code. However, she’s increasingly stripping all that back to give audiences maximum insight into how the music comes to life.
Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
“I make sure the code is visible as much as possible,” she says. “When I get on stage, I can almost guarantee that I’ll be performing to some people who have never seen live coding before and it’s been such an interesting learning process for me to think about how to catch them up to speed, to explain what I’m doing without speaking.”
Educating the masses isn’t just something Dave does on stage. In 2024 she co-authored an academic paper on live coding in pop music, and embarked on her Always Learning Tour of college campuses in the US, where she’d give coding classes and public lectures in the day followed by performances in the evening. As most of the tools required are free and open source, the only real obstacles to the growth of live coding are a lack of public awareness and the need to master some basic console commands – something Dave has been trying to rectify.
“There is so much room for improvisation. The random outputs, the mistakes – I’ve always embraced that”
“Not a lot of schools offer a class on live-coding music and I want to try to bring this to people where I can,” Dave explains. “I was introduced to live coding in such a helpful way: having someone sitting in front of me, telling me the history and being there to answer my questions. It was such an invaluable introduction that I’ve always been so grateful for.”
Live coding is something that typically happens in the moment – with sounds and structures often wholly created or dynamically modified on the fly. This presented something of a challenge when Dave began recording and releasing her music.
“There is so much room for improvisation,” she exclaims. “The random outputs that it’ll give me, the mistakes – I’ve always embraced that. So, in the beginning, I would record the music as raw as I could. The first three songs I put out in early 2020 were recorded straight out of my live coding environment; I didn’t structure them, and there was no mixing or anything. I just bounced them and put them on Spotify.”
Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
These days, Dave leans more on DAWs for structuring her song arrangements but makes clear that everything still starts with code. “I love doing vocal chops in Strudel because every single time it sounds amazing. So, I make a vocal loop and then run that stem for a really long time, maybe for three minutes, and then take that into Logic Pro and find a section that I like. I don’t cut things up too much because I like when it sounds a little fucked up. So, there’s always these live elements present.”
As she works on her first full-length album, Dave says she’s balancing a “concerted effort to hone my sound” with a desire to break new ground. “I’m working on a lot of high-energy dance songs for the album,” she says. “But I also want to let myself go into other areas, other sub-genres that I haven’t really been able to do before.”
She’s also drawing from her experiences as a producer and a remixer. Having worked with Grimes and remixed Tove Lo but also Channel Tres, Dave says a lot of what she loves about remixing has found its way back into her own production process. “I love taking pre-existing sounds and manipulating them to sound brand new, and so I was always drawn to remixing other people’s work,” she says. “Creating the album, I was like, ‘well, if I love remixing so much, why not just remix my own songs?’ So, I would finish a track and then take part of it and remix it into a new track.”
Image: David Milan Kelly for MusicTech
In 2026, generative AI, vibe coding, and social media’s propensity to stoke controversy all make technology a contentious subject, especially in music. Despite, or perhaps because, her creativity is so intrinsically linked to computer programming, Dave is not taking a rose-tinted view of how technology writ-large is influencing the world. “I am tech positive in some ways,” she allows. “But tech just felt a lot more fun when I was younger. Growing up, I was obsessed with gadgets, with classic early-2000s technology, and the aesthetics that went along with it all. It shifted for me when I started learning about planned obsolescence, because that is some bullshit.
“We as a society have been purposefully pulled away from our own power,” Dave continues. “I mean, I know this kid who made his own WiFi router – that is the type of shit that really excites me about technology. It’s putting technology back in our hands and making it fun again.”
For Dave, the allure of live coding is the music – but also the people, the culture, and the promise that technology doesn’t have to be standardised and streamlined. The rough edges, the anarchic spirit, the individualities and idiosyncrasies that have been ironed out of the modern internet still exist in subcultures like these.
“I like when it sounds a little fucked up. There’s always these live elements present”
“What I’ve always loved about live coding is that it has these really authentic, really punk roots. It has always been this transparent interaction with technology. The people that are involved in live coding are genuinely awesome, have good morals, are smart and amazing. Being involved in this community has made me feel a lot more optimistic about tech.”
Against the pervasive background noise of AI, productivity plugins, and frictionless user experiences, there is something inspiring about an artist making digital music line by line, beat by beat.
“It always cracks me up when I get emails telling me to try some AI coding tool that will read my screen and suggest what to code next, or when people leave comments telling me that I should use blah, blah, blah because it’ll ‘streamline the process’,” Dave says, rolling her eyes. “What process? This is not a corporation. This is not an assembly line. I’m literally just a girl making art. There’s nothing to shortcut.”
Words: Clovis McEvoy
Photography: David Milan Kelly
Location: Martinsound
The post “This is not an assembly line. I’m literally just a girl making art”: For DJ_Dave, there are no musical shortcuts appeared first on MusicTech.

