Silverdaw is a FREE open-source Windows DAW for remixing and mashups
Silverdaw is a free and open-source Windows DAW built for remixing, mashups, and sample-based music production. The developer sent this to me via email, and I wasn’t expecting a lot (new free DAWs are popping up like mushrooms nowadays), but I ended up impressed. The key thing here is that Silverdaw is not trying to be [...]
View post: Silverdaw is a FREE open-source Windows DAW for remixing and mashups

EastWest DrumX could be the only drum machine plugin you’ll ever need$299 / $20 per month ComposerCloud+ subscription, soundsonline.com
DrumX sees EastWest Sounds team up with musician and producer Jimmy Jam, whose long list of credits include Janet Jackson, Boyz II Men, Mary J Blige, Mariah Carey, and The Human League, with 42 chart-topping hits. This drum machine instrument combines the sounds of 10 iconic machines with custom Jimmy Jam samples and grooves, giving you exclusive access to the sound of countless pop, R&B and electro funk hits. It’s a punchy, powerful and flexible collection, only let down by a sometimes cumbersome interface.

READ MORE: Reason 14, as reviewed by a Cubase user: “Bells and whistles aren’t always everything”

DrumX loads into EastWest’s Opus sample player instrument, which can run standalone or inside your DAW. It includes a massive 31GB of samples, covering TR-808, TR-909, TR-606, LinnDrum, LM-1, DR-55, DR-110, DMX, DrumTraks, and SP-12 drum machines. These have been deeply sampled with up to four-times round-robin, a real room ambience, and five levels of Studer tape saturation. These options bring life and variation to the sounds, avoiding the rigid machine-gun-like effect you get doing snare rolls with more static samples.
Each kit loads samples into a four-by-four pad grid, and you can edit the sounds individually with a fairly standard selection of controls alongside a few instrument-specific ones such as the 808 Kick Tone and Decay dials. There’s no deep editing or modulation, but it’s enough to shape each sound to fit your track. You can also affect the whole kit with transient shaping, drive, crush and compressor macros at the top of the interface, which is a fun and quick way to beef up the sound. In terms of sequencing, you can input 64 steps and accents along the bottom, or alternatively click the Grid button to switch the pads into a larger grid sequencer for the full kit. Everything is fairly immediate and available from a single screen, which makes programming basic beats fast.

As mentioned, you get 10 iconic drum machines saved as individual kits, plus a bunch of extra Jimmy Jam custom sounds. These add further original character to the mix and include reverse sounds, percussion, and powerful gated hits. You can mix and match drum machine elements using the All Kits patch, or mix up the Jimmy Jam samples using the All Kits Custom patch. Frustratingly though, you can’t blend these samples alongside the drum machines in the same interface.
Elsewhere, you get patches that load a single instrument onto a single pad for the purpose of layering within Opus. There’s also all the kicks, for example, spread across several pads, or a single sound pitched chromatically across the 16 pads. It’s a little confusing at first, and it would be more fluid if access to these options could somehow be incorporated into a single instance, but it’s possible to set up various different layouts as long as you’re willing to layer separate instances within Opus.
If you don’t already have a collection of solid, classic drum machine samples, then DrumX could be an excellent choice, as it covers all the main bases in great depth with several variations. I test the 808, 909 and several other kits alongside a few alternative sample instruments and although they lack a little top-end and sound subtly saturated, they make up for it with an incredible amount of punch.
DrumX sequencer. Image: Press
The obvious star of the show here is the selection of Jimmy Jam grooves, which include 214 beats paired with custom-curated kits. You can mix and match grooves with any kit using the Groove Browser, which also includes a pattern preview button and the ability to drag and drop the MIDI straight into your DAW. Stylistically, they range from big, 80s-style R&B power grooves with gated snares, reverse sounds and fills, to more modern-sounding and distorted electro beats. Not all of them are winners, as some rely a bit too much on gritty bitcrush effects, but there’s plenty here to showcase why Jimmy has so many platinum records under his belt. There’s an effective balance of simplicity, originality and varied sound selection. If you’re particularly looking to evoke that late 80s, early 90s sound, then this will get you there straight away. The only thing to look out for though is a massive variation in preset kit volumes, with some peaking at +15 dB.
In terms of more modern sounds, DrumX is slightly more limited on the surface as it’s drawing on old hardware. However, the Opus instrument has an incredibly comprehensive Mix tab where you can build individual processing chains for each sound, and choose from a large range of highly editable effects processors and convolution reverbs. These even include officially-licensed SSL Channel Strip, Bus Compressor and Transient Shaper effects. With a little tweaking, you can give these classic drum machines a unique and characterful flavour, and you can also route individual sounds to separate outputs if you want to process them using other plugins.
DrumX presets. Image: Press
Although it’s sonically strong, the lack of any modulation, or depth in the sequencer noticeably limits how detailed and alive you can make your beats sound. There’s not even a way to change the velocity of the hits outside of the simple accent buttons, although if you want to get more in-depth then you have the option of simply drum programming from within your DAW. Thankfully, there’s a flexible macro and automation system that offers some unique hands-on control.
These drawbacks aside, DrumX is a great sounding drum machine, with buckets of punch coming from the samples, and additional weight and power available through the extensive processing options.
At $299, it’s expensive. As an alternative, Wave Alchemy’s Revolution is £99 and also features an array of deeply sampled classic drum machines. However, it lacks Jimmy Jam’s excellent custom samples and broad selection of production-ready grooves. If these have value for the type of music that you’re making, then DrumX is well worth a look.
DrumX mix page. Image: Press
Key features

