A for Alpha on the power of sampling and the gear that makes her 90s heart soarBritish DJ and producer A For Alpha, AKA Abby Gray, has proved her admiration for the spirit of 90s underground. She offers a real fusion of past and present, paying homage to the decade’s legends while adding modern flare.

READ MORE: Geeking out with Douze & Lo Galbo about the analogue gear on their 80s-inspired soundtrack album

Although still early on in her career, she’s supported heavyweight artists as a DJ, such as Annie Mac, Eats Everything and Chaos in the CBD. She also has a weekly residency on SWU.FM and runs her own label, Alpha’s Trip.
The producer takes us through the gear that allows her to stay true to the underground scene that gave her the drive to be the musician she is, and the techniques that she uses to emulate the sounds she knows all too well.
Image: Press
Congratulations on the release of your new EP HARD24! How do you think it echoes the iconic sound of the underground scene in the 90s while still sounding modern?
Thank you very much, it’s great to see the tracks out in the world!
I think it’s down to me being really inspired by this decade as it’s pretty much all I listen to. So, when it came to creating the EP those were the kind of ideas and sounds that I had in my head. I also have a very big collection of records from the 90s and I spent a lot of time sampling parts out of those tracks, which was a real snapshot of that time incorporated within the music.
I also spent a lot of time researching what equipment was used during the decade and found plugins and hardware that created this iconic sound which I used a lot during my production process. The tracks still sound modern because ultimately they were created within Ableton – I also use other plugins that I feel have quite a modern sound.
Akai MPC-2000XL. Image: Press
Your sound takes inspiration from the 90s underground scene. How is your studio set up to achieve this?
I have an MPC-2000XL which I love so much — it’s my baby! It’s a really iconic bit of gear from that time used to create a lot of house, garage and hip-hop. It’s been modded so you can put a memory card where the floppy disk used to be and load all your own samples.
I also have a Roland TR-09 which is based on the legendary 909 drum machine by Roland. I don’t use this as much as I used to, but I’d like to get it out more to get those classic-sounding house drums with the signature 909 swing.
The rest is all in the box on Ableton, as well as using other plugins. I used quite a lot of the Roland plugins on this release; you can get all their synths as plugins and there is some wicked-sounding stuff on them that instantly gives you the 90s vibe.
I also use D16’s Decimort for bit reduction, which gives such a great crunch to the drums and creates that 90s roughness. The GSatPlus is also a great saturator that helps to add the 90s sound.
Roland TR-09. Image: Press
Tell us a bit about your studio.
My studio is in Bristol, which is great because it’s a very creative and independent area. I use the studio to produce and prepare for my DJ sets but I also use it to run my own DJ and music production tuition business.
What’s your latest gear or plugin purchase?
My latest purchase is a plugin called FEM-BASO. It’s a vintage FM bass generator that has really cool-sounding bass on it. I bought it because it was recommended by one of my favourite producers, Burnski. I love using it, you can instantly get a great-sounding bass from it and it was very worth it, only £15!
Plugins used by A For Alpha. Image: Press
What’s the best free plugin you own?
There is an amazing free bundle of effects plugins by Kilohearts. I use the frequency shifter on every track, which gives the drums a nice gritty and dark feel which I think is quite a big characteristic of 90s tracks. I also use the trance gate on a lot of tunes, such as on the vocal samples in Dark Bongos and some of the FX in Let Me Hear Ya.
What’s been the biggest investment in your career/studio?
I would have to say my DJ setup. I have three XDJ-700s, a DJM-750Mk2, two Technics 1210Mk2 and about 1,000 records. As you can imagine, that’s cost quite a bit of money to build up over the years!
It’s been hugely worth it though; it’s really elevated me as a DJ. I can also record my vinyls so I can play them digitally as well if I need to. These older tracks are a very unique part of my sound as an artist, so it’s worth it.
A For Alpha’s DJ setup. Image: Press
Is there a particular tool or technique that you like to use that allows your sound to stay true to genres and style you take inspiration from, while being uniquely you?
Sampling is what allows me to achieve this; it’s the easiest way to stay true to the genre and style that I’m most inspired by. It’s not a unique process as it’s been used for decades, but the unique part would be what I choose to sample. For example, with vocals, I do a lot of extensive research into vocalists from the 90s tracks that I like.
How did you approach sampling more non-traditional instruments in your tracks, such as in Dark Bongos?
For the bongos, I found a loop sample in an old 90s sample pack. However, the loop was pretty full-on and busy with lots of drumming and layers of bongos. To strip it back while maintaining the original groove from the loop, I played around with transient shaping in Ableton which reduced some of the peaks of the audio and almost removed parts of the drums from the loop.
Do you have a dream piece of gear? What is it? Why?
A Roland SH-101 would be pretty cool! You can get some incredible bass sounds out of that thing.

