Erica Synths and Richie Hawtin’s Bullfrog Drums will “teach you drum programming and sampling”Meet Bullfrog Drums, a new drum machine developed by Erica Synths in partnership with esteemed producer Richie Hawtin.
The yet-to-be-released machine expands the Bullfrog range, which offers educational music production tools to encourage aspiring producers of the future.

READ MORE: Rob Papen unveils “minimalist” one-knob plugin, UniMagic – but what does it do?

Bullfrog Drums is designed to teach drum programming and the basics of sampling. Its user interface is inspired by classic drum machines, and hosts everything you’ll need for building advanced drum patterns using sampled drum sounds.
The synth features seven sample-based drum voices, each with hands-on sample manipulation, including tuning, start point, sample length, attack, decay, overdrive and stereo panning.
Currently, the Bullfrog ecosystem consists of two other products – the Bullfrog and the Bullfrog XL (designed for teachers to use in front of a classroom)– which creatives will be able to combine with Bullfrog Drums to create a complete electronic music production and performance setup. Bullfrog Drums will contain an easy-to-programme CV/Gate sequencer for this.

Little detail on when it’s set to arrive is yet available, but it’s currently expected to land at retailers before the end of 2024. The Latvia-based brand also says that the product is a “logical and consistent step” in its combined efforts to inspire the next generation and make electronic music technology more accessible along with Hawtin.
“As a producer who’s created many percussion-only tracks under my Plastikman moniker, it only makes sense to add a drum machine to our developing Bullfrog ecosystem,” says Hawtin. “This exciting development will allow both novices and pros a new way to learn drum programming and enjoy some fun new capabilities that we plan to feature on our new machine!”
Check back on MusicTech for more information on Bullfrog Drums as we get it. You can also view more from Erica Synths in the meantime.
The post Erica Synths and Richie Hawtin’s Bullfrog Drums will “teach you drum programming and sampling” appeared first on MusicTech.

What does Suno AI mean for music producers and the music industry?Sharooz is an electronic music producer, studio owner and entrepreneur. He’s also known as Principleasure and is the founder of Wavetick.
Whether a producer or songwriter, it’s impossible not to feel some emotion around the hyped generative music startup Suno. Especially in light of its recent $125 million funding — the biggest music tech equity investment in over three years.
How we create music and the potential to earn revenue from our skills may be about to change forever.
If you haven’t already played with it, Suno is fun and powerful. Like a ChatGPT for music, it creates unique songs based on a simple text prompt – and does so with impressive, albeit generic, accuracy. Vocals sound realistic, even guitar solos and string sections are spliced together with a nuance rarely seen before in generative AI music. In just a few years, AI has advanced from dodgy, artifact-riddled soundalikes to a personalised jukebox capable of spitting out songs that could probably sit unnoticed in the Billboard Top 100.
READ MORE: Learn how to create custom voice and instrument audio stems with AI
The potential to damage virtually every aspect of the music industry is obvious. While virtuosic composers and experimental curators of their craft may have little to worry about, Suno could conceivably chisel away at the stock music industry, sound designers, foley creators, lyricists and the work of songwriters in virtually every genre. This could be particularly true for those who practice more traditional arrangements and chord structures, like those commonly seen in charting pop songs.
I’d like to think that organic human emotion and the poetry of heartfelt lyricism will transcend anything a machine can offer. But it’s not inconceivable that, in the space of a few years, AI output may be indistinguishable from human endeavour, especially to the untrained ear. After all, Suno is a mere glimpse at what may be possible in the near future.