10 iconic drum machines: TR-808, TR-909, TR-606, LinnDrum, LM-1, DR-55, DR-110, DMX, DrumTraks, and SP-12
408 instruments (exclusive Jimmy Jam Kits, DX Kits, DX Layers, DX Stacks, DX Pitched and DX All Kits)
Up to 4x round-robin sampling
214 Jimmy Jam grooves (dance industrial, R&B, funk, pop, hip-hop and ballad genres)
64 step sequencer with global swing, per step accent & randomise function
16 pads/sounds per kit, with the ability to stack multiple kits
Tape Saturation knob with 6 options
Machine specific parameter controls for deeply sampled sounds
Full mixer with extensive per channel processing and effects options
Multi-out routing, drag and drop MIDI grooves & MIDI learn

The post EastWest DrumX could be the only drum machine plugin you’ll ever need appeared first on MusicTech.

“Those are my weapon”: Inside Audeze and Manny Marroquin’s MM-520 headphonesThreatening airport security is rarely wise, but Manny Marroquin had his reasons. “They pulled the headphones out, and were like, ‘What are these?’” says the celebrated mix engineer, stopped on his way back from Mexico. “Those are my fucking weapon. Don’t you mess with me.”
The weapon in question is the Audeze MM-520, the American brand’s new flagship planar magnetics, and the first pair of headphones to grace a MusicTech gear cover. More records than ever are mixed and mastered on headphones, and the MM-520 – the second product in Marroquin and Audeze’s collaborative MM-series – arrives engineered for the job’s toughest call: bass.
The Audeze MM-520 on the MusicTech Cover. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The prolific Grammy Award-winner has run Larrabee Studios in Los Angeles since 2001, with production credits from Rihanna to Rosalía, and began tuning Sonos products in 2012. He first mixed on Solid State Logic consoles aged 17, and speaks to us from London before visiting SSL’s Oxford headquarters to test new equipment.
He used to think mixing on headphones was a joke. “If you had told me 10 years ago I would be mixing on headphones, I’d think you were crazy,” he admits. “I used to hate that. I would laugh at people.” So what changed?
The short answer is Marroquin badgered Audeze CEO Sankar Thiagasamudram to build the professional mixing headphones he actually wanted. He was repeatedly told there’s no money in pro audio (as compared to consumer audio), but one day, Thiagasamudram finally approached him at a trade show and said: “Manny, I think we’re ready to do this.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Marroquin worked through various prototypes with Audeze’s engineers, and the result was 2022’s MM-500. “My career is better because of them; it’s my set of speakers,” he says. It’s why he keeps coming back to work with the brand. “They took everything I told them and everything I wanted to do, and they were like, ‘Yeah, we’ll do that. Let’s go.’ They believed in me.”
The $1,700 MM-520 headphones come with a strange sales pitch: you might not need them. “I am not saying they’re better than the 500s, but it is an alternate version,” Marroquin insists. “If you own the 500s, it’s not like, ‘My gosh, I need to go get the 520s.’ Not about that at all. I want to make sure people know it’s not us trying to sell you a new pair of headphones.”
“If you had told me 10 years ago I would be mixing on headphones, I’d think you were crazy” – Manny Marroquin
A SLAM dunk
The star upgrade is SLAM, which is short for Symmetric Linear Acoustic Modulator and mercifully simpler than it sounds. Air passages running beneath the ear pad create extra space between the driver and your ear, forming a larger acoustic chamber and allowing Audeze to selectively boost the low-end frequencies.
“It’s kind of like increasing the body size of an acoustic instrument or a speaker,” explains Chris Berens, Audeze’s head of A&R. “It gives a little more resonance in the low end, and we tune that specifically for the headphone, so we have a nice, healthily reinforced low end.”
SLAM balances the air pressure on both sides of Audeze’s ultra-thin planar magnetic diaphragm, letting it move more freely and accurately. Measuring just 1.8 micrometres, the nanoscale polymer is around 40 times thinner than a human hair.
“It’s not like we’re just adding a subwoofer,” says Berens. “It really enhances everything that the driver does, which makes things [sound] a little bit wider, and gives you more accurate imaging in terms of location.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Peter James, Audeze’s director of marketing, says the tuning target was extension rather than flattery. “The bass of the MM-520 is pretty much flat to below 20Hz. We tuned this system to get a better bass extension rather than a bass shelf, the way the Harman curve has.”
For Marroquin, the low-end obsession is where records live now. “Whether you’re doing hip-hop, pop, country, or whatever, you want to make sure the low end is tight,” he says. “Low end is the most important thing in pop music, because if it’s too heavy, then it weighs down the track. If it’s too light, it sounds weak. Low end in today’s world has to really be accurate.”
The MM-500’s slightly forward upper mids, a common gripe, have been levelled off. The cost of all this is weight. Planars run heavy to begin with, but the 520s pile on more. SLAM adds material, while new snap on earpads require eight magnets per side.
