Attorneys general from 14 states question FireAid’s $100M fund distributionThe inquiry, led by Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond, centers on growing complaints that fire victims have received no direct assistance.
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Lectric Panda plugins Automata and Stage are now FREE
Lectric Panda has made two of their previously paid plugins available for free: Automata and Stage. Automata (previously $35) is a cellular automata-based MIDI sequencer, and Stage (previously $15) is a simple gain stage amplifier. Automata utilizes one-dimensional cellular automation to generate unique and interesting sequences, which may sound a little complex. At a glance, [...]
View post: Lectric Panda plugins Automata and Stage are now FREE

RØDE Unveils NT1 5th Generation Studio MicrophoneRØDE, a trusted name in professional audio, introduces the NT1 5th Generation, a modern evolution of its iconic mic.A statement from the company highlights artist Kyle Charles Hall’s endorsement: “Made for Music. Kyle Charles Hall’s words, not ours (although we agree).” Hall relies on the NT1 5th Generation to “capture the dreamy textures of his signature brand of woozy indie pop,” from “warm, velvety vocals” to “the subtle detail of every instrument.”According to RØDE, the NT1 5th Generation “fuses the classic sound signature of the iconic NT1 with cutting-edge, next-generation technology.” Key features include the patent-pending Dual Connect output, allowing both XLR and USB connectivity; a world-first “unclippable” 32-bit float digital output; advanced digital signal processing; and high SPL handling — all while maintaining the NT1’s signature warmth and clarity.The company describes it as “a true studio workhorse that excels on everything from vocals and speech, to guitar, piano, drums and percussion—the ultimate studio microphone.”RØDE states that the NT1 remains “unchanged by design,” but ready for the demands of modern recording.Explore more about the NT1 5th Generation here.The post RØDE Unveils NT1 5th Generation Studio Microphone first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

“I want our music to be accessible to people. It was hard to take that away”: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard reflect on removing their music from SpotifyLast month, Aussie rockers King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard became the latest in a string of bands to remove their music from Spotify, following a high-profile investment from CEO Daniel Ek in AI-driven military weapons company Helsing.
While King Gizzard’s Spotify profile remains active, the vast majority of their music is now unavailable.

READ MORE: “We’re doubling down on what we stand for”: How Moog delivered the Messenger

Now, in a new interview with the LA Times, frontman Stu Mackenzie has spoken further on the band’s decision to leave the platform.
Upon hearing about Ek’s investment in Helsing, Mackenzie explains that he felt “a bit of shock”, followed by a “feeling that I shouldn’t be shocked”.
“We’ve been saying fuck Spotify for years,” he goes on. “In our circle of musician friends, that’s what people say all the time, for all of these other reasons which are well documented.
We saw a couple of other bands who we admire, and thought, ‘I don’t really want our music to be here, at least right now.’ I don’t really consider myself an activist, and I don’t feel comfortable soapboxing. But this feels like a decision staying true to ourselves, and doing what we think is right for our music, having our music in places that we feel all right about.”
King Gizzard’s decision to leave Spotify followed the same decision taken by indie rockers Xiu Xiu and art rock outfit Deerhoof.
But regardless of where the band stood on their opposition to Daniel Ek’s Helsing investment, they noted that many of their fans use Spotify to listen to their music.
“The thing that made it hard was I do want to have our music be accessible to people,” Mackenzie continues. “I don’t really care about making money from streaming. I know it’s unfair, and I know they are banking so much. But for me personally, I just want to make music, and I want people to be able to listen to it. The hard part was to take that away from so many people.
“But sometimes you’ve just got to say, ‘Well, sorry, we’re not going to be here right now.’ In the end, it actually was just one quick phone call with the other guys to get off the ship.”
Despite what is, in any case, a big decision for the band to leave Spotify, Mackenzie reckons Daniel Ek won’t take any notice.
“I don’t expect Daniel Ek to pay attention to this…” he says. “It feels like an experiment to me, like, ‘Let’s just go away from Spotify, and let’s see what happens.’ Why does this have to be a big deal? It actually feels like we’re just trying to find our own positivity in a dark situation.”
The post “I want our music to be accessible to people. It was hard to take that away”: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard reflect on removing their music from Spotify appeared first on MusicTech.