What’s a music production myth you think needs debunking?
One myth that I’ve heard is that you have to create every preset yourself on synthesisers. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s fun to create your own and it gives you a unique sound, but in my opinion, it’s all about the general vibe of the track, the end result is really the part that matters the most.
In my experience, creating the 90s sound is best done by sampling or using iconic patches from iconic synths, and so creating a new preset each time isn’t really going to help me achieve that sound.
Who gave you the biggest lesson in your career? Can you tell us about how it impacted you?
I’m going to shout out my old radio producer Paul here. He taught me lots about radio, of course, but he also taught me a lot about 90s tunes. Whether that be specific labels and artists, the best way to mix vinyl and the biggest part really, which is how to deal with the ups and downs of the industry. It’s maybe not something that is discussed a lot, but trying to break through as an artist can be really tough. You’re working 40-50 hours a week at your day job and then you’re trying to create and build your music career on the side. It can be really tough to balance it all and not feel super stressed and burnt out. Paul really helped me to deal with that struggle a lot and how to ultimately enjoy what I was doing, a huge lesson for me that I still embrace to this day.
The post A for Alpha on the power of sampling and the gear that makes her 90s heart soar appeared first on MusicTech.

Sampleson introduce Tronic drum synth Tronic combines a pair of analogue-modelled oscillators with a 16-step sequencer, and comes packed with parameters that allow users to fine-tune the beats it generates. 

Uber will need to fingerprint drivers in California to transport teensUber has 30 days to require certain drivers to get fingerprinted if the ride-hail giant intends to continue transporting unaccompanied teens in California.  The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) issued a ruling Thursday that requires taxi and ride-hail drivers who are carrying unaccompanied minors in the state to pass a fingerprint background check. The ruling […]
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‘China’s MicroStrategy’ sells all of its Bitcoin and Ethereum: Asia ExpressAsia’s MicroStrategy Meitu has sold all of its 940 Bitcoin and 31K ETH while Sth. Korea looks to legalize corporate crypto buys. Asia Express

Off the Strip at the Punk Rock MuseumLas Vegas is a wild vacation location, no matter how you slice and dice it. Whether you go for the gambling--the activity which, let's be honest, built the city--or the various other attractions that cause the skyline to drip with sweat, blood, tears, and decadence, a memorable time can be pretty much guaranteed.On a recent trip over Thanksgiving week, this writer and his family stayed at the Luxor, the pyramid-shaped, Egypt-themed hotel situated on one end of the infamous Strip. With a 13-year-old in tow, this was a chance to experience a family-friendly version of a Vegas break.So, as well as the Luxor and Excalibur hotels, we ventured off the strip to take in art experience Meow Wolf's Omega Mart location, as well as the One Piece Cafe (based on the popular One Piece anime).But best of all was the Punk Rock Museum. When our Uber pulled up, it was immediately apparent that there was nothing else in that location but for a strip club a few yards away. Maybe, when you dig into the sometimes-seedy club origins of punk, that's appropriate.