Suno’s public message offers utopian promises of “moving the bar” of music creation. It’s clear the Massachusetts-based company has plans to disrupt, with the online discourse opining that the wider mission is to fully remove the barrier between music creation and casual listening — imagine personalised playlists made up of fully unique AI-generated songs, fuelled by user prompts.
If these services are creating a future where the music creator and listener become one, this gives real potential to disrupt DSPs, labels, aggregators and everything in between. At the time of writing, Suno recently announced it plans to pay the platform’s most popular “creators” $1 million in “prize money” during June 2024.
To grasp Suno’s impact, one needs to understand how their output has become so much more polished than anything else that’s come before. AI is traditionally fed on real recorded music — human-created intellectual property (IP) with complex copyright restrictions. In theory, the more ‘data’ the network can train on, the more realistic the resulting output can sound.
Nobody is quite sure of the data Suno is trained on, but keen listeners have already identified scrambled elements of distinguishable works in their creations.
Public details on training data are scant, with many suggesting there could be lawsuits from major publishers and labels in the offing. Sony Music recently sent 700 letters to leading generative AI firms warning them not to infringe their copyrights. But if the current landscape of the music industry has taught us anything, it’s that there’s no guarantee disruptive technologies will favour human creator rights or livelihoods.
The dominance of digital streaming platforms (DSPs) has only diluted existing songwriter and performer revenue further. There’s an ongoing conversation on the unfair economics of streaming, with commercial law slow to catch up on AI’s impact on existing copyrights and publishing rights.
It’s not inconceivable labels may soon license our recordings and songs into Suno by the truckload. When those deals are done, they may net you less than any DSP currently does: fractions of cents. Will the majority of subscription revenue Suno generates line the pockets of its investors and the major labels that could one day own a share in it, if or when it goes public? After all, the investors in it will be keenly expecting a return, such is the nature of venture capitalism.
To create this technology is an awesome feat. Suno sounds remarkable. It’s fun, powerful and easy to use. To embark on this journey by going a step further, disclosing training sources and collecting metrics, directly compensating dataset contributors would be a welcome play…But I don’t suppose that pays investors well.
We all want to make technology more accessible, but we won’t get there by powering our product on the work of writers who have yet to even be acknowledged, let alone compensated. Creators may be in real danger of being squeezed out of operating altogether.
Brand trust begins with responsible practice. High-profile artists will likely boycott and vilify Suno — we saw something similar with the SAG/AFTRA strikes in 2023. Suno’s millions could aid its legal challenges but could set an uneasy precedent — steal now, seek permission later [producer BT told MusicTech a similar anecdote].
Will future legislation render AI music services a gimmick unfit for public broadcast or distribution?
User terms for most generative AI services are also unacceptably vague. We see “Use at your own risk” through to “your creation is uniquely your copyright”, with little comfort for pro/broadcast use or publishing to a DSP. Licensing a bona fide, human-created sample or track may be far more beneficial than hours spent prompting an AI-generated output that’s legally unfit for purpose.
Is there an exaggeration of AI’s impact on the music industry? If Suno are to be believed, we may evolve into an entirely new class of creators, further democratising music making. After all, why settle for spoon-fed major label playlists when you can just roll your own bespoke experience? But the real threat to professional creator livelihoods seems a long way off.
The winners in this space will likely be the well-researched, steady adopters who subtly integrate AI-assisted features to aid their existing creative processes. They’ll meaningfully democratise access for tomorrow’s creators without stealing from humans, whose work has been an endeavour of learned skill, political upheaval, emotional intelligence and the very meaning of what it is to be human. They’ll translate their authentic experiences through music.
Read more music technology features. 
The post What does Suno AI mean for music producers and the music industry? appeared first on MusicTech.