Tipping the scales at 555g, they’re 60g up on the MM-500 and tower over non-planar rivals such as Sennheiser’s 330g HD 800 S, though Audeze says memory foam on the new earpads help disperse the extra load.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Turning the tables
For decades, engineers trusted monitors and used headphones for a second opinion, but increasingly, it’s the other way round. Low end is arguably the hardest thing to get right in any room, and Berens believes even serious money doesn’t fix it. “We have a lot of pro people in the space who are really primarily referring to our headphones for bass,” he claims.
“They can trust what they’re hearing, versus their room, [which] they can’t quite trust. Even people who have invested tens of thousands in great speakers, room treatment, all that stuff, there is always something that’s not quite right.”
Marroquin still mixes on Yamaha NS-10s; a mix that survives these famously brutal nearfield monitors is said to survive anywhere. He dreamed of taking that trusted reference on the road, and the MM series became his answer. “To me, that’s like [being] a kid in the candy store.” 99 per cent of the time, he says, he runs them straight out of his laptop, streaming his Larrabee sessions via a real-time remote streaming plugin by Audiomovers.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Audeze says it intentionally designed the 500s and the 520s to function perfectly fine from most devices without a dedicated headphone amp. That’s tricky, given most planar headphones are notoriously power-hungry. The efficiency comes from the company’s Fluxor magnet arrays, which pack a denser magnetic field across the driver, so the diaphragm needs less power to move.
Rival planar makers shed weight by using fewer, smaller magnets, James says, at the cost of needing an amp. Some of the 520’s heft, in other words, is precisely what frees you from carrying one.
The deeper reason Marroquin never travels without them has nothing to do with specs. “I’m pretty sure everyone is insecure, and it’s okay to admit to it,” he says. “Sometimes you’re having a bad day, or you didn’t sleep well, your mother’s sick. That’s going to reflect on your work. The successful [people] are the ones that can cut through the BS and just focus on this one thing.” His cure for mixer’s block lives in his headphone bag. “I’m feeling a little insecure, a little lost. Let me just put them on, and immediately, I’m back. I’m back within a split second.”
“I created these headphones for the masses. This is how I hear things” – Manny Marroquin
Sony and yet so far
Audeze was acquired in 2023 by Sony Interactive Entertainment, the PlayStation arm of the Japanese multimedia company, primarily for its patented technologies, planar magnetic drivers, and audio engineering expertise. So where does a pair of pro studio flagship headphones sit on PlayStation’s list of priorities? “Clearly, it’s still a priority for us because we put it out this year,” says James. “Nothing about the Sony PlayStation acquisition has changed that market orientation. We’re going to continue developing and deploying cutting-edge sound solutions.”
Is it odd that Audeze is now part of a bigger brand that makes the MDR-CD900ST and MDR-7506, some of the most ubiquitous studio headphones on the planet? James is unbothered, pointing out PlayStation sits a long way from Sony Electronics, and “Sony’s most expensive studio headphone is somewhere around the price of our least expensive.
“If PlayStation is the car brand, Audeze is the racing division,” he argues. “We’re out there at the edge of what’s possible, innovating and trying to see what we can do.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The proof is SLAM, which debuted before the 520 and is now what James calls a foundational technology, deployed across the range as products refresh. That includes this year’s £339 Maxwell 2 gaming headset. And just last week, a Maxwell 2 ANC variant arrived, bringing active noise cancelling to a full-range planar magnetic driver – a world-first James claims the brand has spent over a decade developing. It also adds auto-calibrating head tracking and Dolby Atmos.
So who does Audeze want to see in the driver’s seat of its newest MM-520 racecar? “It’s a studio product for folks who are serious about learning their craft and perfecting it,” says James, pointing budget-conscious buyers to the MM-100, tuned for “the same kind of vibe”. For his part, Marroquin wants zero gatekeeping. “I created them for the masses,” he says. “This is how I hear things. And if you like it, if you give it a chance, do 10,000 hours on them.”
There’s plenty riding on his own pair. Marroquin is starting Post Malone’s next album, has just finished a Quavo record with Pharrell, and tonight will be back in his London hotel room, laptop open, controlling his console at Larrabee from another continent.
“It gives me a lot of confidence,” he says. And confidence, as he puts it, “is everything”. We sure hope airport security sees it that way.
The Audeze MM-520 is now available.
Words: James Day
Photography: Simon Vinall
The post “Those are my weapon”: Inside Audeze and Manny Marroquin’s MM-520 headphones appeared first on MusicTech.