The guy checking us in informed us that the museum is arranged chronologically, starting at the birth punk and taking us through to the present. So we see artifacts from the proto-punk era, including from Detroit bands the MC5 and the Stooges.We explore CBGB's and Max's Kansas City New York, and the origins of U.K. punk with the likes of the Sex Pistols and the Damned.

Outfits, instruments and other sundries from L.A. punk bands including the Germs and the Circle Jerks are fascinating, with the CJs supplying a full drum kit.

We could have stood and stared at the wall of flyers all day long. And the circle of stage outfits, including one of the Aquabats' superhero suits, is glorious. If you haven't been yet, get yourself there! For all info, visit thepunkrockmuseum.com.The post Off the Strip at the Punk Rock Museum first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

How Corroded Can a Motherboard Be?We will admit it. If we found a 386 motherboard as badly corroded as the one [Bits und Bolts] did, we would trash it—not him, though. In fact, we were surprised when he showed it and said he had already removed most of it in vinegar. You can check the board out in the video below.
There was still a lot of work to do on both the front and back of the board. The motherboard was a Biostar and while it isn’t as dense as a modern board, it still had plenty of surface mount parts jammed in.

One challenge was that fixing corroded vias could break connections with traces on inner layers of the multi-layer PCB. It was important to try to find out where things were going in case it was going to need some wiring repair after some of the other repairs.
Even after cleaning and resoldering, there were some bad components — notably some tantalum capacitors. With those replaced, the board came up as you’d expect. It is worth listening to the maniacal laughter of satisfaction at about the 53-minute mark when the board booted up. We get it.
The 386 is simple enough that you could do your own motherboard. Otherwise, you might expect to have to provide some TLC.

Daniel Ek cashes out another $37m in Spotify stock, bringing total value of shares sold this year to nearly $320mSpotify's market capitalization is more than double that of the world's largest music company, Universal
Source

Inside Sony Music Publishing’s flagship creative hub for songwriters in Los AngelesSony Music Publishing has opened a new office space and creative hub for songwriters in Los Angeles.
Source

Keebin’ with Kristina: the One with the Folding Keyboard ModLet’s face it, failed Kickstarters are no good. But they can spark good things, like real versions of technologies that might have actually been faked for the platform. A touchscreen mouse, for instance, with shortcuts that can be programmed for various applications.
Image by [Sam Baker] via Hackaday.IOThis story is one of scope creep, as [Sam Baker] says in the project details. At first, he thought he could just basically duct tape a touchscreen with shortcuts to an existing mouse. A couple of mouse teardowns later, [Sam] arrived at the conclusion that things would not be so simple.
After some digging around, [Sam] found a repository where someone created a way to communicate with the ADNS-5050 optical sensor, so [Sam] started by creating a breakout board for this sensor. By combining that with an ESP32 dev board and a touchscreen, [Sam] had his shortcut mouse.
Does it work? Yes. Is it useful? Well, yes. And also no. The beauty part of using a regular mouse is that you don’t have to look down at it to know where the buttons are. In the future, [Sam] would like to implement some kind of buttons for tactility. In the meantime, haptic feedback could be nice.

Converting (Another!) Folding Keyboard Into Bluetooth
There is a ton of neat old technology out there, and not all of it has to end up as e-waste. You might remember this post about a cool old folding keyboard converted to Bluetooth for use with phones and tablets.
Image by [Xinming Chen] via GitHub[Xinming Chen] wrote in to alert me that not only are there other folding keyboards that were made for PDA devices back when, namely the G750; he has converted these to Bluetooth as well.
There were a bunch of different models sold under various names, but [Xinming] says as long as the keyboard looks the same, it should work with his adapter. The biggest difference is that the G750 itself uses inverted TTL for the RX line, while other models do not.
The really amazing part of this is the actual build itself, which fits in the smaller-than-a-Shuffle footprint of the original PDA connector. Naturally, [Xinming] had to roll his own PCB, which is based on the CH582F microcontroller. But another awesome bit is the micro-switch, which turns on the Bluetooth module when the keyboard is unfolded, and off when it is pushed back together. The whole deal is a really slick maneuver that you should check out in the demo video below.
Whether you build or buy one of these adapters, you don’t have to limit yourself to one device: the CH582F can support up to four hosts as well as the USB connection, so feel free to use it like a KVM switch. Awesome!

