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  • Arturia’s AstroLab: The story of an instrument ten years in the makingIt’s fitting that we find ourselves speaking with Arturia’s product manager, Pierre Pfister, on the eve of Arturia’s 25th birthday. Since its genesis, the French company has moved gracefully between musical software and hardware; from the Modular V released in 2003 and designed in collaboration with Robert Moog, to 2012’s MiniBrute, which marked the start of an enduring and fruitful relationship with the world of analogue.
    Multitudes lie between those poles: 2014’s Step range of compact controllers provided an elegant interface between USB, DIN MIDI and CV connectivity, quickly finding a home in electronic setups the world over. 2018’s Pigments heralded the company’s first original software synth, and 2020 saw the launch of the titanic Polybrute, a polyphonic six-voice analogue powerhouse. Now, the company boasts Eurorack modules, plugin effects, audio interfaces and more, confidently rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in those industries.
    But the litany wouldn’t be complete without the V Collection, Arturia’s category-leading, ever-expanding suite of iconic software emulations. Version 10 boasts a whopping 39 instruments and the companion software, Analog Lab, packs thousands of presets designed by Arturia and dozens of artists. With parameters combined and streamlined for more intuitive performability and effects, Analog Lab combines a dauntingly vast array of instruments and presets that could easily overwhelm even the most confident users.
    Now comes the AstroLab, touted by Arturia as a defining achievement in the company’s history.
    Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
    “It’s everything we’ve ever wanted to achieve,” describes co-founder Frédéric Brun of the AstroLab. And it’s easy to see why.
    The AstroLab’s raison d’être is to take the environment of Analog Lab and all its intricacies— its instruments, presets, effects and playlists— and load them into a fully-fledged, bespoke hardware instrument fit for the rigours of any stage or studio. It’s heavy, rugged and oozes elegance; from its colour screen to its wooden side panels.
    “So yeah, launching the AstroLab is a good way to mark our 25-year anniversary,” Pfister laughs, before reflecting, “It’s quite a long time now since we started. I joined the company ten years ago. I’ve seen quite an amazing change in the company in that ten years. We were around 25 people, I think. Now we have 150 people in the office in Grenoble, [France]. So it’s exploded, massively.
    Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
    “When I arrived, most people didn’t know about Arturia. We were just seen as a very small software company making niche products. It felt like it was only for some people, in their home studio, making bleeps and bloops! Now, it feels like Arturia is used by everyone. Whether professionals or amateurs, everyone has a link to Arturia in some way. It’s crazy.
    “That’s the biggest thing that comes to my mind when I think about the evolution of Arturia: now we are one of the major actors in the music industry. When I meet artists, it’s very exciting to see everyone using our products. It makes our job super important..”
    Be it creating a Eurorack case that can clip onto a hardware synth or the ultra-portable hybrid MicroFreak, Arturia’s modus operandi has long been to bridge workflow gaps for music creators.
    Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
    So why hold the AstroLab aloft as a singularly significant achievement? Well, for starters, it’s worth remembering that most famous developers’ stories start in hardware before moving into software. For Arturia, however, born at the technologically auspicious turn of the 21st century, things were different.
    When the company’s classically-trained founders Frédéric Brun and Gilles Pommereuil met at the Grenoble Institute of Technology in the 1990s, their initial ambition was to create a software company. This they achieved: after launching in 1999, Arturia’s first product was Storm: an “end-to-end” production suite for the home computer that quickly found a faithful user base.
    This flexing of the software muscle would meet one need, but in the process open up another. Users began to look for ways to bring their work in software back into the physical realm. “Musicians were still hesitant to take computers on stage at that time,” Pommereuil would later remember. “Many were coming to us, requesting hardware instruments that would embed our algorithms.”
    Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
    Enter Origin, Arturia’s first hardware instrument, unveiled in 2009. Replete with physical controls, the Origin sought to meet that need with a modular-style workflow, onboard effects and a now-retro-looking colour screen.
    Exactly what happened next is something of a mystery. “Arturia is now in a strategic position between hardware and software,” the company declares in 2024, “offering new ways to learn, create, and play, empowering musicians and allowing them to seamlessly move from one to the other. This balance was, and remains, a cornerstone of our strategy.” But has it always been?
    Origin’s design was far from perfect, and it was expensive, but it was no flop by any means. Developments in the Origin’s vein were paused in favour of other projects— not dissimilar to how the iPad’s development was purportedly shelved to make way for the original iPhone amid a blooming smartphone market.
    Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
    As it was, Arturia’s Analog Factory Experience launched in 2008 along with the company’s first MIDI keyboard, presaging the arrival of Analog Lab not long after and signalling a renewed focus on the DAW as a primary production tool for the modern producer.
    It’s also no mystery that the beginning of the following decade heralded a massive resurgence in analogue synthesizers, a large portion of which ostensibly presented their own variations on the theme of ‘small’.
    Arturia saw the opportunity from a distance; announcing the fully analogue, monophonic MiniBrute in January 2012. Korg’s MS-20 Mini and Moog’s Sub Phatty— comparative shoo-ins from already vaunted synth companies— would both follow in 2013, but Arturia’s designs kept apace. The MicroBrute arrived in 2014 and two years later, the DrumBrute. 2018’s MiniBrute 2 would double down on the commitment to analogue with a patch bay and the accompanying invitation to integrate it into a modular synth environment.
    Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
    However, the success of these products was belied by Arturia’s continued preoccupation with the conundrum of how to reconcile the power of software with the joyous tactility and hands-on performability, which was all but fuelling the analogue renaissance.
    “AstroLab is the conclusion of a long-standing dream that we’ve had forever at Arturia: to make the software and hardware integration seamless, and to be able to use all the sounds that we have in the V collection live,” explains Pfister. “The idea was already there when I arrived at Arturia. So we’ve been talking about doing it for more than 10 years!”
    If it wasn’t clear already, the story of the AstroLab is, in many ways, the story of Arturia. But it’s also Pfister’s own story at the company. Joining as a software developer, many of his early years at the company were spent working on the V Collection before moving into the contiguous world of product design and eventually product management.
    Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
    “All the work that we’ve done at Arturia on MIDI keyboards and the integration with Analog Lab is what has fuelled the idea of AstroLab,” he says. “So, it’s definitely one of the most important projects that we’ve worked on for years. It was already something that we’d tried to achieve with previous products.
    “Origin was our first hardware instrument, embedding some of our software emulations. And AstroLab is the next step. It’s a dream we’ve had from the beginning. When Frédéric started to work on software emulations of vintage instruments, we quickly started to imagine how we could make that usable on hardware instruments as well.”
    The phrase ‘the best of both worlds’ comes up more than once in our conversation. As a practitioner on the very boundary between those worlds, what exactly is the best of each, according to the Arturia manifesto? “Hardware is going to have the tactile feel, obviously,” considers Pfister, “but it’s also about having a limited and very purpose-oriented design. So you’ve got a set of features, and you don’t have to think about it. You’re limited to what the hardware is telling you that you can do.
    Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
    “On software, you can do pretty much anything. And, if you want to add some more functionality, you just add a screen. So it’s great to have some limitations on hardware; to immediately be able to understand what you can do with it. But on software, you have the opposite. You have unlimited potential for creativity because you can do whatever you want.”
    It follows that the AstroLab pulls few punches when it comes to those hardware limitations, leaning into the workflow introduced by Analog Lab with an astonishingly sparse control panel that could capably handle twice its bill of controls.
    “With the AstroLab, it’s really about refining things to the smallest common denominator. Since you have so many different instruments [to choose from], with so many controls on each, it takes a lot of time to learn every instrument and to learn the differences between all of them. So those Macros, that we’ve worked on for years now with Analog Lab, prove to be very simple to understand and very powerful, even though it feels limiting at first.
    Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
    “But once you’ve focused on finding a sound and tweaking the macros, it makes your music production workflow very fast. You don’t have to think about it, and you know exactly what you can do with a sound. It’s the end of a process where we saw how people are using Analog Lab with our MIDI controllers. We saw what’s actually used by people, and we saw how many people are making music today with those four macros and those four effects. And we felt like we didn’t want to add more controls just for the sake of it. We wanted to keep a synth that was super simple to use, even by people who don’t know anything about synthesis.”
    It’s almost as if Arturia’s mission is as much to do with education and accessibility as it has to do with providing tools for seasoned professionals, we offer. “It’s democratising,” agrees Pfister. “Like, there’s so much complexity that you can have in hardware and with synthesisers in general, but we wanted to hide it as much as possible on this instrument and focus on performance, on finding inspiration.
    “The first step needs to be as easy as possible— we need people to understand the benefits very quickly. And when they get interested in the instruments, then we can provide them with all the history, all the specifics about each of the instruments, and they can dive into the collection and understand everything about how the instruments work. But the first step needs to be very easy to understand: how they sound, and how they can interact with them. So that’s why we wanted to make a product that’s very simple at first sight, that everybody can understand. And then, if you want to go more in-depth, you can open the collection on a computer and change anything that you want.”
    Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
    The AstroLab, then, is every bit a fitting token for Arturia’s two-and-a-half-decade milestone. As Pfister talks, it’s clear that into this instrument the company has poured its history, its philosophy— and, needless to say, its technology. The AstroLab has been a decade in the making, but it promises a new chapter for Arturia that may well provide a blueprint for the decade to come, too.
    “It’s the end of a very long path,” reflects Pfister. “Although, for us, it’s not the end; it’s also just the beginning! Because now we have the technology. And we can make pretty much anything based on that. It’s about putting all the pieces together, small blocks in very different areas, and combining everything in a single ecosystem that provides everything that we’ve worked on so far. It’s going to take some time, but I’m really hoping to see more and more people using our instruments on stage in the next couple of years. There’s no clear limitation on what we can do. It’s gonna be very exciting.”
    The post Arturia’s AstroLab: The story of an instrument ten years in the making appeared first on MusicTech.