2024 Business Card Challenge: Tiny MIDI KeyboardThe progress for electronics over the past seven decades or so has always trended towards smaller or more dense components. Moore’s Law is the famous example of this, but even when we’re not talking about transistors specifically, technology tends to get either more power efficient or smaller. This MIDI keyboard, for example, is small enough that it will fit in the space of a standard business card which would have been an impossibility with the technology available when MIDI first became standardized, and as such is the latest entry in our Business Card Challenge.
[Alana] originally built this tiny musical instrument to always have a keyboard available on the go, and the amount of features packed into this tiny board definitely fits that design goal. It has 18 keys with additional buttons to change the octave and volume, and has additional support for sustain and modulation as well. The buttons and diodes are multiplexed in order to fit the IO for the microcontroller, a Seeed Studio Xiao SAMD21, and it also meets the USB-C standards so it will work with essentially any modern computer available including most smartphones and tablets so [Alana] can easily interface it with Finale, a popular music notation software.
Additionally, the project’s GitHub page has much more detail including all of the Arduino code needed to build a MIDI controller like this one. This particular project has perhaps the best size-to-usefulness ratio we’ve seen for compact MIDI controllers thanks to the USB-C and extremely small components used on the PCB, although the Starshine controller or these high-resolution controllers are also worth investigating if you’re in the market for compact MIDI devices like this one.

LVRN invests in Afro-Caribbean cultural platform Jerk X JollofThe investment 'underscores our commitment to empowering communities through music and culture,' LVRN says
Source

Foosbar: The World’s Best* Foosball Robot From Scratch[Xander Naumenko] is back with another bonkers project. This is the same creator that built a working 32-bit computer inside a Terraria world. This time it’s a bit more physical of a creation: a self-playing foosball table.
We’re not sure of the impetus for this idea, but we’re delighted to see the engineering it took to make it work. It sounds so simple. It’s just servos mounted on linear actuators, right? Oh, and some computer vision to determine where the ball actually is on the table. And the software to actually control the motors, pass the ball around, and play offense and defense. So maybe not so simple. All the code and some other resources are available under the MIT license.
As to while the claim of “best” foosball robot has an asterisk? That’s because, although we’ve seen a few potential competitors over the years, there isn’t yet a world foosball competition. We’re hoping that changes, as a tournament of robots playing foosball sounds like a sports event we’d show up for!

Sony Music Publishing wins Publisher of the Year at 2024 BMI Pop AwardsMiley Cyrus’ 'Flowers' was named Song of the Year.
Source

Playfair Audio: Dynamic Grading plug-in gets major update With the launch of v1.3, Dynamic Grading has gained a whole host of new features and improvements based on user feedback. 

UNIIQU3 on the art of sampling and the sonic identity of Jersey club
UNIIQU3 and fellow New Jersey icons Just Blaze and Rah Digga dive deep into the evolution of Jersey club, the art of sampling, and more.

Eventbrite study confirms fans are buying tickets much later than everTicketing platform Eventbrite shared a new study on US music ticket buyers at this week's National Independent Venue Association (NIVA) conference in New Orleans.....
The post Eventbrite study confirms fans are buying tickets much later than ever appeared first on Hypebot.

5 Music Collaborations worth exploringUnlock the secrets to musical success with these five game-changing collaborations. They show how teaming up with the right partners can skyrocket your career and create unforgettable music. by Chris. Continue reading
The post 5 Music Collaborations worth exploring appeared first on Hypebot.

Rob Papen unveils “minimalist” one-knob plugin, UniMagic – but what does it do?Rob Papen‘s latest plugin – UniMagic – is here to prove that complicated plugins aren’t always necessary. With a single control knob, the software allows users to thicken and modernise their sound without the faff of an overly cluttered UI.

READ MORE: Harrison Audio’s 32Classic Channel Strip plugin brings the iconic console sound to your DAW

At a glance, you wouldn’t be blamed for glancing over this minimalist plugin. However, UniMagic is rammed with over 50 presets suitable for tweaking vocal or instrumental tracks. In a preview video, the plugin can be seen working with single vocals, harmonies and even a steel string guitar.
The 0-100% knob makes adjusting a track clear and simple. There’s also a Spring Back switch to synchronise sound to tempo, with the option to select different time divisions.
Speaking about the plugin, Rob Papen writes: “You might think… what type of FX is this? But we simply say, don’t worry about that.” The plugin is a low-cost multi-tool, able to produce just about any sound a user might desire at a high quality.
“Put it this way: while flicking through UniMagic’s presets proves that effect plugins do not necessarily have to be packed full of overly-complicated features and
functions in order to create a great sound, its Ribbon controller allows users to finely adjust the sound by changing a pre-defined parameter within each
preset type,” says Rob Papen.
The plugin is currently available for $26. However, users who already own Rob Papen’s eXplorer-9 bundle can claim UniMagic for free by downloading Rob Papen’s latest installer.

