James Blake is frustrated with the “fake” music industry : “If you’re an artist…You’re probably doing better than you think”James Blake has vented his frustrations about the music industry in 2026, noting how today’s artists are contending with bot farms and promotion tactics that are fuelled by financial incentives.
In his Instagram Story, Blake spotlights comment sections filled with bots, AI slop, and an entire system that is “faked”. Blake also believes many music critics (but not all) are now driven by financial backing from labels, and has since clarified that he feels bad for those who are underpaid and are being replaced by these figures.

READ MORE: “If you’re a musician and you support this degenerate shit, you’re disgusting”: SZA calls out the “vultures” training AI on tracks without permission

In his story, he writes, “Can’t trust a review because blogs/mags stopped making money so journalists now get paid off by labels. Can’t trust a comment section cause it’s full of fake fan accounts saying ‘omg their voice’ to create bandwagon effect. Can’t trust YouTube numbers because labels buy them.
“Can’t trust streaming numbers because labels pay for bot farms to drive discovery. Can’t even trust that a song was made by human beings. If you’re an artist, remember that in 2026 there’s not a single part of the system that isn’t faked. You’re probably doing better than you think.”
In the comment section, he goes on to add: “Just to be clear, I didn’t say *all journalists* – there are of course journalists who are not paid off or given perks for their critiques. Sadly they are becoming rarer and it has cheapened the craft (that I respect) for everyone else. It has also cast doubt upon the work being reviewed, which is a shame.
“This is obviously not a particularly new thing. In entertainment, and media at large, this has always existed. It has just become far more prevalent with the algorithms and bots making it easier to sway the public.”
He concludes, “I feel bad for the increasingly underpaid critics and journalists with integrity, that they’re dragged into it. I have come up alongside many of you and respect your work and dedication. But I’m watching you be replaced one by one for figures who will say what is asked of them.”

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Blake often speaks out against modern music industry struggles, including low royalty rates from streaming services and how artists lack ownership of fan data, meaning they don’t know how to directly reach out to those who support them. In 2024, he launched his own streaming platform, Vault.
Find out more about James Blake or view his full list of tour dates via the official James Blake website.
The post James Blake is frustrated with the “fake” music industry : “If you’re an artist…You’re probably doing better than you think” appeared first on MusicTech.

DNA Track Purifier is a FREE Trackspacer-style plugin for Windows
Mike Sorrentino has released DNA Track Purifier, a free Trackspacer-style sidechain dynamic processor designed to reduce frequency masking between competing tracks. Mike is a musician, composer, producer, and solo developer from Rome, Italy. DNA Track Purifier is his first software release, and it comes as a free plugin with an optional paid PRO version. The [...]
View post: DNA Track Purifier is a FREE Trackspacer-style plugin for Windows

Orra Audio releases Orra Pump, a FREE tempo-synced modulation filter
Orra Audio has released Orra Pump, a free (pay-what-you-can) tempo-synced modulation filter for macOS and Windows. David from Orra Audio reached out to let me know about the new release, and I was very happy to see another freebie from their team. We covered Orra Audio’s Tone Zone in April, and that one got a [...]
View post: Orra Audio releases Orra Pump, a FREE tempo-synced modulation filter

Tributes pour in for Clive Davis, the music executive behind Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen and others, after he dies at 94Music executive and record producer Clive Davis has passed away at 94, his family have confirmed.
Davis founded Arista Records, and helped to shape the music careers of Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen, Aretha Franklin, Christina Aguilera, and many others. He had recently been in hospital due to respiratory problems and was recovering at his home in Manhattan, New York, where he passed away surrounded by loved ones.
In a statement shared by his family (via the BBC), they say, “To the world, our father was the iconic music legend whose vision, instincts, and relentless pursuit of excellence shaped the soundtrack of countless lives. He discovered, mentored, and championed the greatest artists in modern music history, leaving an indelible mark on culture that will endure for generations.”
They add, “To his family, Clive was Dad and Granddaddy, the steady presence at the centre of our lives, the source of wisdom, strength, encouragement, and unconditional love.”