    We sit down with Arturia to talk about the instrument that encapsulates the philosophy of a company – the AstroLab

  • The Very Loud Indeed Co. Spring Sale The Very Loud Indeed Co. are currently offering generous discounts across their entire range of sample libraries and software synthesizer sound packs. 

    The Very Loud Indeed Co. are currently offering generous discounts across their entire range of sample libraries and software synthesizer sound packs. 

  • Synth designer Love Hultén is crowdfunding a new book that lets you see inside his artful mindRenowned Swedish designer, woodworker extraordinaire and synth-crafter Love Hultén has announced the crowdfunding of his first monograph titled Apparatrum.
    Apparatrum offers an in-depth insight into the idiosyncratic influences and inspirations behind the creativity of the self-described ‘alientech’ and ‘craftporn’ maker, whose reputation for quirky synths and offbeat electronic contraptions often precedes him.

    READ MORE: The Minimoog Book by Bjooks is a visual deep-dive into the most famous synth in music history

    This extensive overview of Hultén’s work celebrates a decade of his creations — which range from synth-shaped guitars to cacti and black goo synthesizers, while also revealing the technical detail and inspiration behind his craft.
    Each piece is accompanied by a personal commentary by Hultén that explains his design process and eclectic influences, from retrofuturism and science fiction to Dieter Rams and mid-century design. Interspersed throughout are step-by-step case studies where the artist breaks down the creative process behind some of his best-known works, from the initial sketches to the finished product.
    The book also features a personal biography, studio tour and exclusive behind-the-scenes sketches and photographs illustrating Hultén’s secretive working process. Readers will also enjoy a deep-dive into Hultén’s evolution as an artist and woodworker, as well as a rare tour of his Gothenburg workshop.
    Comprising multiple paper stocks and bound in a dual-cover case with tipped-on images, Apparatrum is a must-have for fans of Hultén’s alientech oeuvre. Backers can choose between a signed or unsigned version of the book; the former costs $87 and the latter $113.
    For serious collectors, a special slip-cased edition of the book is also available, featuring a graphic cover designed by Love Hultén himself. Priced at $165, this edition is signed by Hultén and is limited to 250 copies only.
    Image: Courtesy of Volume, Love Hultén
    Apparatrum is currently in its crowdfunding stage, with nearly half of its $104,010 goal met. According to the Volume, the campaign will end on 12 April 8pm, and the project will only commence if the funding goal is met.