CapySynth synthwave synthesizer is FREE for the next few hours
CapybaraSoftware is offering CapySynth as a free download for 24 hours, with roughly 12 hours left at the time of writing. Thanks to BPB community member N. Robin for sharing this in the BPB Community. It was perfect timing. I saw the comment as soon as I woke up this morning, so I’m trying to [...]
View post: CapySynth synthwave synthesizer is FREE for the next few hours

Xylo Audio XyloWidthXyloWidth is a professional multi-band stereo wideness and phase decorrelation tool. Video Guide Key Features : 3-Band Linkwitz-Riley Crossover Uses 4th-order (LR4) filters to split your signal into Low, Mid, and High bands. Sums perfectly flat with zero phase distortion, letting you widen highs while keeping lows tightly centered. Sustain-Only Stereo Widening Separates dry transients from sustaining reverb and pads, applying widening only to the sustain tails to preserve transient punch in the center. Mono-Safe Decorrelation All-pass filtering Cascade creates lush width out of mono tracks that sums perfectly back to mono without comb-filtering. Read More

SmallRun.net Enters the Marketplace MarketSo you have a project that you love, and everyone else loves too. People start saying “you should sell this” but where? Well, there’s a new marketplace you might want to consider called called SmallRun, aiming at makers and their, well, small production runs.
SmallRun will absolutely host your custom PCBs, on-demand 3D prints, and other traditional maker products — but they’ll also happily sell your merch, too. Along with electronics and hardware, they aim to allow you to sell products in categories like tabletop gaming, sciences, and yes, accessories/apparel.
For sellers, they offer automatic payouts and promise to take care of the taxes by integrating with Stripe. That said, they’re still working on getting the whole VAT thing set up for products imported to the EU. EU to EU sales are apparently OK. They’ll host build logs, which may drive engagement with your product. There’s even a handy tool to import your existing listings from eBay, Tindie, Lectronz, Etsy, Shopify, or Crowd Supply if you’re already in the biz. They make their money by taking a cut of your sales: eight percent, plus forty cents per listing.
Depending on your perspective, you might wonder if we need another marketplace, To that we can only say: “Let a thousand flowers bloom!” Competition should drive these marketplaces to continuously improve and we all win.
If you’re selling online, even packaging can become a project. If you’re not, but are interested in starting, our “From Project to Kit” series from ten years back remains surprisingly relevant.
Thanks to [Aron] for the tip!

Ubisoft co-founder Claude Guillemot dies in plane crashClaude Guillemot, who founded Ubisoft with his four brothers, has died at the age of 69.

Bitcoin tipped for $66K top as trader flags 'suspicious' BTC price gainsBitcoin pushed for a $64,000 reclaim despite the US-Iran war making a partial comeback and Binance spot sellers keeping up pressure from earlier in the week.

John Walden’s Cubase Video Tutorials Regular SOS contributor and Cubase workshop columnist John Walden has just released a new Cubase video course that is now available on the Udemy platform.

Signal’s Meredith Whittaker wants you to remember that AI chatbots ‘are not your friends’"These are not your friends. These are not conscious beings. These are not sentient interlocutors.”