Born in Brooklyn in 1932, Davis spent seven decades working in music, and was active within the industry until his death. Davis received a full scholarship to study at Harvard Law. He had no prior knowledge of the music industry when he joined Columbia Records at the age of 28, and took night classes to learn about copyright law, contracts and litigation.
Davis was promoted to vice-president of the record label in 1965 and eventually became president. He signed artists such as Santana, Aerosmith, Pink Floyd and more. He was played by Stanley Tucci in the Whitney Houston biopic, I Wanna Dance With Somebody, and also worked as one of its producers. He earned five Grammy Awards across his career, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a non-performer in 2000.
A number of musicians and industry figures who worked with Davis throughout his long career have paid tribute online. Springsteen writes on his website, “Over here on E Street, we mourn the death of the great record man and close friend Clive Davis. At 22 years old, he changed my life when he signed me to Columbia Records. He treated me with the same respect and kindness as a 22-year-old nobody as he did after all my success. A great man. All our prayers and love.”

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Santana states, (via Variety), “Clive Davis was a visionary. He could hear the intangible before anyone else could see it. He believed in Santana from the beginning, and years later he believed in us again. That kind of faith is a beautiful blessing, and I will always be grateful.
“Clive understood that music is more than entertainment. Music is a healing force. It brings people together beyond fear, beyond separation, beyond borders. He dedicated his life to championing artists and helping them share their gifts with the world… I thank Clive for his friendship, his trust, and his belief in Santana.”
Billy Joel states, “Clive Davis convinced me to sign with Columbia Records many years ago. He recognised the talent of great musicians and understood the power of contemporary music.
“I will always be grateful to Clive for his recognition of the critical importance of songwriting. He undoubtedly enhanced the stature of the music industry during his tenure as president of Columbia Records.”
The post Tributes pour in for Clive Davis, the music executive behind Whitney Houston, Bruce Springsteen and others, after he dies at 94 appeared first on MusicTech.

Is Oeksound’s Soothe3 the most transparent resonance suppressor yet?£199 / £45 upgrade / rent-to own available, oeksound.com
I reviewed Soothe2 in 2020. At the time, it was the undisputed champion of resonance suppression plugins. But since then, there’s been a tidal wave of competitors vying for the crown. Not content to rest on its laurels, Oeksound has finally released an update with improved sound, a streamlined interface and unique new features. It may be just enough to keep Soothe at the top of every producer’s essentials.

READ MORE: Imagine Plugins is changing who gets to make plugins

Soothe is the perfect tool to reach for when you’re wanting to tame multiple unwanted resonances. Although you could potentially notch these out using a standard EQ, it would be incredibly time consuming, whereas Soothe reacts dynamically in real-time to remove these out as they appear. The plugin window has had a re-jig since version 2, but it won’t take long to readjust if you’re upgrading. The separate controls for Sharpness and Selectivity have been simplified to a single Detail dial which you turn up if you want to target narrow notches, or down to make broader reductions.
Other controls, like Attack and Release have been made more prominent, and the stereo section that lets you switch between and edit the Left/Right and M/S balance has been moved to a collapsible sidebar. It’s here that we find the Tilt section, which is one of Soothe3’s new features. This lets you increase or decrease the Detail, Attack and Release amounts in the upper or lower portions of the spectrum. This is a welcome addition as it gives you more flexibility to target something like a kick drum more broadly, whilst narrowing in on sharp cymbal resonances within the same instance. That said, it would be even better if you could control the Detail amount via each node instead, which is something you can do with Baby Audio’s Smooth Operator Pro. Technically, the more you boost a node, the narrower the cuts become, but we find the results relatively negligible in practice. In fairness, the Tilt controls are effective for most tasks.