The Centerfold: Peep This Beautiful Beast!
Image via Bili Bili
So I was trawling reddit and came across someone asking for the 3D models for these hand rests. I was of course myself more interested in the keyboard, which is a 6×6 dactyl manuform (translated) with an extended num pad in between. That’s quite a few keys, innit? 38 keys per half plus the center beast at 30; I assume the black things are knobs. On a personal note, as much as I like the dactyl and even tried to build one, the dactyl manuform’s thumb cluster just looks uncomfortable to my small hands.
Do you rock a sweet set of peripherals on a screamin’ desk pad? Send me a picture along with your handle and all the gory details, and you could be featured here!
Historical Clackers: the Lasar
Just like any burgeoning, lucrative industry, many entered the typewriter game, but few actually won. Among history’s many forgotten typewriters and the men who made them is the Lasar, made between 1890-1892 by the Godfrey Henry Lasar of St. Louis, MO.
Image via the Antikey Chop
Lasar held an impressive number of patents for various typewriter elements, including one for a “telegraph transmitter”. For the Lasar itself, he received a whopping 17 patents in a single day  — November 19, 1889.
For all of Lasar’s innovation, his company did almost no marketing, which may have attributed to its downfall. Fortunately, several ads were published by the St. Louis Typewriter exchange. Unfortunately, most of them ran after the company went out of business.
The Lasar sold for $75, which comes out to over $2500 in 2024 money. This is about smack dab in the middle of the average cost for a typewriter at the time, however.
One of the reasons it may have failed is because it only typed uppercase, but every other guy’s machine did lowercase, too. One of Lasar’s Lasar patents is for a shift mechanism, but he didn’t implement it. It is thought that the Lasar was always meant to be a telegraph typewriter, and was even advertised as “the Best Machine for Telegraph Work”. The world may never know.
ICYMI: the Case For the Vecdec Cyberdeck
Image by [svenscore] via GitHubAs awesome as cyberdecks are to behold, many of them just aren’t that useful. It’s a shame, really. But [svenscore]’s Versatile Ergonomic Computing device, or vecdec, is different.
Hackaday’s own [Tom Nardi] spotted this bad boy at JawnCon 0x1, where it was being used in place of a laptop. This build was born when [svenscore] caught the split keyboard bug and couldn’t reconcile going back to a rectangle on the go. Totally understandable!
Despite its sleek form factor, this Raspberry Pi 4-powered cyberdeck has a few surprises. One is the built-in LoRa radio for doing Meshtastic wherever. The other is a pair of gesture sensors that let you fly through documents with a wave of your hand like you’re in Minority Report (2002) or something. If you ask me, this interface should be standard on every cyberdeck going forward.

Got a hot tip that has like, anything to do with keyboards? Help me out by sending in a link or two. Don’t want all the Hackaday scribes to see it? Feel free to email me directly.

Producers who worked on Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign’s Vultures albums have not been paid, per reportsProducers who worked on Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign’s Vultures albums have still not been paid, according to reports.
Per Billboard, over 10 producers worked on the project – which spawned albums Vultures 1 and Vultures 2, with third outing Vultures 3 reportedly scheduled for release in the near future – and they have “not been paid for their services even though both albums have been released”, says music attorney Bob Celestin, who represents an unspecified number of producers who worked on the albums.