    Excited to announce the upcoming release of my new book APPARATRUM. The monograph offers an in-depth insight behind my work including detailed case studies, studio tours, drawings, personal observations and all that secret stuff I never share
    Pre-order a copy at @voldotco pic.twitter.com/YlyX51rVp1
    — Love Hulten (@HultenLove) February 6, 2024

    Learn more about the campaign at Volume.
    The post Synth designer Love Hultén is crowdfunding a new book that lets you see inside his artful mind appeared first on MusicTech.

    Swedish designer, woodworker and synth extraordinaire Love Hultén has announced the crowdfunding of his new book titled Apparatrum.

  • VZTec Releases FREE Malibu Reverb-Tremolo Pedal Plugin
    VZTec just debuted the beta release of the free Malibu plugin, a digital replication of the Singletone Malibu reverb and tremolo pedal.  The plugin is for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. VZTec states that it “allows you not only to incorporate the characteristic audio of the Malibu into your productions but also to remotely test the [...]
    View post: VZTec Releases FREE Malibu Reverb-Tremolo Pedal Plugin

    VZTec just debuted the beta release of the free Malibu plugin, a digital replication of the Singletone Malibu reverb and tremolo pedal.  The plugin is for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. VZTec states that it “allows you not only to incorporate the characteristic audio of the Malibu into your productions but also to remotely test theRead More

  • Image-Line acquires sample pack creator MSXII Sound DesignImage-Line, the Belgian software company behind DAW program FL Studio, has acquired MSXII Sound Design, a manufacturer of sample packs and sonic tools. MSXII’s 200GB-plus sample library will henceforth be available to FL Studio users through FL Cloud.

    READ MORE:Excite Audio’s Bloom Bass Impulse is a plugin designed to make “groundbreaking bass”

    MSXII Sound Design is widely used among hip hop, trap, R&B, and soul producers, with their samples contributing to numerous hit tracks over the years, including five Grammy nominations, two Billboard #1s, five platinum plaque tracks, five gold plaques, and placements in Super Bowl advertisements.
    FL Cloud, which was added to FL Studio in 2023, meanwhile, delivers AI-powered mastering, music distribution via DistroKid, and a vast, integrated library of royalty-free loops and hits, right in the FL Studio browser.
    “MSXII Sound Design is the secret sauce for many producers and stands for impeccable quality and variety” Image-Line CEO Constantin Koehncke said in a statement. “We’re very excited to partner with Mike and his team to now offer the MSX catalogue to FL Studio producers via FL Cloud, and will use our combined forces to create more great sample packs and new tools to help our users create their best music.”
    All MSX material is recorded with state-of-the-art equipment such as SSL EQ’s and preamps and Neve channel strips for instrument tracking. Space Echo delays & creative pedals such as the Chass Bliss Mood & Generation Loss are used for sound texture. Vintage samplers also involved, including the MPC 3000, ASR-10, and SP-1200 for drum character, and much more.
    MSXII Founder Michael Simpson said: “At MSXII, we are proud to support the underdog producers who are chasing dreams of making great music while also juggling work and the responsibilities of life.”
    “By teaming up with Image-Line and FL Studio, we hope to reach more of these creators and empower them with high-quality sounds for their projects.”

    The news follows an announcement last month that FL Studio is collaborating with Native Instruments on a collection of instrument bundles.
    Read more music technology news. 
    The post Image-Line acquires sample pack creator MSXII Sound Design appeared first on MusicTech.

    Image-Line, the Belgian software company behind DAW program FL Studio, has acquired sample pack manufacturer MSXII Sound Design.

  • Bang & Olufsen studio residency competition Bang & Olufsen have teamed up with STUDIOCANAL to launch a competition that is offering one lucky singer-songwriter a five-day residency at Metropolis Studios, London.

    Bang & Olufsen have teamed up with STUDIOCANAL to launch a competition that is offering one lucky singer-songwriter a five-day residency at Metropolis Studios, London.

