“There’s a great opportunity for people who are committed to being creative”: Chris Lake wants you to make something with what you’ve gotAfter dominating house music for the past several years, Chris Lake is officially out of goals.
The LA-based British producer has numerous hit records including Turn off the Lights, Beggin’, and Somebody, and released his debut album, Chemistry, in 2025. Through his label, Black Book Records, he gave early opportunities to Cloonee, Eli Brown, and other prominent artists. He recently collaborated with exciting up-and-comers such as ATRIP and Ragie Ban. Finally, he just played two massive headline shows at Los Angeles State Historic Park, selling 20,000 tickets each.

READ MORE: How we remixed Taylor Swift: Tips and tricks from Chris Lake and Ely Oaks

So, what’s left? He could push for a stadium headline. Or he could curate his own festival. But that’s not where his head’s at right now.
“Do I have any big goals? No. Not really. I’m in a nice spot at the moment where interesting things just keep coming towards me, rather than me having to go towards the good ideas,” Lake says. “Whichever ones seem the most interesting to me, fuck it, I’ll do that.”
Back when a 19-year-old Lake was putting out his first release in 2002 — a progressive house single called Santiago De Cuba — he had the opposite approach. He was chasing any opportunity he could find, making music on a PC with the now-niche DAW Sonic Foundry ACID. Santiago De Cuba got signed because he posted the track on the message board for the now-defunct underground UK label, Hooj Choons. Much to his excitement, its sublabel, Lost Language, was interested.
“I ended up spending months trying to perfect it, and then my computer crashed,” Lake says. “I lost the project, and I couldn’t recreate the song. The only file that I had was a 192K MP3. So I just converted it to a WAV and submitted that for mastering. That’s the version that’s out there. I didn’t want to lose my first record deal.”
Lake spent a lot of time on those message boards in his early years, listening to the “cool” music and doing his best to make something that sounded similar. Santiago De Cuba is still on Spotify (he didn’t know that until I told him), and so are many of his releases from the early to mid 00s. Scanning through will reveal a plethora of warehouse-friendly genres. Chemical Breaks is an acid breakbeat, and Filth is another deep progressive track.
Image: Claire S. Burke
On average, these initial releases have fewer than 30,000 Spotify streams, with some under 5,000. While stream counts are not directly indicative of quality, these are extremely low numbers compared to his new, more energetic cuts that have mostly broken a million. It was when he stopped putting any energy towards folding into others’ tastes that Lake found his real audience.
“When I was younger, that underground mentality was intentional. That was me trying to fit in,” Lake admits. “I abandoned that shit years ago.”
With his new approach, he’s getting tapped for Taylor Swift remixes and blowing way past any expectations he had for his career as a young producer. Some of his prized aspirations were having dance originators like Sasha & Digweed play his songs. Or perhaps playing to 1,000 people at a UK superclub where attendees were more interested in the brand than the DJ.
“When I think about the very early days as a music producer, none of those thoughts or visions or dreams even come close to anything that I’m doing right now. I say it to my manager and my team. How the fuck are we doing this shit?” Lake says.
After all, 24 years ago, few could fathom today’s audience numbers because dance music events simply weren’t that momentous or historic. Lake himself recently headlined Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the same stage where The Beatles, Johnny Cash, The Grateful Dead and countless other non-dance acts have performed. As a lifelong fan of dance music, he’s thrilled that everyone involved in the culture can take part in this current mass appeal.
Image: Claire S. Burke
“There’s a real impression being made by dance music on a much bigger scale. An artist like myself who can make beats and end up connecting to 10,000 people, turning up to a cutout in a mountain to dance for hours. That’s pretty fucking special,” Lake says. “Some artists in the scene find it challenging [to] see new artists being popular. It can be easy to compare success within a scene; I just think that’s a terrible way of looking at it. It makes me really happy seeing artists go on and become successful.”
Lake is equally happy to work with artists regardless of their success or genre. As seen on his regular Studio Sessions series on YouTube, he’ll invite his mates such as Sammy Virji and Chris Lorenzo (with whom he has the side project Anti-Up). Stalwarts seemingly way outside his house music sound, such as Bonobo and Dillon Francis, have shown up. The videos have also been a way to put on rising stars, such as MPH. He acknowledges the cliché that making music is just about having fun for him, but that’s the way it’s always been.
“I know a lot more. I’m old now, but genuinely, making music, I feel exactly the same today as I did the first time I made music. And I approach it exactly the same way. I just feel like a kid again. It definitely keeps me young until I look in the mirror,” Lake jests.
Some of his studio session videos are almost eight hours long. Skimming through them, it’s common to hear him make fun of himself. Calling initial ideas “shit” or “bro-y,” leaning into the stereotype that his fans are one giant legion of Hawaiian shirt-clad frat boys.
Image: Claire S. Burke
But then the final product becomes something like Reach For You, a dreamy cut off Chemistry that combines the ethereal voice of Kelly Lee Owens with precisely swung arpeggios and burning sonic sheets over both a garage and 4/4 beat.
“What’s firing off in my head is the same,” Lake says of his current mindset compared to his earlier days. “I just have more tools and experience to get from an idea to a finished composition. That’s probably the biggest difference.”
Another element of his career he jokes about is how much money he’s “wasted” on gear. For anyone who might be hoping to find the secret weapon to the kind of Chris Lake bassline that leads to 20,000-cap headlines and hit records, it doesn’t come from a new purchase. In fact, he recommends the exact opposite.
“One of the best things you can ever do is to try and make something with the constraints that you have,” Lake says. “Do something with what you’ve got. See how fun you can make it.”
He is sure to mention that people now have much fewer constraints than they used to. One specific element he discusses is the advance in stem separation. But it’s certainly a give and take.
“There’s nothing that you can’t sample. There’s no idea that you can’t tap into. You’re gonna get some phenomenal beats that are familiar, because it’s a remix of an old track from the 70s that no one had the stems for before,” Lake says before a concise caveat: “The consequence of it is, there aren’t a lot of people out there at the moment writing any new ideas—picking up a microphone and recording something. There’s a really great opportunity for people who are committed to being creative to write things and actually stand out.”
Chris Lake is already standing out, but perhaps the burgeoning artists out there should set the goal of making their mark with something only they can create.
The post “There’s a great opportunity for people who are committed to being creative”: Chris Lake wants you to make something with what you’ve got appeared first on MusicTech.