The Many Layers of FandomFandom goes far beyond simply being a label or identity, it’s an ongoing journey fueled by active participation and deep connection. Learn why true fans invest time and passion beyond consumption and how layers of fandom redefine what it means to be a fan in the digital age.
The post The Many Layers of Fandom appeared first on Hypebot.

Live Music Industry News Roundup: Hard Rock, Resale, PROs, MoreThis week in live music we take a look at ticket resales, soaring Metal and Hard Rock ticket sales and PRO reporting.
The post Live Music Industry News Roundup: Hard Rock, Resale, PROs, More appeared first on Hypebot.

Focusrite introduce Windows ARM support Focusrite have announced that all generations of their USB audio interfaces now boast full compatibility with Windows for ARM systems.

There’s over 20 Sonnox plugins and bundles on sale at Plugin Boutique – all with over 80% offThere’s a huge sale on Sonnox plugins going on over at Plugin Boutique, with over 80 per cent off on more than 20 products.
There are a number of Sonnox’s Oxford plugins available, which are used in a range of live and recorded applications throughout the music, broadcast, film and games sectors – as well as a handful of handy Sonnox bundles for mixing, mastering, and more. These huge deals mean that some plugins are now less than £10.
[deals ids=”2RbaZ4nb6VnZl6rR3Cwzaj”]
The cheapest offers are on the ListenHub plugin, and the VoxDoubler vocal processor – both of which are now just £7 and £8 respectively.
The ListenHub, which was originally priced just over £70, is a Mac-only plugin that lets you reference commercial tracks and gain more insight into your mix by A/B testing against songs from any streaming source. As for the VoxDoubler, formerly £82.80, this one is presented as two separate plugins that focus on the most common vocal doubling workflows.
Find out more in the videos below:

You can also find deals on the following Oxford plugins: Inflator, Drum Gate, Limiter, Envolution, TransMod, Dynamic EQ, SuprEsser (and SuprEsser DS), plus more. As for bundles, there’s an Essentials collection that includes four key Oxford products: the EQ, Dynamics, Reverb, and SuprEsser plugins.
As well as a Broadcast bundle, there’s also a Mastering collection – this is now £78 down from over £700. In this one, you’ll get five plugins including the Oxford Dynamics, EQ, Inflator, and Limiter V3, as well as the Fraunhofer Pro-Codec.
To shop these plugins or view the full range of deals available now, head over to Plugin Boutique.
The post There’s over 20 Sonnox plugins and bundles on sale at Plugin Boutique – all with over 80% off appeared first on MusicTech.

Universal Audio SSL 4000 Series Console BundleWorking in close partnership with Solid State Logic, Universal Audio proudly unveils the SSL 4000 Series Classic Console Bundle for Native and UAD-2 hardware and Apollo interfaces — a perfect match of exacting circuit emulations from these certified hit-making machines: Track and mix with an exacting emulation of SSL E Series Console Type E "black" and "brown" knob channel EQ and filters. Harness famous SSL E Series VCA Compression — from transparent to "in your face". Harness the SSL E Series' highly responsive Gate including "no-chatter" mode derived from later designs. Easily add G Bus glue and cohesion to drums, strings, and background vocals. Elevate your mix bus with legendary SSL G Bus compression. Use the G Bus's Auto Fade feature (1-60 seconds) as found in original console. Included in This Bundle SSL 4000 E Series Channel Strip Collection The SSL E Series Channel Strip plug-in gives you everything you need to dial in professional, polished tracks with classic SSL sonics. With the inclusion of both the Type E "black knob" and "brown knob" four-band EQ and filters — hallowed in SSL lineage — you can apply refined punch to drums, presence to vocals, and heft to bass. Other features include high and low cut filters, an expander/gate, and compression. SSL 4000 G Bus Compressor Collection A faithful circuit emulation of the legendary SSL 4000 G console's bus compressor, this iconic dynamics processor delivers undeniable drive and punch that helped make the original 4000 G Series the world's most successful production console. Top engineers have come to rely on this master compressor to "glue together" mixes like nothing else, as well as patching into it for stunningly musical results on drums, pianos, and more. Read More