Seeing the World in Radio Waves with the QuadRF
Although the basic principle of radio direction finding is easy to understand (measure the phase difference between different antennas, then calculate the angle of arrival from this difference), the radio hardware to actually implement this has historically been hard for hackers to access. The QuadRF project aims to change this by building a phase-coherent four-channel SDR which makes direction mapping easy (GitHub repository).
The QuadRF uses two boards: one to receive and pre-process radio waves, and a Raspberry Pi 5 for additional processing. The RF board has four patch antennas, each capable of either transmitting or receiving in the 4.9 GHz to 6.0 GHz range, with switchable right- or left-hand polarization. For on-device processing, it uses a Lattice ECP5 FPGA, which uses two MIPI cables to connect to the camera and display interfaces on the Raspberry Pi. These form a very high-speed data exchange, and after further processing, the Pi can pass data on over Ethernet or Wi-Fi. Individual QuadRF boards can connect together in a lattice grid to form larger phased arrays.
The QuadRF’s software shows off its real strength: it’s compatible with standard programs like GNU Radio, but it also hosts a few of its own programs. The most striking of these is an “RF camera” which scans its entire frequency range at 30 fps, tracking the direction of detected signals and visualizing them on a spatial plot. When overlaid on a camera feed, this plot lets one easily see the radio signals emitted from electronics; as an example, the creators tracked a drone in flight, even distinguishing the two radio transmitters on the drone.
This isn’t the first multi-antenna SDR we’ve seen, though this is the first that could transmit. It’s important to be careful, though: some applications of this kind of hardware run afoul of arms regulations.

Thanks to [Swake] for the tip!

Bitcoin rotations into altcoins collapses: Have altseasons 'disappeared'?BTC's crypto market dominance is holding above a key support, signaling Bitcoin may keep absorbing capital from altcoins and delay a broader altseason.

WAVDSP Primary VxPrimary Vx is a real-time, low-latency AI vocal cleanup product line from WAVDSP Neural Labs. It detects and separates the human voice from background noise and stage bleed, helping speech and singing stay clear in demanding environments. Keep the voice. Push the noise away. Primary Vx is designed for vocal microphones surrounded by real world sound: loud instruments, reflections, ambience, and unwanted bleed that normally follows the voice into the mix. Voice-aware cleanup in three stages. 1. Vx Source Detection. Identifies the vocal source in real time so the engine follows the performance, not the bleed around it. 2. Source Separation. Wipes unwanted background instruments, ambience, and bleed away from the vocal path. 3. Feedback Protection Helps you push more gain before feedback, with lower risk of ringing from the PA system. Designed with a multi-stage processing chain while keeping internal latency under 4.7 ms. This makes it practical for Front of House (FOH) workflows and other live vocal applications where response time matters. Read More

IK Multimedia introduce ReSing Doubling Available as a paid add-on for all versions, ReSing Doubling has been designed to help users create wider lead vocals, thicker backing parts and larger ensemble-style vocal arrangements without having to record multiple takes.

The Freddie Mercury Quote That Had Nothing to Do With MusicFreddie Mercury had everything the world could offer — and called himself the loneliest man alive. The quote that reveals who he really was when no one was performing for.

"In Times of Dragons" by Tori AmosUniversal/FontanaProducer: Tori Amos

Tori Amos’ 18th album sees the alt-pop veteran in full myth-maker mode, spinning political dread into fire-breathing allegory, where tyrants lurk like serpentine villains and hope flickers stubbornly underneath. It’s a sprawling 76-minute velvet coup that demands total surrender to its intricate, moss-covered melodies and, despite the record’s sheer density and occasional self-indulgence, it impressively navigates that tension between ancient folklore and modern chaos. In essence, it’s shadowy and just unhinged enough to remind us why she remains a high priestess of the avant-garde. Few artists could craft a campfire story for the end of the world that feels quite this essential. 

The post "In Times of Dragons" by Tori Amos first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Go eyes robotaxis and acquisitions after Japan’s biggest IPO of 2026. Here’s why it mattersGo’s IPO — Japan’s biggest so far this year — has done more than provide a much-needed boost to the country’s languishing listing season. It has also supplied the taxi-hailing app with the capital required to address an existential issue: Japan’s shortage of drivers. Go, which went public Tuesday, plans to use the ¥88.6 billion […]