Darkpalace Studio releases PIRANHA multi-band waveshaper and clipper (GIVEAWAY)
Darkpalace Studio has released PIRANHA, a multi-band waveshaper and clipper plugin for macOS, Windows, and Linux. We’re taking a closer look below and giving away one free copy to one lucky BPB reader. You might remember Darkpalace Studio from CATERPILLAR, the free stereo enhancer we featured on BPB before. PIRANHA is a more aggressive tool than [...]
View post: Darkpalace Studio releases PIRANHA multi-band waveshaper and clipper (GIVEAWAY)

Need more character in your tracks? UJAM’s new Retrocraft plugin packs an entire vintage effects chain into one windowLooking for an effects plugin to transform your piano chords, vocal loops, or drum beats into beautifully imperfect tracks? Meet Retrocraft, UJAM’s new multi-effect plugin designed to bring “vintage character, analogue-style saturation and lo-fi texture” to your productions without the need for sprawling effect chains.
Combining amp colouration, tape and vinyl emulation, speaker modelling, modulation and ambience processing in a single plugin, Retrocraft is designed to apply colour from subtle warmth and playback colouration to heavily degraded radio effects and experimental sound design.

READ MORE: “A new standard for vocal manipulation”: UJAM’s Voxcraft is its first plugin dedicated to vocal processing – here’s what you need to know

Alongside its core character-processing engine are six effects modules – including LoFi, Modulation, Instability, Delay, Reverb, and Chop – as well as 100 production-ready presets for instruments and vocals. There’s also a built-in Surprise feature for generating random effect combinations to help you get started.
Retrocraft’s character-shaping engine draws inspiration from classic analogue equipment and playback devices. Each processing stage can be combined and adjusted independently, making it easy to switch between subtle enhancement and dramatic sound transformation.
“We’re big fans of the many character-processing tools available today, but we felt there was room for a more integrated solution that combines these types of effects with important additions like modulation and ambience processing,” says UJAM co-founder Peter Gorges.
“Instead of tediously building effect chains, Retrocraft lets you start with a complex effect combination you like and easily tweak it to make it your own.”
Retrocraft is available in VST2, VST3, AU2 and AAX formats for macOS and Windows. The plugin is currently being offered at an introductory price of $49 ($39 for users who own at least one UJAM plugin) until 2 August, after which it will retail for $99 (loyalty price: $89).