READ MORE: “No other company delivers as many innovative and affordable products as we do”: Behringer hits back at “vapourware” critics following NAMM 2025 announcement

Brittney Trigg, another lawyer representing a producer who worked on Vultures 1, adds: “We’ve had trouble receiving a producer agreement from Ye.”
Vultures 1 and Vultures 2 were released on 10 February and 3 August, respectively, while the release date for Vultures 3 is currently unknown.
According to five lawyers whose clients worked on Vultures 1, Kanye West has worked with at least two attorneys to help with clearances and issuing royalties to his collaborators.
Per Billboard, some of the producers’ joined forces to issue threatening letters to the distributor of the albums at the time, although West switched distributors before the letters could be sent, and the albums were released independently under Ye’s Yeezy brand.
Lawyer Jason Berger says that in “nine out of 10 deals, the producer has not been paid the day the music comes out”.
Another lawyer whose client worked on Vultures 1 says “we have no recourse besides to try to sue [Kanye West]… but that’s costly.”

The post Producers who worked on Kanye West and Ty Dolla $ign’s Vultures albums have not been paid, per reports appeared first on MusicTech.

Music AI Revenue Loss: Study Reveals Disturbing StatisticsThe first global study of the economic impact of AI on the music paints a bleak picture. Generative AI will enrich tech companies while music AI revenue loss will top. Continue reading
The post Music AI Revenue Loss: Study Reveals Disturbing Statistics appeared first on Hypebot.

Acon Digital Acoustica gains Pro Tools ARA support Compatible with Pro Tools 2024.10 and later, the latest version of Acoustica allows for deeper integration and eliminates the need to round-trip audio between the two applications. 

Artists Growth adds Credit Cards, Expense Tools for the Music IndustryArtist Growth has added a suite of music industry credit cards and expense management tools to its platform.
The post Artists Growth adds Credit Cards, Expense Tools for the Music Industry appeared first on Hypebot.

Free Music Business Newsletter: Subscribe NowStaying on top of the fast-changing music industry, the latest trends in music marketing, and the most interesting music tech startups can feel like a full time job. We make it easy with Hypebot's free music business newsletter.
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Musical AI and Beatoven.ai to build “first fully licensed, rights holder-compensating” AI music generatorAI training content licensing and attribution company Musical AI and Beatoven.ai have teamed up to build what they claim to be the industry’s first “fully licensed, rights-holder-compensating, generative AI platform” trained on copyrighted music and other audio.
Set to debut in the second half of 2025, the tool – designed to ensure musicians and rights holders are “compensated for every use of their repertoire” – will be trained on over 3 million songs, loops, samples, and sounds.

READ MORE: Stevie Wonder demoed the Apple Vision Pro, according to CEO Tim Cook: “It’s always great to get feedback from Stevie”

The AI song generator will leverage Beatoven.ai’s existing technology, while Musical AI will provide the essential backend, including data licensing, attribution of generated outputs, and fair payments to rightsholders.
Artists and rights owners will receive a revenue share based on how the AI-generated outputs are used, mirroring the model of streaming royalties. In short, everything will be “completely legal and licensed”, with all with the necessary permissions from rights holders.
Musical AI will exclusively offer this full-song generator to its enterprise clients as a white-label service.
“We are working with the forward-thinking, ethically driven team at Beatoven.ai because they see the value in proving that generative AI can be legal and can compensate original content creators for their work while still thriving as a business,” says Musical AI CEO Sean Power. “There are no more excuses for not doing things right and well. We’re proving this with this first-ever service.”
Fair compensation for artists and rights holders has become a hot-button issue in the music industry, especially with the rise of AI-generated content. We’ve seen major record labels like Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment filing significant copyright infringement lawsuits against AI music companies like Suno and Udio, accusing them of unauthorised use of copyrighted sound recordings to train their AI models.
For Mansoor Rahimat Khan, founder and CEO of Beatoven.ai, this partnership “will set the way forward for how business models need to be built in AI with the rightsholders being compensated for the data the models are trained on.”
“We have historically been adopting this model in direct partnerships with independent artists and by joining hands with Musical AI we will build a sustainable revenue sharing model using their attribution technology,” says Khan.
The post Musical AI and Beatoven.ai to build “first fully licensed, rights holder-compensating” AI music generator appeared first on MusicTech.