  • Benn Jordan says “more than half” of music gear owners “aren’t really making music on it”Musician Benn Jordan has estimated that “more than half” of music gear owners don’t use their equipment, but says there’s “no shame in it at all”.

    READ MORE: Light as a feather: Nujabes’ lasting impact on hip-hop and electronic music

    He made the statement during the latest episode of My Forever Studio, a podcast that invites musicians and producers to dream up their fantasy forever music-making space.
    In this episode, Benn Jordan – The Flashbulb musician, music tech journalist, and scientist – tells listeners about a fantasy brutalist, forest-based studio and the high-end gear within it. He also touches upon synth collecting, telling a story about Herbie Hancock and talks about an unusual sound-checking method.
    “The people who buy music gear and are keeping the companies afloat, I would say more than half of them are not really making music on it,” he says. “They’re just collecting it and playing with it.
    “Even DAWs and software. They just buy the software, they play with the knobs, they listen to it for a second, and there’s no shame in it at all. Everybody pretends they’re making music, but there are a lot of people who just like collecting synths and collecting DAWs and learning. Because they’re not producing music that people are listening to, for some reason they’re not as validated. I think that’s nonsense because it is a hobby one way or another.”
    Jordan goes on to further defend collecting music gear for the sake of collecting rather than using it make and publish music: “Collecting synthesizers is a way cooler hobby than, like, a lot of other hobbies that people have. I mean, people have crazy hobbies. People play pickleball. They do all sorts of things that, like… fly fishing. People stand in rivers all day. There are tons of hobbies that are kind of absurd. I think that collecting synthesizers…is one of the less absurd hobbies.
    “I wish that that was a little bit less of a secret… ‘Oh, you know what? Actually, I do like collecting synthesizers, and I have no intention of using them in music, and that’s fine.’”
    The My Forever Studio podcast is a weekly podcast, created in patnserhip with Audient and now in its sixth season, that challenges music makers to build their dream fantasy forever studio anywhere they want in the universe – or even further afield. The catch? They’re only allowed to name six dream items. There will be drool-worthy gear. There will be juicy stories. There will be… NO BUNDLES!
    Listen to the latest episode featuring Benn Jordan below:

    Find all episodes on MusicTech.
    The post Benn Jordan says “more than half” of music gear owners “aren’t really making music on it” appeared first on MusicTech.

    Benn Jordan has estimated that “more than half” of music gear owners don’t use their equipment, but says there’s “no shame in it at all”.

  • Gibson Gives and 1500 Sound Academy Partner for Music Scholarships Across Los Angeles, CA, Beijing, China, and Taipei, TaiwanFor over 130 years, the iconic and leading American instrument brand Gibson has been shaping sound across generations and genres. Gibson, and its charitable arm Gibson Gives believe in the power of music, and that getting instruments into the hands of those with a desire to make music is a life-changing event. A state-of-the-art music school in Inglewood, CA, 1500 Sound Academy offers comprehensive courses to music students and aspiring professionals who want to learn the craft of Music Production, Engineering, Songwriting, Mixing, Music Business, and Artist Branding. Gibson Gives is proud to announce it will partner with 1500 Sound Academy this year to give five music scholarships valued at$25,000. in addition to instruments and gear totaling over $12,500 across the program inLos Angeles, California,  Beijing, China and Taipei, Taiwan.

    "Music has the power to transform lives, and at Gibson Gives, we believe in amplifying that transformative potential. We're thrilled to announce our partnership with 1500 Sound Academy, a beacon of excellence in music education. This collaboration extends our commitment to fostering talent globally, reaching students in Los Angeles, Beijing, and Taiwan.”

    --Erica Krusen, Senior Director, Global Cultural Influence and Gibson Global Executive Director, Gibson Gives

    “1500 Sound Academy and Gibson Gives share a tireless commitment to providing musicians with the education, resources and support that is vital on their journey. We couldn’t be more excited this partnership and the opportunity the Gibson Gives Scholarships will afford to young, bright minds as they pursue their dreams in the music industry.”