Learn more at UJAM.
The post Need more character in your tracks? UJAM’s new Retrocraft plugin packs an entire vintage effects chain into one window appeared first on MusicTech.

Corus wants to make music discovery social again – and leave the algorithm behindMusic discovery today is largely a battle of algorithms. Whether you’re scrolling Spotify, TikTok or YouTube, software is constantly deciding what it thinks you should hear next. But a new platform called Corus is betting that human taste still beats machine learning.
Launched by Cymbal co-founder Gabe Jacobs, Corus is a new social platform built around music and film discovery through shared recommendations and conversation. The idea is that, instead of relying on algorithms to find your next favourite artist or movie, you discover them through people whose taste you trust. A few early adopters of Corus include artists such as Nikki Nair, Daedelus, Conducta, and DJ Noir.

READ MORE: “If artists are lucky, we get in your ‘For You’ page”: Loco Dice on the harsh truth of modern music discovery

Available on mobile and desktop, Corus blends social networking with media discovery, allowing users to share favourite songs, albums, playlists and films while connecting with others who gravitate towards similar creative interests. The platform currently integrates with SoundCloud, Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal and Deezer, making it relatively painless to share what you’re listening to across services.
The project marks a return to familiar territory for Jacobs, who previously co-founded Cymbal, a music-focused social platform that ran between 2015 and 2018. While Cymbal borrowed heavily from Reddit’s charting and upvote system, Corus takes a different approach, leaning into visual design and personal expression in a way that feels closer to Instagram or Letterboxd.
“Corus… It’s going to be about connecting and celebrating the art we love that we share in common,” says Jacobs. “It doesn’t feel like there’s a really comfy place on the internet to express yourself and connect to others over the art we love. Current social media hurts to use and is full of ads, bots, and algorithms that pigeon-hole us. I want this to be different, more human and authentic.”
The platform operates on both free and premium membership tiers. Free users can share up to five posts per day, while subscribers ($3.99 a month, or $24.99 a year) gain access to unlimited posting, profile customisation options, playlist exports and a dedicated Favorites feed. Jacobs has also committed to keeping the platform free from advertising, with subscriptions intended to support the service long term.
The company is already rolling out additional discovery and community engagement tools, including feeds that surface trending conversations and notable releases from the previous 30 days. Looking further ahead, Jacobs says Corus is also exploring ways to help artists generate more income through the platform.
For more information or to sign up, visit Corus.
The post Corus wants to make music discovery social again – and leave the algorithm behind appeared first on MusicTech.

Jeesonic releases EQ Pro, a FREE 24-band dynamic EQ plugin
Jeesonic has released EQ Pro, a free dynamic equalizer plugin for macOS and Windows. EQ Pro is a surgical EQ with up to 24 dynamic bands, per-band stereo routing, selectable phase modes, and a real-time analyzer. That’s still crazy for a free plugin, if you ask me, even though I recently wrote that ZL Equalizer [...]
View post: Jeesonic releases EQ Pro, a FREE 24-band dynamic EQ plugin

Mastering The Mix’s Reference 3 tells you exactly how to fix your mix£59, masteringthemix.com
Checking how your mix stacks up sonically alongside a reference track is one of the best ways to level up your productions. Whether you’re at the writing stage and looking to calibrate your ears before you begin, or in the mixing or mastering phase, it’s an essential technique for beginners and pros alike.
I’ve always found switching back and forth between tracks to be incredibly clunky inside a DAW, but dedicated plugins like Mastering The Mix’s Reference make it quick and easy. Version 3 adds new and innovative ways of comparing tracks and, although some of these give mixed results, the overall package provides a slick workflow and enough useful tools to make it all worthwhile.

READ MORE: Is Oeksound’s Soothe3 the most transparent resonance suppressor yet?

