Check out a Free Music Promotion Masterclass with Groover & SymphonicUnlock the secrets of using modern music marketing techniques to cut through the noise using expert promotion strategies from Groover and Symphonic. by Randi Zimmerman from Symphonic Feeling lost in. Continue reading
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BT goes deep on his plugins: “There isn’t a producer on the planet that won’t want this”Words: Sam Willings, Oliver Payne
BT is truly a music production polymath. That word gets thrown around a lot, but how many other Grammy-nominated producers and audio engineers are, writing code for their own plugins, starting software companies, actively working for a fairer future for musicians and writing critically acclaimed music and soundtracks for movie and video games?
The 52-year-old has more projects on the horizon, too — new music, new plugins and new technologies are expected from BT, real name Brian Transeau. We caught up with Transeau for the first time in a few years, after appearing on our podcast and in another interview, to see what he’s been up to. Alongside his latest release with Shingo Nakamura, Lifeforce on Monstercat, it turns out he’s been up to quite a lot.

It’s been four years since we last spoke to you about music and synthesizers — what’s new?
Without too much of a reveal, we’ve spent the past 18 months starting a new software company, SoundLabs.
We closed our pre-seed round and have been diligently building some wildly new both traditional DSP and machine learning/AI technologies into a suite of plugins. I literally can not live without them at this point. They are totally game-changing technologies, none of which are public-facing technologies available to producers currently. To say I’m excited about them is the understatement of the century.
Image: Lucy Transeau
But, in addition to these three plugins, I’d say another plugin I can’t live without is Oeksound Soothe2. It’s one of the most useful plugins I’ve ever used. Every new version of that is an essential level-up in production for me.
Another essential I should mention is my collaboration with CableGuys. We’ve been working on a plugin for almost seven years (can’t believe it) that has changed shape a couple of times. The final (new) release candidate is something so simple and elegant, that there isn’t a producer on the planet that won’t want this, regardless of the type of music you make.
You’ve got a lot of studio gear. At what point in your production process are plugins making an appearance? Is it when creating the music or only in editing, mixing and mastering?
My DAW autoloads/templates have hundreds of plugins in them — from bus mastering to channel strip, limiting, compression, and spectral sidechain configurations. So they’re there from the start.
Here’s an example: the Roland Jupiter-8 is normaled through an EAR 660 compressor into a Lynx Aurora(n) interface. I can break this normal, but they are such a lovely pairing. In the autoloads, there’s a Softube and Plugin Alliance channel strip configuration and starting EQ points. This channel normals to the synth bus with a clip limiter, some saturation plugins and out to stereo compression (outboard) and finally to a Trackspacer with spectral side chain normaled to my drum bus.
Image: Lucy Transeau
The setups are so complex and refined that I really can sit down and write, and it just sounds like a record.
Once things are taking shape — I frequently do stem mixes — RX spectral artefacts, HPF, general audio repair and design and then flip all stems into a clean (different) autoload that is audio only. This is where more creative sound design plugins come into play.
My Cubase/Vienne Ensemble Pro setup is an interview in itself. It’s 3,200 instances of Kontakt and a plethora of software instruments summed to a 32-track stem template. It’s taken about 12 years to build to this point. It would be a fun one to show at a point.
You and Shingo Naramuka have created this incredible airy, elevated sensation in ‘Lifeforce’. Can you tell us more about its creation?
Shingo is lovely and such a talent. We had as much fun hiking, eating and talking as we did in the studio and it’s really reflected in the sound of that record. It was fairly effortless.