The sidebar also includes a new Max Cut control that raises a line to set the maximum amount of reduction Soothe is allowed to make. This is useful to drive the processing harder without any massive cuts from rogue frequencies.
The largest part of the interface provides a live visual of the suppressed frequencies. I’m not sure what tweaks have been made to the ballistics, but it feels smoother and easier to read than its predecessor. Here you can double-click to add up to eight nodes, with eight shapes including a new tilt and bandpass. I’m especially happy about the bandpass as it means you have a much quicker way to focus on a small region whereas before, you had to use a combination of low-cut and high-cut.
There are Soft and Hard modes, as before. Soft is the mode that most will use as it has an adaptive threshold that reacts to the relative levels of resonances, and works well with more dynamic sources. Hard mode has a fixed threshold and is used for more aggressive control, or when using the plugin to sidechain duck another instrument. Both algorithms have been improved to give a cleaner, more transparent output.
Oeksound Soothe3 Max Cut. Image: Press
To get a better idea of how they sound, I push things to the extreme and compare the delta (removed) signal of Soothe3 with both Soothe2 and Waves Curves Equator. There’s a positive leap in cleanness between Soothe 2 and the Waves, and then a further leap with this new algorithm. On Ultra quality Soothe3 is silky smooth, with an open high end and minimal artefacts. It also has an improved ability to focus on resonances when the Detail control is turned up, which means less damage to the surrounding material. More than the various new features and user interface, this is what really makes the upgrade worthwhile to me. Some engineers complain that these kinds of tools can ruin mixes by making them sound over-processed, but this new algorithm allows you to dig into the signal while keeping things more transparent. Of course, you do still need to use your judgement to make sure you don’t overcook things.
Quality settings have been simplified to just Normal, High and Ultra in version 3, with no separate controls for oversampling. You can engage a separate feature in the settings menu that will always render on Ultra, giving the cleanest and most accurate sound. Also added is the ability to run Soothe3 in both linear phase and low latency mode. Linear phase might give better results if you’re processing in parallel, or provide more stable panning when using unlinked stereo. Oeksound released Soothe Live a few years back to provide an ultra-low-latency option for live sound and tracking, but this new version improves on that even more, with zero samples of latency at base sample rates. This makes it a fantastic option for controlling unpredictable live performances whether on-stage or whilst tracking.
For anyone working in Atmos and surround, the final new feature will be a legitimate game-changer; Soothe can now function in multichannel setups up to 9.1.6. There are various options for grouping and linking channels, and you can assign nodes to only affect certain channels. You also get separate metering and delta controls so you can hone in on problem areas, making Soothe3 a useful tool for taming multichannel masters.
Oeksound Soothe3 controls. Image: Press
If you’re looking for a simple resonance suppressor plugin and you don’t need some of Soothe3’s features such as the super transparent sound, low-latency mode and surround support, then there are cheaper options available such as Baby Audio’s Smooth Operator Pro and Three Body Technology SpecCraft, to name a couple.
Soothe3 isn’t cheap, but it’s a worthwhile investment if you’re serious about audio. Tweaks and new additions have refined an already excellent plugin. The sound quality now keeps up with—and often surpasses—the competition, while the interface is quicker and more pleasurable to work with. It’s definitely worth the upgrade price of £45 for existing users.
Despite a flood of competition, it turns out the real Soothe2 killer ended up being Soothe3.

Key features

Resonance suppression plugin
VST3, AU, AAX (requires iLok account)
Updated algorithms
Transparent Soft mode with adaptive threshold
More aggressive Hard mode with fixed threshold
New Low Latency mode adds zero samples at base sample rates
Streamlined, resizable window with simplified Detail control
Flexible nodes with 8 band shapes
Tilt controls for Detail, Attack and Release
New Linear Phase mode & Max cut parameter
Up to 9.1.6 multichannel support

The post Is Oeksound’s Soothe3 the most transparent resonance suppressor yet? appeared first on MusicTech.

lun.wtf TapeSoleTapeSole: The producer-focused effect chain plugin that includes 9 essential effects with features that save time and cpu... Here's What's inside: • Analog - 7 console emulations across 7 eras, plus analog-ifying color FX and stereo tools. • EQ - 6-band parametric with dynamic EQ and a multiband stereo width mode. • Dynamics - 4 classic compressor flavors (FET, Vari-Mu, two Optos). • Drive - 8 distortion engines, from amp grit to tube warmth. • SendFX - reverb, delay, modulation and filter strips, all reorderable. • Tape - reel-to-reel saturation, wow, flutter, hiss, tape speed, and aging effects. • Vinyl - record-player grime with noise, crackle, RPM control, and wobble. • IR Loader - load your own impulse responses. • Degrade - bitcrush, sample-rate mangling and codec rot. Then it all hits the Master section which includes: • Realtime pitch shifter (with formant option). • Two styles of multi-band compression/saturation • 6-band master EQ • Limiter/Maximizer • 3-mode clipper • 5-minute recorder to capture your processed input to drag straight into your DAW. All of the essentials, under one roof. Available as VST3 + AU • Windows & macOS. Read More

The AI world is getting ‘loopy’The loop takes agentic AI a step further by authorizing a swarm of agents to work continuously in the background, endlessly.