Graph Tech Guitar Labs open UK Online Store Graph Tech Guitar Labs have just announced the launch of a new UK Online Store that makes it quicker and easier than ever for musicians, repair shops and guitar builders to get their hands on genuine Graph Tech products. 

Netflix paid $587M for Ben Affleck’s AI filmmaking startupNetflix revealed that it paid $587 million in cash for InterPositive, a startup co-founded by Ben Affleck.

Kreativ Sound Juno Nocturnes — 96 Arturia JUN-6 V PresetsJuno Nocturnes is a KREATIV Sound preset collection for Arturia JUN-6 V. It focuses on dark ambient pads, deep drones, pulsing sequences, shadowed basses, fragile leads, dusty keys, and atmospheric FX for cinematic and experimental production. What's Inside. - 96 Arturia JUN-6 V presets. - 32 pads, 16 drones, 13 sequences, 8 basses, 9 leads, 9 keys, and 9 FX. - README, preset list, license, product description, and cover image. Best For. - Dark ambient, drone, cinematic, sci-fi, and experimental electronic music. - Soundtrack-ready pads, chorus-heavy analog motion, and long evolving notes. - Producers who want a complete JUN-6 V bank with a nocturnal character. Requirements / Format. - Arturia JUN-6 V required. - Recommended: JUN-6 V 1.6.x or newer. - Delivered as a JUN-6 V preset bank in .junx format inside a ZIP download. License / Usage. You can use the included presets royalty-free in personal and commercial music, film, game, and client projects. Do not resell, redistribute, repackage, or share the source preset bank itself. Load Juno Nocturnes into JUN-6 V and build darker cinematic parts fast. Read More