Shingo had a sketch we fleshed out with vintage synthesizers and then I wrote a new drop progression with some Spitfire Felt pianos (and crazy outboard signal path – I remember an Ensoniq DP4, Roland SRV-330 and 737 compressor were involved). I spent a lot of time on this one doing hand editing to final stems in RX before we had a master-ready copy we were excited about. Some of my secret plugins were used on this one as well.
You’re an advocate for – and collaborator with – iZotope. Which are your go-to iZotope products, aside from your own?
For me hands down RX and Stutter Edit 2. I absolutely LOVE the new Trash as well and am so excited they made that. I use that all the time.
Tell us about BreakTweaker and Stutter Edit. What was your role in the creation of these plugins and how do you use them yourself?
Well, this is a long story but my role, broadly, was showing up at former iZotope CEO Mark’s door with a million-line code base and two finished products. I developed these to completion myself and then licensed them to iZotope.
Image: Lucy Transeau
We’ve had a wonderful and fruitful relationship and we worked closely when (I went off to do the same again with Stutter Edit 2). I love developing music software as I find holes in my own personal creation process since I started making music professionally, that there is a needed new ‘thing’. It’s become one of the thrills of music creation for me, creating the tools to augment the process.
I’ve been programming since I was a kid — starting with BasicA and, believe it or not, Fortran. I studied Csound (my main prototyping language and what I have built all my generative music blockchain projects in) under Dr. Richard Boulanger at Berklee (formerly MIT). And regularly prototype in Csound, MAX/MSP, Pure Data and sometimes now just directly to JUCE.
I’ve gone pretty deep down the Python wormhole over the last three years in our AI plugins, too, so I can hack around in there pretty well now too.
Point is, in creating plugins, I’m not just dryboarding and delegating. I like to get my hands dirty doing the fun stuff too — coding.
iZotope RX in BT’s Studio. Image: Lucy Transeau
How are you feeling about the rise of AI implementation in music production tools?
I want to give a very nuanced answer here. I’m a strong believer that the future of music is human. I also strongly believe in consensual, ethically trained AI (across the board) and there are very few companies respecting intellectual property rights in this space. Some are flagrantly flaunting their first-to-market status from trading text to music models (which we don’t believe is a product) by scraping Spotify and YouTube.
I find this an abhorrent misuse of this technology, one which I believe that, when used responsibly, will unlock infinite creative potential in the next generation of music creators.
Our large label music partners told us a story about a CEO that came to see them (probably a service you have heard of) where they are clearly in violation of training on IP-protected works just to speedrun a product to market. They asked them how they had trained and he said, “We would rather ask for forgiveness than permission”. This kind of thinking and irresponsibility could destroy music. Full stop. We must rally against this kind of unbelievable irresponsibility in the development community.
Image: Lucy Transeau
Okay, so now the good stuff. For artists that have a large corpus of work, through a lot of new laws, litigation and the music industry sticking together, they will have a completely new ancillary revenue stream unlocked. This will be through allowing consensual training on their work and fractionalised revenue share model for different types of tasks, engineering, patch making, and things that are real friction points in the music creation process that take us out of “flow” while we create.
I’m thrilled about tools that will fairly reward artists they are trained on that unlock brand-new possibilities for young and seasoned artists alike.
Finally, the tools we are building, and things I see people building behind closed doors, are completely mind-blowing. There are unimaginable future technologies that all artists, singers, producers, and engineers will love to use because they do groundbreaking things they currently don’t have access to.
So my measured TL;DR answer is: The future is bright and we must as a community (musicians) proactively control and be involved in the narrative of what is acceptable, what is ethical and all couched in reverence and respect for the large bodies of work created that are needed to train on for effective new tools. There is a lot to look forward to.
What are your favourite examples of AI-integrated plugins?
There are none available that have impressed me aside from the obvious things in software like RX (dereverb). The things coming, though — WOW!
Image: Lucy Transeau
Check out what else BT is up to at btmusic.com.
The post BT goes deep on his plugins: “There isn’t a producer on the planet that won’t want this” appeared first on MusicTech.

Love Hultén teases “percussive harmonic device” Crum2 – and it will be getting a production runAudiovisual artist Love Hultén has revealed a prototype for a brand new “percussive harmonic device” called Crum2.
Developed by Analog Sweden and Albert Nyström, and designed by Hultén himself in his usual sleek aesthetic, the product will eventually be getting a real production run. Two prototypes were shown at Superbooth last weekend, so it’s likely more work is yet to be done before then.

READ MORE: This alien-looking Love Hultén MIDI guitar comes with a built-in NESpoly synth

Little information is available on what Crum2 actually entails, but Analog Sweden’s website has a small list of prototype specs. It says the device has four channels with six sound engines each, percussive and melodic modes with a master scale, probability beat generation, plus step and live record.
There’s also randomisable parameters, a master offset performance control section, plus master reverb, delay and drive effects, and a whole lot more. Responding to a comment on Instagram in which a user says they hope it will go into production, Hultén has simply replied, “It will”.