The post Rob Papen unveils “minimalist” one-knob plugin, UniMagic – but what does it do? appeared first on MusicTech.

What is an ISWC? Hint: The key to music rights and royaltiesIf you’re a new artist, you may not fully understand all the important terms the industry throws at you yet. If an “ISWC” is one of those terms, don’t worry! We'll give you everything you need to know about it below…..
The post What is an ISWC? Hint: The key to music rights and royalties appeared first on Hypebot.

What does Suno AI mean for music producers and the music industry?Sharooz is an electronic music producer, studio owner and entrepreneur. He’s also known as Principleasure and is the founder of Wavetick.
Whether a producer or songwriter, it’s impossible not to feel some emotion around the hyped generative music startup Suno. Especially in light of its recent $125 million funding — the biggest music tech equity investment in over three years.
How we create music and the potential to earn revenue from our skills may be about to change forever.
If you haven’t already played with it, Suno is fun and powerful. Like a ChatGPT for music, it creates unique songs based on a simple text prompt – and does so with impressive, albeit generic, accuracy. Vocals sound realistic, even guitar solos and string sections are spliced together with a nuance rarely seen before in generative AI music. In just a few years, AI has advanced from dodgy, artifact-riddled soundalikes to a personalised jukebox capable of spitting out songs that could probably sit unnoticed in the Billboard Top 100.
READ MORE: Learn how to create custom voice and instrument audio stems with AI
The potential to damage virtually every aspect of the music industry is obvious. While virtuosic composers and experimental curators of their craft may have little to worry about, Suno could conceivably chisel away at the stock music industry, sound designers, foley creators, lyricists and the work of songwriters in virtually every genre. This could be particularly true for those who practice more traditional arrangements and chord structures, like those commonly seen in charting pop songs.
I’d like to think that organic human emotion and the poetry of heartfelt lyricism will transcend anything a machine can offer. But it’s not inconceivable that, in the space of a few years, AI output may be indistinguishable from human endeavour, especially to the untrained ear. After all, Suno is a mere glimpse at what may be possible in the near future.