“We’re doubling down on what we stand for”: How Moog delivered the MessengerMoog’s Messenger has a lot to prove, standing beside legendary monosynths such as the Minimoog Model D, Voyager, and Subsequent 37. Expectations on a Moog instrument like this will always be sky high.
But its arrival is notable for another reason: this is the first synth Moog has developed, start to finish, since being acquired by music tech conglomerate InMusic in 2023. Since then, there has been no shortage of online handwringing and doomsaying about what might become of the beloved American instrument maker. Now the results are in, and we can all breathe a sigh of relief because the Messenger delivers.
The Moog Messenger is on the MusicTech Cover. Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
“This feels like a watershed moment for the brand,” Joe Richardson, president of Moog Music and chief commercial officer at InMusic, tells MusicTech. “But it’s also been an anchor moment. We’re doubling down on what Moog stands for, and not deviating from it.”
The Messenger boasts a classic sound palette, but its near-compact form factor also gambles on a host of new-gen features that we’ve never seen in a Moog before. Steering this high-stakes release was the company’s Director of Keyboard Product Development, Erik Norlander, a veteran designer whose contributions to synthesis include IK Multimedia’s excellent UNO Synth line and the influential Alesis Andromeda.
Norlander says the team’s vision for the Messenger was “a compact analogue synthesiser that has all the mojo of Moog’s glorious past, along with some cutting-edge new features for the present”. “And we wanted to put all this in an accessible package that’s within reach for all musicians,” he adds.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Analogue & Accessible
At £725 ($799), the Messenger actually is a viable purchase for average music-makers – something that hasn’t really been true of Moog’s product lineup in recent years. “This is a space that Moog had not played in for a long time,” Norlander concedes. “Having a sub-$1,000 synthesizer… You’d have to go back to the 80s for this kind of a product; the Rogue and Prodigy, those sorts of instruments.”
Thankfully, this cost reduction has not resulted in lacklustre build quality – something that Moog-watchers have been particularly worried about since the company announced its manufacturing would move from its North Carolina HQ to Taiwan. “For it to be a Moog, in my book, it’s got to have amazing sound quality and build quality,” Richardson says. “That would have been easy to abandon; it would have been easier to make a cheaper instrument, but we didn’t do that.”
“We wanted this to be a visceral, hands-on experience” – Erik Norlander
Accessibility is also front and centre in the instrument’s layout and learning curve. Adopting a familiar left-to-right signal path influenced by 1970’s Minimoog Model D, the Messenger largely keeps to a one-knob-per-function paradigm. There’s also plenty of mod-cons for 21st-century players wanting a fast workflow. Recallable presets, some nifty generative features for the unit’s 64-step sequencer, and extensive I/O options, including six CV patch points, external audio in, and high-resolution MIDI over USB-C, all make this feel like an instrument ready for today.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Screen-Free Synthesis
But the Messenger notably lacks one ubiquitous feature of the modern world we all love to hate and hate to love: a screen.
“That was very much a deliberate choice,” Norlander explains. “We could have put a display on there – there was room for it and it wasn’t a cost issue – but it would change the whole aesthetic of the instrument. We didn’t want you looking at a display. We wanted you to look at the knobs and think about the music. We wanted this to be a visceral, hands-on experience.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The lack of a display isn’t what’s gotten head turning; it’s the new analogue improvements that the Messenger brings to the table. There’s wavefolding and FM, two styles of synthesis which Moog has historically neglected, and a sub-oscillator enhanced with continuously variable waveshape. For noise lovers, there’s a deliciously crunchy feedback circuit directly inspired by a classic Minimoog Model D hack, where users would take the headphone output and plug it back into the external audio input.
“We gave it a lot of gain,” laughs Norlander. “If you turn the feedback up, it gets really aggressive. On some of the earlier prototypes, we had even more gain, but we were like, ‘Okay, okay, let’s pull this back, it’s getting a little out of control.’”
“The Messenger is much more universal than the other gear we’ve got. You should expect to see more of that going forward” – Joe Richardson
The sonic lynchpin of all this is the Messenger’s supercharged ladder filter. Employing an innovative pole-matching design, it boasts multiple slopes, multimode functionality, and a sought-after Res Bass feature, which preserves the low end even as you dial up the filter’s resonance. The results are genuinely impressive, but Norlander says the team’s initial decision to tinker with perfection was not taken lightly.
“At Moog, there are things that are sacred,” he says. “The filter is one of them. We can add to the sound, but we can’t take anything away. So, when we were reimagining the filter on the Messenger, we had to make sure it still had that classic sound. If you turn off the Res Bass and you keep it in 4-pole low-pass mode, it still sounds like a 904A from 1967.”
Norlander also makes clear that, no matter what additions we might see on future filters, some things will never change. “The filter is always going to be discrete,” he assures me. “I don’t think you’ll ever see one that’s chip-based. In a Sequential or an Oberheim, it’s perfectly fine to have a chip-based filter – those are beautiful sounding synthesizers – but the Bob Moog transistor ladder filter is a discrete design. That’s something we can’t and won’t mess with.”
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
A Legacy of Innovation
The relationship Moog Music has to its own history is fascinating. No other synth maker has a founder who looms so large, whose influence is still so directly felt in the sound, features, and feel of the instruments. Yet, despite a palpable reverence for Bob Moog’s legacy, neither Richardson nor Norlander seems to have any interest in letting that past narrow the company’s future.
“Bob Moog was famous for listening to artists and sound engineers,” Richardson points out. “What he heard from them informed the next thing. If we stop introducing innovation, then we’re not going to get those new messages from the creative community to help inform us on what happens next. So, it’s a fuel to the innovation machine that exists inside Moog.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
“The feedback we’ve gotten before, during, and after launch,” he adds, “will affect this instrument through updates. But it’s already informing the next instruments that are going to come online in the next 12 to 18 months.”
What can we expect from these in-development instruments? Richardson hints that the digital side of synthesis will be “an important part of the future” and outlines a broad focus on efficiency, creative flow, and deep sound design. More than anything, he simply points to the new paradigms established by the arrival of the Messenger.
“The Messenger is going to be the beginning of a new category of instruments,” he says. “It’s much more universal than the other gear we’ve got. You should expect to see more of that going forward.”
In truth, the Messenger really does send a message – and more than one at that. For longtime fans, it’s proof that the company is still in safe hands and still a force to be reckoned with. For the analogue-curious, it’s an open invitation to join the Moog party, now with a significantly lower door charge.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
For the Moog team, the Messenger feels like a statement of intent: a framework for how the company plans to balance the realities of a highly competitive marketplace with long-held, and deeply felt, ideals.
“It was really important to me, to the folks at Moog, to keep the spirit alive and well in this instrument,” reflects Richardson. “To show that new things can be added to what Moog’s always been, that it can be affordable and accessible, but, very importantly, to show that things don’t have to be cheapened to get there. I think we’ve succeeded in doing that.”
The Moog Messenger appeared in the MusicTech Magazine July/August 2025 issue.
Words: Clovis McEvoy
Photography: Simon Vinall
The post “We’re doubling down on what we stand for”: How Moog delivered the Messenger appeared first on MusicTech.