DPA Mics Play a Crucial Role in Groundbreaking Immersive Audio Live EventsAccording to recent news from DPA Microphones, "For the worldwide anniversary tour celebrating AIR’s iconic debut album, Moon Safari, the French musical duo set out to deliver a live experience that felt as rich, precise and atmospheric as the record itself. Monitor Engineers Julien Vouillon and Florentin Convert had two goals: to recreate a sound as close as possible to the album and provide a fully immersive listening experience. To achieve this, the pair relied heavily on the clarity, precision and natural imaging of DPA Microphones. The result was a mix of solid technical innovation and audio quality that AIR’s music deserves."

“Since the rise of in-ears, a concert has to sound like the record—both at front of house and in the monitors,” Vouillon says. “AIR’s music demands that level of detail and space. The system is centered around binaural processing via spatial audio processing software (SPAT Revolution), feeding the musicians a spatially accurate, responsive ‘room’ inside their in-ears. But the immersive mix only worked with captured ambience that was stunningly clean and true. That’s where DPA came in.”

“What surprised us was how the DPA mics gave us the same drum sound every night, no matter the venue. You really hear the instruments as they are, not some interpretation of them, which is what makes the immersive mix feel like a studio recording happening live,” said Convert.

“Our goal was to get the musicians to listen to their own album, live. With the DPA 5100 and SPAT Revolution, we recovered what is always missing from classic in-ears: the natural 3D of the room, the air and the space,” added Vouillon.

According to a statement, Convert "immediately recognized the microphone as the ideal match for their approach."

“It’s discreet, easy to use and reproduces the natural 3D of the room,” he explains. “With SPAT Revolution, it adds the air and space that are always missing in classic in-ears.”

"To complement the main surround capture, the team relied on several models from DPA’s pencil microphone lineup, including the 2012 Compact Cardioid, 2015 Wide Cardioid and 2017 Shotgun Microphones for the ambience feed," they say.

According to Vouillon, “A crucial point was minimizing the delay between front-of-house and the ambience. If the system was too offset, the musicians would feel it immediately. The solution was adding a pair of DPA 2015s in ORTF stereo format facing the stage, helping musicians feel grounded in the physical space.”

Of AIR's live album release, Vouillon said that, "The vinyl was created directly from the live stereo monitor mix combined with the DPA 5100 room capture, mixed live during the performances and not reworked in the studio afterward. The only post-production step was mastering by Alex Gopher. It’s a good demonstration of how accurately the immersive monitoring system translated the live experience."

Vouillon adds, “The real refinement came when we added pink noise into the sidechain. It keeps the compression active until just the right moment, making the audience reactions feel natural and alive.” Vouillon, who long relied on other ambient microphone solutions, says the transition to DPA felt like a breakthrough. “After Florentin introduced me to the DPA mics, I was blown away. The mics have perfect transients and depth, and zero artifacts. I’ve replaced all my old habits with the DPA range.”

For more information, visit dpamicrophones.com.The post DPA Mics Play a Crucial Role in Groundbreaking Immersive Audio Live Events first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Music industry leaders, megastars pay tribute to Clive DavisRob Stringer, Patti Smith, Alicia Keys, the Lipmans, Merck Mercuriadis, and more pay tribute to legendary record exec
Source