    --Twila True, Co-Founder, 1500 Sound Academy and CEO, True Family Enterprises

    Students can apply through April 19, 2024 AT 5PM PT for the Los Angeles area program of the Gibson Gives Scholarship HERE, the Beijing program HERE, and the Taipei program HERE.

    Recipients will be announced on May 8.

    For over 130 years, the iconic and leading American instrument brand Gibson has been shaping sound across generations and genres. Gibson, and its charitable arm Gibson Gives&nbs…

  • Ford’s hands-free BlueCruise system was active before fatal Texas crashIt's the first known fatality resulting from a crash involving the use of BlueCruise, which Ford first announced in 2021.
    © 2024 TechCrunch. All rights reserved. For personal use only.

    It's the first known fatality resulting from a crash involving the use of BlueCruise, which Ford first announced in 2021.

  • Garage Door Automation With No Extra HardwareHome automation projects have been popular as long as microcontrollers have been available to the general public. Building computers to handle minutiae so we don’t have to is one of life’s great joys. Among the more popular is adding some sort of system to a garage door. Besides adding Internet-connected remote control to the action of opening and closing, it’s also helpful to have an indicator of the garage door state for peace-of-mind. Most add some sensors and other hardware to accomplish this task but this project doesn’t use any extra sensors or wiring at all.
    In fact, the only thing added to the garage door for this build besides some wiring is the microcontroller itself. After getting the cover of the opener off, which took some effort, a Shelly Uni was added and powered by the 12V supply from the opener itself. The garage door opener, perhaps unsurprisingly, has its own way of detecting when the door is fully open or closed, so some additional wire was added to these sensors to let the microcontroller know the current state. Shelly Uni platforms have a WiFi module included as well, so nothing else was needed for this to function as a complete garage door automation platform.
    [Stephen] uses Home Assistant as the basis for his home automation, and he includes all of the code for getting this platform up and running there. It wouldn’t be too hard to get it running on other openers or even on other microcontroller platforms; the real key to this build is to recognize that sometimes it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel with extra sensors, limit switches, or even power supplies when it’s possible to find those already in the hardware you’re modifying. This isn’t always possible, though, especially with more modern devices that might already be Internet-connected but probably don’t have great security.

    Home automation projects have been popular as long as microcontrollers have been available to the general public. Building computers to handle minutiae so we don’t have to is one of life̵…

  • Having spent over $200m on catalogs to date, South Korea’s Beyond Music eyes Latin Music market with Yandel music rights dealLatin Music star Yandel strikes music rights deal with Beyond Music
    Source

  • Cryo-EM: Freezing Time to Take Snapshots of Myosin and Other Molecular SystemsUsing technologies like electron microscopy (EM) it is possible to capture molecular mechanisms in great detail, but not when these mechanisms are currently moving. The field of cryomicroscopy circumvents this limitation by freezing said mechanism in place using cryogenic fluids. Although initially X-ray crystallography was commonly used, the much more versatile EM is now the standard approach in the form of cryo-EM, with recent advances giving us unprecedented looks at the mechanisms that quite literally make our bodies move.
    Myosin-5 working stroke and walking on F-actin. (Credit: Klebl et al., 2024)
    The past years has seen many refinements in cryo-EM, with previously quite manual approaches shifting to microfluidics to increase the time resolution at which a molecular process could be frozen, enabling researchers to for example see the myosin motor proteins go through their motions one step at a time. Research articles on this were published previously, such as by [Ahmet Mentes] and colleagues in 2018 on myosin force sensing to adjust to dynamic loads. More recently, [David P. Klebl] and colleagues published a research article this year on the myosin-5 powerstroke through ATP hydrolysis, using a modified (slower) version of myosin-5. Even so, the freezing has to be done with millisecond accuracy to capture the myosin in the act of priming (pre-powerstroke).
    The most amazing thing about cryo-EM is that it allows us to examine processes that used to be the subject of theory and speculation as we had no means to observe the motion and components involved directly. The more we can increase the time resolution on cryo-EM, the more details we can glimpse, whether it’s the functioning of myosins in muscle tissue or inside cells, the folding of proteins, or determining the proteins involved in a range of diseases, such as the role of TDP-43 in amytrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in a 2021 study by [Diana Arseni] and colleagues.
    As our methods of freezing these biomolecular moments in time improve, so too will our ability to validate theory with observations. Some of these methods combine cryogenic freezing with laser pulses to alternately freeze and resume processes, allowing processes to be recorded in minute detail in sub-millisecond resolution. One big issue that remains yet is that although some of these researchers have even open sourced their cryo-EM methods, commercial vendors have not yet picked up this technology, limiting its reach as researchers have to cobble something together themselves.
    Hopefully before long (time-resolved) cryo-EM will be as common as EM is today, to the point where even a hobby laboratory may have one lounging around.