SYSTEM DigiDestroy plug-in from HOFA Aimed at engineers seeking vintage flair, experimental transitions and destructive sound effects, SYSTEM DigiDestroy combines a bit-crusher with a variable jitter control and includes a versatile clipper module. 

How Live Music Stocks Performed Last WeekLive Nation reported as strong Q2 on Thursday. Here is a recap of how it and major live music stocks performed during the week ending Friday, August 8, 2025, along with a comparison to the broader stock market.
The post How Live Music Stocks Performed Last Week appeared first on Hypebot.

2025 One Hertz Challenge: Using Industrial Relays to Make a FlasherThese days, if you want to flash some LEDs, you’d probably grab a microcontroller. Maybe you’d go a little more old-school, and grab a 555. However, [Jacob] is even more hardcore than that, as evidenced by this chunky electromechanical flasher build.
[Jacob] goes into great detail on his ancillary write-up, describing how the simple building blocks used by industrial control engineers can be used to make a flasher circuit that cycles once per second. Basically, two relays are paired with two 0.5-second delay timers. The two relays tag each other on and off on delay as their timers start and expire, with the lamp turned on and off in turn.
We’ve had lots of other great entries to our One Hertz Challenge, too — from clocks to not-clocks. There’s still time to get an entry in — the deadline for submission is Tuesday, August 19 at 9:00AM Pacific time. Good luck out there!

The hidden cost of living amid Mark Zuckerberg’s $110M compoundMark Zuckerberg has spent 14 years gobbling up his leafy Palo Alto neighborhood, according to a New York Times report detailing how the Meta CEO has purchased 11 properties for over $110 million to create his own personal fiefdom in Crescent Park. The piecemeal compound features a main residence, guest homes, manicured gardens, and a […]

World Mobile launches drone-based, decentralized telecom projectThe decentralized telecommunication project uses unmanned aerial drones in the stratosphere to provide wireless services to users.