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A post shared by Love Hulten (@lovehulten)

As GearNews has spotted, Nyström currently sells a DIY four-voice drum machine called Crum Drum. It’s a drum synth with built-in randomisation and probability. So, given this new synth’s name, it looks as though it will be an evolution of that, with new melodic capabilities.
Get a closer look below:

Back in April, Hultén began crowdfunding for his first monograph titled Apparatrum. The book was set to offer an in-depth look into the idiosyncratic influences and inspirations behind his work. Unfortunately, the crowdfunder did not reach its goal and plans for publishing were called off. All hope is not lost though, as Hultén says he “might try this book in the future again”.
Keep an eye on MusicTech for more information on Crum2 as we get it. Find out more about Analog Sweden, Albert Nyström and Love Hultén.
The post Love Hultén teases “percussive harmonic device” Crum2 – and it will be getting a production run appeared first on MusicTech.

Producers have discovered the free plugin presets Justice used for their new album, HyperdramaSeveral music producers have recently uploaded videos to YouTube that break down Justice’s track, Generator, from their 2024 album Hyperdrama. And, surprisingly, it sounds like the French duo opted to use some preset patches from a bizarre free plugin released seven years ago.
The Grammy-winning group (Xavier de Rosnay and Gaspard Augé) seemingly downloaded Rave Generator 2, made by Christophe Tudela in 2017 as the follow-up to version 1 from 2014. As YouTuber Dylan Tallchief points out, Justice probably named the track after the plugin. It’s seems pretty likely, right?

READ MORE: “He was like, ‘I only work with people who use Pro Tools’”: Sarz says using Fruity Loops once cost him a job with one of Nigeria’s top artists

Justice’s use of Rave Generator’s presets wasn’t subtle, either. According to Tallchief and another channel, Synth No More, the track’s gritty intro synth is a preset called ‘Braincrash’. The hoover sound, that drops in just after, is the preset ‘Cubik.’ The bass part is a preset called ‘Overdub test’.

Dylan Tallchief recreates most of Generator, with pretty impressive results. He’s using mostly Rave Generator 2, of course, but also shows some of the production and arrangement techniques that Justice likely used.

We’d love to believe that Justice decided they’d make a rave-inspired track and just searched ‘rave plugins’ online, taking them to the Rave Generator 2 page.
For years, producers have battled online about whether you should look to presets to build your tracks or create your own patches to make original music. But it’s nice to be reminded that even some of the most celebrated electronic music producers on the planet are just using presets from a freebie. 
Justice haven’t been quiet about their use of free tools. According to a Pitchfork interview in 2008 (via MusicRadar), they were using GarageBand around the time their acclaimed debut album was released. They wouldn’t be the first Grammy winners to use GarageBand — Steve Lacy has been making hits on his iPhone using GarageBand for years. 
“It’s not the gear that matters. Do you get it now?”, asks one commenter on Synth No More’s video… Yeah. We get it.
The post Producers have discovered the free plugin presets Justice used for their new album, Hyperdrama appeared first on MusicTech.

JLab Epic Lab Edition earbuds boast crisp highs and deep bass but basic EQ leaves gritty mids£199, jlab.com
With so many wireless earbuds to choose from, brands try to differentiate their products and get a little edge over the competition. JLab’s new Epic Lab Edition buds boast dual driver technology for deep bass and sparkling treble reproduction, a typical charging case, a dongle for streaming over Bluetooth LE from a laptop or other device, and active noise cancelling, among other expected features.

READ MORE: DALI IO-12 are incredible headphones that serve a hyper-niche audience