Investigating Annealing as Fix for Poor CF Adhesion in 3D PrintsAfter recently publishing a few videos covering research into the poor adhesion between chopped carbon fiber (CCF) and the thermoplastic filaments as used with FDM 3D printing, some of the feedback received by [I built a thing] included the idea that the missing step to make CCF additives work was post-print annealing. Naturally this claim had to be investigated, both through the resulting physical characteristics as well as on a microscopic level in the same scanning electron microscope (SEM) as before.
Post-annealing SEM scan, showing clear voids. (Credit: I built a thing, Youtube)
Theories as to why annealing the parts would help here seem to focus on increased bonding and filling of voids in the printed CCF-infused material, while there are the typical worries with annealing such as parts warping and shrinking to also take into account as potential downsides of this treatment.
For the sample materials PETG and PETG-CF, as well as PLA and PLA-CF filaments are used, with each filament type featuring an annealed and not annealed version. These were then tested for tensile strength, stiffness and failure type, as well as dimensional accuracy and warping, before being examined under the SEM. A total of 160 samples were used, with 20 samples per material and annealing state.
Perhaps the biggest surprise here was how much PETG benefits from annealing, making it much more resilient to breaking, whereas neither PLA nor PLA-CF seemed to see much benefit. Shocking was how much worse PETG-CF performs than PETG, with the former being worse than both PLA and PLA-CF here.
In terms of dimensional accuracy, annealing caused a Z direction expansion while shrinking the samples in the  other directions. The CCF addition here actually prevented much of the shrinking and expansion, showing the first clear benefit of this additive. Yet despite annealing at right above the glass transition temperature as is proper, this would seem to be the limit of this approach in terms of practical benefits.
Compared to the previous research that focused on PLA-CF, PETG-CF would seem to make the case even more strongly that there’s no real purpose to CCF additives, especially since you can already account for parts shrinkage during annealing before printing. That there’s no improvement to the CCF and thermoplastic interface adhesion is also no mystery, considering the science behind how e.g. thermoset materials create bonds with CF.

ADDAC System’s new Four Strings Series ADDAC System's latest creation comes in the form of the Four String Series, which comprises a collection of modules that make it possible to incorporate guitar strings and pickups into a modular synth rig.

“If you’re a musician and you support this degenerate shit, you’re disgusting”: SZA calls out the “vultures” training AI on tracks without permissionLast week, The Atlantic’s AI Watchdog revealed that over 12 million tracks are being unlawfully used to in AI development. Now, multi-award winning artist SZA has discovered that 238 of her tracks are included in the “giant datasets of songs” being used to train AI – and she’s not happy about it.
Taking to her private Instagram account, NotMusicAtAllISwear, the singer-songwriter has condemned anyone supporting the use of AI in music. “If you’re a musician and you support this degenerate shit, you’re disgusting and there’s nothing you could ever say to me to make this okay,” she writes over a screenshot of the AI Watchdog search engine.

READ MORE: Gary Numan thinks AI music hype is short-lived: “It will go full circle and people will want to go back to sharing a human experience rather than just brilliantly copied one”

In a separate post, she specifically calls out Diplo. “I don’t know who needs to hear this but Diplo has equity in Suno and is actively attempting to train it on the best and brightest black minds of writers and producers,” she says.
Back in April, Diplo appeared on the Behind The Wall podcast and sung AI’s praises. Amidst his claims, the producer shockingly admitted that he prefers AI-generated voices over real singers nowadays. “I don’t even need a voice any more – I can get the best voice from AI,” he said. “I don’t need anybody to sing the song any more.”

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Of course, if more producers take a shine to AI-generated voices, that will have a severe knock on effect on real singers. And, as SZA points out, training AI on the work of black musicians such as herself is another way of the music industry undercutting and exploiting black minds. “We make up 13% of the American population yet influence the world with our sound and perspective,” she explains.
“We have no protection in legislature medical or creative – the easiest to steal from…” she continues. “Do not train AI with your genius! Fuck these weird ass vultures.”
SZA’s anger towards AI has been bubbling beneath the surface for quite some time. Back in May, the singer commented on guitarist Sophie Burrell’s Instagram post exposing an AI deepfake account cloning her performance videos.
“I am so genuinely offended,” SZA wrote in support of the guitarist. “Hurts more that streaming services and our labels won’t protect or advocate for us. We mean nothing to anyone omg.”

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The post “If you’re a musician and you support this degenerate shit, you’re disgusting”: SZA calls out the “vultures” training AI on tracks without permission appeared first on MusicTech.

OTODESK releases ANATOMY, a FREE transient sound design plugin for Windows
OTODESK has released ANATOMY, a free and open-source VST3 plugin for Windows. This is the third free plugin from OTODESK we’ve covered on BPB in June, following Ambience and Quad Morph Filter. Both received some very cool comments from the BPB community, although I especially liked Quad Morph Filter. ANATOMY is different from any transient [...]
View post: OTODESK releases ANATOMY, a FREE transient sound design plugin for Windows

Sampleson release Aeronaut Built around a custom spectral engine, Aeronaut captures and ‘freezes’ segments of incoming audio and continuously morphs them with the live input, creating evolving atmospheric sounds that follow and respond to users’ playing. 

“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.