    Using technologies like electron microscopy (EM) it is possible to capture molecular mechanisms in great detail, but not when these mechanisms are currently moving. The field of cryomicroscopy circ…

  • Tips on making samples from the Soul Surplus team
    Soul Surplus share some tips on sample pack creation from their recent studio takeover at Drexel University.

    Soul Surplus share some tips on sample pack creation from their recent studio takeover at Drexel University.

  • Taylor Swift’s music is back on TikTok, despite no resolution in its dispute with UMGIt’s likely no coincidence that Swift’s music has reappeared on TikTok little more than week before the April 19 release of her new albu
    Source

    It’s likely no coincidence that Swift’s music has reappeared on TikTok little more than week before the April 19 release of her new album.

  • Benn Jordan: “I will get burnt out by YouTube. It’s gonna happen…”Musician and YouTube-based music journalist Benn Jordan has discussed his future as a content creator and how it will, eventually, burn him out.

    READ MORE: Watch Depeche Mode play the final Memento Mori show in Cologne

    On YouTube, Benn Jordan, also known as The Flashbulb, shares insights into his music production process, offers tutorials, and provides commentary on various aspects of the music industry. His account, at the time of writing, has 340,000 followers. On the latest episode of My Forever Studio, a podcast where guests run through their dream studio setup, he reveals that his time on YouTube might end sooner than we think.
    “Yeah, I will get burnt out on YouTube,” he admits. “It’s gonna happen, you know, like, I’m gonna quit at some point.”
    Despite this, he remains passionate about his music career, stating emphatically, “I’m not gonna quit writing music. I’m not gonna let that happen, because I know how these things build up.
    “I think the reason why so many people, you know, tap out is because they over monetize their own craft, and then it becomes a job, and it becomes. And they wanna retire from working, whereas I don’t wanna retire from making music. I love it. I wanna retire to make music.”
    Acknowledging the risk of over-monetisation leading to artistic compromise, Jordan mentions being inspired by Charlie Cooper, a member of the band Telefon Tel Aviv, who passed away in 2009.
    “The late Charlie Cooper from Telefon Tel Aviv… He waited tables while Telefon Tel Aviv was in their height.
    “And he did it because he didn’t want to monetize Telefon Tel Aviv as his primary source of income because then he would be more likely to write music that would be a pop hit than writing music that he actually wanted to write, which is such a logical, great way to look at that.”
    He lauded Cooper’s approach of maintaining a separate job to preserve artistic integrity, emphasizing, “I’m okay with writing music for ads. It’s not really selling out as long as I put my art here and then have my service on this side.”
    “Yeah…money and art just don’t really mix very well.”
    Listen to the full episode below:

    Also in the episode, in which Jordan dreams up a fantasy brutalist studio in a forest, the musician defends usic tech collectors. He estimates that “more than half” of gear owners “are not really making music on it…They’re just collecting it and playing with it.”
    “They just buy the software, they play with the knobs, they listen to it for a second, and there’s no shame in it at all,” he adds.
    My Forever Studio is a weekly podcast where guests musicians and producers are invited in to dream up their forever music-making space anywhere in the universe, or beyond. Sound easy, right? Here’s the catch: They must craft their dream setup using only six coveted items. Plus, no bundles are allowed!
    Find all episodes on MusicTech.
    The post Benn Jordan: “I will get burnt out by YouTube. It’s gonna happen…” appeared first on MusicTech.

    Musician and YouTube-based music journalist Benn Jordan has hinted that he might, at some point soon, be “burnt out” by the platform.