Learning to identify a useful and relevant reference track is an important skill. Even within the same genre there are differences in things like kick drum size, hi-hat sizzle, and vocal width — picking the wrong track can leave you chasing your tail. To help with this, Reference 3 includes an inventive feature that scans your reference track folder to give each track a series of unique tags according to the elements of tonal balance, stereo, dynamics and loudness. It then listens and analyses your track for 20 seconds and pulls up four tracks from your library that are the closest, giving each a match percentage score. A larger and broader reference library will give the best results, naturally.
Especially impressive, is that the four tracks are instantly level matched to your track, with their loudest parts looped. More times than not, it provides me with useful selections that allow me to get started making comparisons straight away. When I disagree with any of the selections, then it’s easy to switch them out with a track of my own choosing. You can also set up additional loops, or switch to Mirror mode, which is useful for checking different versions of the track that you’re working on.
The centre of the user interface is where you click to switch between the original and the reference track, and it’s flanked by peak and LUFS meters so you can compare volumes. Below this is a veritable smorgasbord of feedback data on how the mixes compare, including differences in the frequencies, width, compression, and instrument balance. The latter is an innovative new feature called Mix Balance. It reads the relative volumes of the vocals, drums, bass and musical elements of each reference, and then compares it to your own balance, offering suggestions of volume adjustments if they don’t match.
Reference 3 Mix Balance. Image: Alex Holmes
Mix Balance can be heavy on the CPU and memory as it’s calculating in real time, but it can be switched off in the settings menu. I find the resulting suggestions are sometimes inconsistent, and making the relevant adjustments isn’t always then reflected in the metering. That said, when I take it more as a rough starting point to make minor tweaks, I am able to overcome my ear fatigue from hearing a track too many times, and manage to create a slightly more balanced mix.
The next section is Master Scope, which has several meters that can be switched on and off. These include red areas that will show up if you have portions of your track that are seriously out of phase, and also if there is over-compression in a region compared to the reference. Both are useful indicators of potential problems, but it’s also worth checking your mix in mono to make sure you’re not losing anything important. I also found the Over Compression meter seemed reluctant to register anything in the low-frequency range, even when I compressed the hell out of my master using an OTT compressor as a test.
Two returning features from the previous version, are the Stereo Width display and the Level Line, novel alternatives to simply trying to match two spectral curves together. It shows the difference between the two tracks as the exact EQ adjustments needed to make your track sound like the reference. You can change the refresh speed in the settings, which helps slow things down and make it easier to read. The manual suggests that as long as you’re within +/- 3dB, then you’re sounding pretty close, and this is highlighted by a faint blue region behind the line. You get four levels of zoom that potentially let you really hone in on the small differences, but it’s wiser to use the Level Line as a rough guide and work more zoomed out.
In principle, the Level Line is a more direct way to help you match your tracks than using a spectrum analyser, but it has the danger of leading you down the garden path of following numbers when you should be using your ears. I find myself making adjustments and expecting the line to match what I am doing, but it keeps recalibrating itself into different shapes as the built-in volume averaging system shifts the line up and down. It’s not without its uses though. If you take the first shape it presents and roughly build that into an EQ curve, then you get part of the way there.
Reference 3 Mix Instructor. Image: Alex Holmes
I am surprised to find the Stereo Width display to be the most useful to me. It shows how much you need to widen or narrow the mix at different parts of the spectrum, and the display seems to respond more predictably as you make changes in real time.
The final new section is the Mix Instructor, which essentially provides a text version of the meter readouts in the Master Scope display. It splits the spectrum into three bands and presents simple instructions like ‘Boost by 2 dB/. You could argue that using this is a safer idea than using the Level Line, as it works more generally without you obsessing over small, specific EQ shapes. However, it’s also victim to some of the same unpredictability issues, so use with care.
Other useful features include the ability to quickly solo a portion of the spectrum to help compare subs or top end, being able to switch the output from Stereo to Mono, Mid or Side, and the extra Ref Send plugin. This little beauty can be placed at the beginning of your mastering chain and will send a signal to Reference 3 so that you can easily do level-matched comparisons of your master bus processing. There’s even a guide on the Mastering The Mix website that shows how you can use it to route audio directly from music streaming services to compare to your tracks.
I’m somewhat torn with Reference 3. It’s arguably a victim of its own success at providing stacks of data for you to use when comparing tracks. When you see it providing specific width or EQ suggestions, it’s easy to make decisions based on trying to balance numbers rather than actually using your ears. That’s not necessarily the plugin’s fault though.
If you can build Reference 3 into your workflow as more of a guide than a verbatim solution, then it has stacks of useful tools and a lightning-fast workflow that could make it a decent contender.