But the unique feature that piques our interest is a new EQ voicing option that’s based on research into a new listener-preferred target curve.
Target curves define the EQ contour for headphone listening to provide a deep bass and clear treble response. They’re often intended to approximate the experience of playing back music on large speakers. Headphone geeks will likely be aware of the well-established Harman curve, but JLab has taken on board research from Knowles to include its new target curve as an EQ option. For those with the inclination, Soundguys explores the difference between the two but how does the new curve sound in practice?
Epic Lab Edition earbuds
How are the treble frequencies on Lab Epic Lab Edition earbuds?
With the Signature sound EQ preset enabled in the app, highs are crisp and sparkling, accompanied by recessed mids and powerful bass. The Signature preset is a joy for general listening, but we’d prefer a slight cut on the high end. Frustratingly, there’s no way to copy the Signature preset to the user-adjustable Custom slot, so we attempt — in vain — to match the EQ sliders of the custom preset to the Signature one, but the result is nowhere near as pleasing.
Presumably, the Signature contour uses more graphic EQ bands and deeper cuts than the app graphic shows.
Disappointed, we do eventually get used to the bright, Signature preset presentation and just stick with that.
Epic Lab Edition earbuds paired with the app
What are the mids like on JLab Epic Lab Edition earbuds?
Research into and development of preferred target curves is laudable but it’s dependent on your playback system’s capabilities. While we prefer bolder mids than a typically scooped ‘hi-fi’ response, the new Knowles target curve is a poor experience on these buds with mids sounding brittle to our ears and desperately in need of attenuation.
As before, we’re unable to properly tweak this preset to taste and end up retreating to the sanctuary of the Signature preset, which has a more subdued, pleasing mid-range — albeit with the slightly forced treble range described above.
Epic Lab Edition earbuds in case
How’s the bass on JLab Epic Lab Edition?
Down at the low end, the 10-mm low-frequency dynamic drivers produce a deep, pleasing bass that’s still articulate. There are no complaints from us here — the depth of bass reproduction offering thump in the very lowest octaves of tracks, such as Naughty Boy’s catchy La La La – perfect for everyday listening.
The range of earbud tips provided ensures you can achieve a tight seal, allowing you to get really immersed in your music — once the mids have been beaten into shape, that is.
Epic Lab Edition earbuds in use
JLab Epic Lab Edition extras
The provided USB-C dongle does well to stream audio from our MacBook and, despite the associated battery life hit, active noise cancelling makes listening even more immersive. This is particularly noticeable on our long train journey, where the incessant high revs and vibrations of the engine are pushed right into the background.
All-in-all, the JLab Epic Lab Edition earbuds have a premium build quality and offer deep bass, crystal-clear treble presentation plus solid battery life and noise cancelling. They’d be an easy recommendation for the £199 price if only the EQ customisation was a bit more flexible (and reflected the actual shaping taking place) as mids need to be carefully contoured to avoid a plasticky edge to the sound. Hopefully, this will be addressed in a future update.
The buds have the potential to produce a compelling sound, but the promise of a new curve ends up being a damp squib since the midrange needed to reproduce the curve is not that pleasant.
Epic Lab Edition earbuds with case and USB-C dongle
Key features

Dual drivers
AAC on iOS/LDAC codec on Android
13 hours of playtime per bud / 9 hours with ANC enabled
IP55 water and dust resistance
Basic app for settings and over-the-air firmware updates
USB-C dongle for Bluetooth streaming from a laptop
USB-C and wireless charging
Active noise cancelling (ANC)
Touch gestures to access controls
Onboard microphones
6 sets of silicone and foam tips (small, medium, large)

The post JLab Epic Lab Edition earbuds boast crisp highs and deep bass but basic EQ leaves gritty mids appeared first on MusicTech.

Quiet Music Releases FREE Dream Waves Lite Virtual Instrument
Quiet Music has released a new free electric-piano-style virtual instrument called DreamWaves Lite. Over the years, Quiet Music has released several instruments and made free versions of many of them available. This time, it’s no exception, and as you might expect, DreamWaves Lite is a condensed version of their new release, DreamWaves. While offering the [...]
View post: Quiet Music Releases FREE Dream Waves Lite Virtual Instrument

The music of Naruto: Analyzing the harmony of KANA-BOON’s “Silhouette”
We highlight a few unique chords and progressions heard in KANA-BOON's "Silhouette," the track that served as the sixteenth opening for Naruto Shippuden.

TechCrunch Space: Star(side)linerHello and welcome back to TechCrunch Space. For those who haven’t heard, the first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner capsule has been pushed back yet again to no earlier than May 25. From NASA: “The additional time allows teams to further assess a small helium leak in the Boeing Starliner spacecraft’s service module traced to […]
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Sony Music Publishing inks admin deal to represent Otis Redding song catalog in the US“As one of the most significant songwriters of our lifetime, Otis Redding remains an American treasure,” commented Sony Music Publishing Chairman/CEO Jon Platt
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Ex-Florida congressman joins Coinbase Global Advisory CouncilStephanie Murphy, Tim Ryan, and Pat Toomey — all former U.S. lawmakers — are on the council advising Coinbase on regulatory matters.