Suno’s public message offers utopian promises of “moving the bar” of music creation. It’s clear the Massachusetts-based company has plans to disrupt, with the online discourse opining that the wider mission is to fully remove the barrier between music creation and casual listening — imagine personalised playlists made up of fully unique AI-generated songs, fuelled by user prompts.
If these services are creating a future where the music creator and listener become one, this gives real potential to disrupt DSPs, labels, aggregators and everything in between. At the time of writing, Suno recently announced it plans to pay the platform’s most popular “creators” $1 million in “prize money” during June 2024.
To grasp Suno’s impact, one needs to understand how their output has become so much more polished than anything else that’s come before. AI is traditionally fed on real recorded music — human-created intellectual property (IP) with complex copyright restrictions. In theory, the more ‘data’ the network can train on, the more realistic the resulting output can sound.
Nobody is quite sure of the data Suno is trained on, but keen listeners have already identified scrambled elements of distinguishable works in their creations.
Public details on training data are scant, with many suggesting there could be lawsuits from major publishers and labels in the offing. Sony Music recently sent 700 letters to leading generative AI firms warning them not to infringe their copyrights. But if the current landscape of the music industry has taught us anything, it’s that there’s no guarantee disruptive technologies will favour human creator rights or livelihoods.
The dominance of digital streaming platforms (DSPs) has only diluted existing songwriter and performer revenue further. There’s an ongoing conversation on the unfair economics of streaming, with commercial law slow to catch up on AI’s impact on existing copyrights and publishing rights.
It’s not inconceivable labels may soon license our recordings and songs into Suno by the truckload. When those deals are done, they may net you less than any DSP currently does: fractions of cents. Will the majority of subscription revenue Suno generates line the pockets of its investors and the major labels that could one day own a share in it, if or when it goes public? After all, the investors in it will be keenly expecting a return, such is the nature of venture capitalism.
To create this technology is an awesome feat. Suno sounds remarkable. It’s fun, powerful and easy to use. To embark on this journey by going a step further, disclosing training sources and collecting metrics, directly compensating dataset contributors would be a welcome play…But I don’t suppose that pays investors well.
We all want to make technology more accessible, but we won’t get there by powering our product on the work of writers who have yet to even be acknowledged, let alone compensated. Creators may be in real danger of being squeezed out of operating altogether.
Brand trust begins with responsible practice. High-profile artists will likely boycott and vilify Suno — we saw something similar with the SAG/AFTRA strikes in 2023. Suno’s millions could aid its legal challenges but could set an uneasy precedent — steal now, seek permission later [producer BT told MusicTech a similar anecdote].
Will future legislation render AI music services a gimmick unfit for public broadcast or distribution?
User terms for most generative AI services are also unacceptably vague. We see “Use at your own risk” through to “your creation is uniquely your copyright”, with little comfort for pro/broadcast use or publishing to a DSP. Licensing a bona fide, human-created sample or track may be far more beneficial than hours spent prompting an AI-generated output that’s legally unfit for purpose.
Is there an exaggeration of AI’s impact on the music industry? If Suno are to be believed, we may evolve into an entirely new class of creators, further democratising music making. After all, why settle for spoon-fed major label playlists when you can just roll your own bespoke experience? But the real threat to professional creator livelihoods seems a long way off.
The winners in this space will likely be the well-researched, steady adopters who subtly integrate AI-assisted features to aid their existing creative processes. They’ll meaningfully democratise access for tomorrow’s creators without stealing from humans, whose work has been an endeavour of learned skill, political upheaval, emotional intelligence and the very meaning of what it is to be human. They’ll translate their authentic experiences through music.
Read more music technology features. 
The post What does Suno AI mean for music producers and the music industry? appeared first on MusicTech.

Erica Synths announce Bullfrog Drums Erica Synths have announced another collaboration with Richie Hawtin, this time designing a drum machine that aims to help users learn the basics of drum programming. 

Serato promises “versatility and creativity” with new upgrades for DJ Pro 3.2.0DJ and production software company Serato has unveiled its latest upgrades for Serato DJ Pro 3.2.0 and Serato DJ Lite 3.2.0.
Boasting ample new effects, expanded parameters and enhanced control, Serato’s new suite is designed with versatility in mind. The development promises to transform the DJing experience, encouraging creative freedom with its expanded selection of sounds and customisable presents.

READ MORE: Best DJ Gear 2024: 11 best DJ software for mixing and playlisting in 2024

The main appeal of Serato’s upgrade is its new selection of high-quality effects. Among the improved effects, users can take advantage of Infinity Tone, Spiral Echo, Stretch, Vast Reverb, and Infinity Flanger. There’s also the grand return of Rollout, the much beloved effect from Serato’s classic Scratch Live software.
Alongside a full suite of new effects, Serato has also redesigned its effects panel. The fresh look is set to enhance user control, allowing users more flexibility when shaping their tracks.
Serato has also added a new Channel FX option that can be assigned to the filter knob for users without built-in hardware effects. Users can also have an unlimited amount of custom presets, as well as having the option to save up to four favourite effects banks for easy access.
The upgrade will also see Serato DJ Pro 3.2.0 and Serato DJ Lite 3.2.0 gaining native Apple Silicon support. This optimisation will result in the smoothest software performance to date.
Serato DJ Pro 3.2.0 will officially release in July, but for now users can access a free public beta.
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