Key features

Referencing plugin (VST3, AU, AAX)
Smart Reference Tracks feature automatically finds four similar tracks
Tracks are auto-looped, level matched, and given concise mix descriptors
Masterscope provides exact EQ and stereo width adjustments to match the reference
Also highlights phase issues and over-compression
Mix Balance feature suggests gain adjustments for vocals, drums, bass and music
Mix Instructor splits into three bands and tells you exactly what’s needed to match the reference
Match % displays how closely the tonal balance, stereo, dynamics and loudness are matched

The post Mastering The Mix’s Reference 3 tells you exactly how to fix your mix appeared first on MusicTech.

Just 48 hours until GearExpo UK! GearExpo UK is now upon us, with just two days to go until 150 of the world's top pro-audio brands and industry names gather for a day of exhibits, panel talks and networking. 

The Story Behind Britney Spears' "...Baby One More Time" — The Idea Everyone Rejected FirstMax Martin wrote it half-asleep. TLC passed. The label wanted animation. Then 16-year-old Britney Spears had a better idea than everyone in the room — and "Baby One More Time" changed pop music forever.

AI was supposed to kill engineering jobs, but new data suggests they’re the most resilientWhile AI dominates the layoff narrative, engineers as a share of total new hires have actually increased, according to SignalFire data.

MintoTsukino HotelCurrySpiceHotelCurrySpice is a free harmonic spice effect — it does not crush the original signal, but adds a precise "single sting" of harmonics to bring depth and character. Three controls only: SPICE (the amount of seasoning), HEAT (direction from rounded to biting), and TYPE (the harmonic recipe). Features: SPICE 0% — bit-transparent dry signal, true bypass. 4 harmonic recipes: 欧風 (European) / キーマ (Keema) / マサラ (Masala) / hidden 裏メニュー (Secret Menu). A/B comparison stores SPICE, HEAT, and TYPE together. Animated pot character GUI with 8 expressions. Safety peak guard to prevent dangerous output. Made by Minto Tsukino as part of the Minto Shokudo (Audio Tools) series. Free for personal and commercial use. Read More

FTX exec’s wife scheduled for November trial on campaign finance chargesA Manhattan judge ordered that Michelle Bond’s criminal trial start in November after he denied a motion to dismiss the indictment based on claims that prosecutors misled her husband over her charges.

Deezer’s new in-app remix feature lets users speed up and modify tracks by Céline Dion and other artists ‘with full rights compliance’Deezer says every remix is created with the explicit agreement of the artist, and that streams of remixed versions are attributed to the original work
Source

Laser Scanning A Cave With Homebrew GearHow do you measure the inside of a cave? You could do a bunch of hard work with classic surveying gear… or you could just use a laser scanner. [9nl] did the latter, with a scanning rig of his own creation.
The build is based around an Ouster VLP-16 mid-range lidar sensor. It shoots out pulses of light and measures how long it takes them to bounce back in order to determine the range of objects in the vicinity, and thus can be used to great effect for 3D scanning tasks. For [9nl], though, the sensor had a serious limitation. Since it only had a 40-degree field of view, it wasn’t ideal for the desired application of scanning a cave. However, by building a custom rig that could rotate the sensor, [9nl] ended up with a rig that could 3D scan an area through a full 360 degrees. There’s nothing wildly complex involved, just some good old mechanical engineering—putting the sensor on a shaft and spinning it with a belt drive. Then it’s just a matter of processing the data correctly. The hard part is then getting the rig in and out of the cave without breaking anything.
There are plenty of off-the-shelf 3D scanning solutions that can do this work, but few of them come cheap. Plus, rolling your own teaches you a great many things as you hone your solution to your particular needs. Video after the break.

[Thanks to Kovy Jacob for the tip!]

Assignments: Chris RogersonArtistic Director

The Bravo! Vail Music Festival

The Bravo! Vail Music Festival (Bravo! Vail) has announced composer Chris Rogerson as its next Artistic Director. Rogerson assumes the Artistic Director Designate role immediately and the Artistic Director title on September 1, 2026, for an initial three-year term. “Bravo! Vail represents the highest level of music-making in an incomparable natural setting. From its founding in 1987, it has served as a beacon of artistic integrity and a place of limitless artistic possibility,” said Rogerson.

For more, contact powens@bravovail.org.The post Assignments: Chris Rogerson first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

Waves V17 now available Waves V17 introduces a range of new features and improvements, including a completely redesigned preset management system, new live sound and post-production enhancements, and Mix Unlock, a premium stem-separation feature within StudioVerse.