The MLC's Tech Innovations Win Impact Award at Music Business Assoc. Bizzy Awards!The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) has been awarded Music Business Association’s Impact Award for Technological Excellence at the third annual Bizzy Awards on Wednesday, May 15 as part of the Music Biz 2024 conference in Nashville, TN.

The Impact Award for Technological Excellence recognizes a company or individual that is at the forefront of innovation in the music business, by providing solutions to meet the needs of the modern industry or pioneering the ways it will operate in the future. This year, The MLC’s total royalties distributed exceeded $2 billion in U.S. streaming royalties since the first royalty distribution in April 2021. Since then, The MLC has continued to distribute monthly royalty distributions, all of which have been on time or early, and grown its membership to over 40,000 Members. 

The MLC’s Head of Third-Party Partnerships, Dae Bogan, was also awarded the Maestro of Metadata Award, which is presented to a company or executive who has made a significant impact in the area of data processing, credit clarification, streamlining or otherwise promoting clean data and best practices.

Bogan played a pivotal role in launching The MLC’s Distributor Unmatched Recordings Portal (DURP), a data portal developed in collaboration with seven prominent independent music distributors, which has helped identify and distribute hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties to music creators globally. The DURP, which now includes over 70 distributors, aggregators and other eligible sound recording distributors, allows distributors to see the publicly available data The MLC has compiled for unmatched royalties that relate to streams of sound recordings they have distributed. This transparency enables them to work with their customers to register their songs with The MLC and claim any unmatched royalties for their songs that The MLC has accrued.

The MLC has also effectively illuminated the “black box” for digital audio mechanicals by giving members the ability to search all the unmatched data and propose matches for their works using The MLC’s Matching Tool. To date, The MLC has received and approved more than 1 million proposed matches submitted by members through the Matching Tool. Additionally, The MLC has nearly 36 million works in its public database, which allows anyone to search The MLC’s song ownership database free of charge. 

For more information about The MLC, visit www.themlc.com. 

Trying to Build A Communications Device With a 1-Pound Laser And a 7805You can get a red laser diode pretty cheap these days—as cheap as £1 in fact. [Beamer] had purchased one himself, but quickly grew bored with just pointing it at the walls. He decided to figure out if he could use it for some kind of communication, and whipped up a circuit to test it out.
To do the job, he designed a modulator circuit that could drive the laser without damaging it. The build is based around the common 7805 regulator and the venerable 555 timer IC. The 555 is set to pulse at a given rate with the usual array of capacitors and resistors. Its output directly drives the input of a 7805 regulator. It’s set up as a constant current source in order to deliver the correct amount of current to run the laser. The receiver is based around a photodiode, which should prove fairly straightforward.
[Beamer]’s still working on the full setup, but plans to use the laser’s pulses to drive a varying analog meter or something similar. Not every communications method has to send digital data, and it’s good to remember that! Video after the break.

Could Spotify lose the crucial ‘bundling’ lawsuit filed by the MLC? It all comes down to these legal arguments…Spotify could easily lose the lawsuit failed against it... but still win in the long run
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Etch-A-Sketch Camera is Open SourceThe Etch-a-Sketch was a great toy if you were somehow born with the talent to use it. For the rest of us, it was a frustrating red brick filled with weird grey sand. [Every Flavor of Robot] has taken the irritating knob-encrusted oblong and turned it into something we can all enjoy, however, by building an Etch-a-Sketch camera!
The build is simple. It uses an ESP32 microcontroller to run the show, equipped with a camera. The camera is used to take a photo of the subject, and the image is then sent to a desktop computer. The desktop runs the image through an AI pipeline that generates a simplified version of the image, and the necessary G-Code to draw it on the Etch-A-Sketch. The toy’s knobs are operated by a pair of brushless motors which have been geared down to provide more torque.
It’s a neat project, and more details are available on GitHub. We’ve seen some other great mechanized Etch-a-Sketch builds before, too.

SUPERBOOTH24: Arturia PolyBrute 12 Arturia have just launched the PolyBrute 12 which doubles the voice count of the original PolyBrute and boasts a new FullTouch keyboard that opens up a whole host of expressive performance possibilities.