Automated Pressure Advance Using a Bed-Leveling SensorOne of the most crucial aspects of FDM 3D printing is ensuring sufficient material is extruded. Determining the right flow rate can be done manually, but some printers these days automatically perform this adjustment, which is very convenient. [Stefan] of CNC Kitchen investigates how to add similar functionality using existing bed-leveling sensors.
A major complication with extrusion in FDM printers is that the flow rate has to fit the printing speed. However, you can’t just immediately speed up or reduce the flow rate, as the melting filament is flexible and thus acts like a spring, especially as the extruder is exerting significant force on the filament, which adds compression.
The moment you reduce or increase the speed of the nozzle, you can get over- or under-extrusion, but the delayed response by the extruded filament means that you have to adjust for this change in advance. Ergo, the name ‘pressure advance’, also known as the K-value. Obviously, this is a parameter that differs with each material, printer, and other factors, so a direct measurement is always the best.
In the Bambu Lab X1 FDM printer, a Lidar scanner was used to scan various test patterns to automatically determine the optimal setting. This was later moved to the purge section of the extruder in newer Bambu Lab printers. On other FDM printers, the only available sensor in that area is typically the pressure sensor for bed leveling. Could this sensor make a similar measurement?
This wasn’t just an idle thought, but was inspired by the Snapmaker U1, which runs open-source Klipper, with tantalizing glimpses of how it does pressure-advance sensing in its extruder. This extruder also only contains a load cell, as do some Prusa printers. These much more open printers thus provided a test bed for some experimentation.
With load cell data available, [Stefan] measured how various extrusion rates affect the load cell, which can then theoretically be correlated with the appropriate K-values for specific transitions. He created a calibration tool for a range of Prusa printers that works with stock firmware, though this is definitely still a work in progress. There are also a couple of similar open-source projects, such as this Auto PA Calibration project by [Mark].
Overall, K-value presets tend to work pretty well, but adding a pressure-advance calibration feature to existing FDM printers is definitely an interesting idea. There’s also the prospect of lateral sensing using this same bed-leveling sensor, which could allow the printer to sense much more than just the bed.

Acustica reveal Mystic 2 Mystic 2 now offers a choice of three preamp models, with a new Vintage option delivering a more aggressive sound character, and Modern offering a more refined and flexible sound. 

Calculator UI Is More Complex Than You Might ThinkCalculators are so ubiquitous and so familiar that they are easy to take for granted in many different ways. [lcamtuf] points out one that has probably never occurred to many of us: the user interface for a calculator is an unexpectedly complex thing.
The internal logic to support sequential inputs and multiple operators in a way that feels intuitive is a complex thing.
Resolving something like 1 + 2 = is pretty straightforward but complexity compounds rapidly after that, with numerous special cases. Let’s imagine one decides to program a simple calculator UI as a weekend project. The development process might look a little like this:

User types in 1 + 2 = and the calculator displays 3. What happens if the user immediately presses -?
No problem, just consider the result of the previous operation as an already-there input. So we’ll have 3 - for this next operation, and wait for more.
Unless we should have treated that - as a negative sign for whatever number is coming next, making it a negative number? No, ignore that. Just treat whatever results from pressing equals as a pre-typed input.
Unless the user hits a number. Because if they hit 2 (for example) then we’ll have a 32 and not a 2 which they probably, definitely don’t expect. So that’s a special case and we should insert a clear if that happens.
Oh, better clear if the user enters a decimal, too.
I’m going to need a coffee…

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Imagine trying to figure all this out for the very first time, without the benefits of habit and history to fall back on.
The fact is that supporting the apparently trivial behavior of a simple calculator requires an underlying complex state machine that deals with all kinds of special cases in order to make the UI feel intuitive. And that’s just for a basic four-function calculator; we haven’t even touched on how special keys like % should behave.
We know [lcamtuf] speaks from experience, not just because of their deep knowledge of calculator history but because they rolled their own calculator that uses voltmeters as digit displays and there’s nothing like actually implementing something to make one appreciate it.

Waymo says San Francisco service has resumed after one-hour pauseThis isn’t the first time power outages have caused issues for Waymo.

Stemwire Zero Sweep FilterA high-pass and low-pass filter that leaves the signal unchanged at zero, without clicks or wet/dry artefacts. Sweep the filter. Not the bypass. The sweep is the easy part. Getting the filter completely out again is where the workaround starts. With Zero Sweep, the signal moves smoothly from fully transparent to filtered, then back to clean. Zero Stays Clean No residual filtering at the resting position. Put it on a channel, bus or master without keeping a bypass lane beside it. One automation lane Draw the sweep itself. No separate bypass and wet/dry moves to keep in sync. Made for transitions Builds, breaks and DJ-style cuts without the usual bypass clicks, phasey wet/dry crossfades. Read More

Frap Tools update the Magnolia A second production run of the Magnolia is now complete, and the company have also been hard at work on a firmware update that delivers some enhancements and bug fixes. 

IK Multimedia add Brown Panel Signature Collection to TONEX Widely used across surf, country, blues and early rock records, the amps were behind everything from the expressive tones of Chris Stapleton to the pristine clean sounds embraced by Mark Knopfler.

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