Shure and PAMA Launch 4th Annual Mark Brunner Professional Audio ScholarshipThe Professional Audio Manufacturers Alliance (PAMA), in partnership with Shure Incorporated, is accepting applications for the 4th annual Mark Brunner Professional Audio Scholarship, offered to students worldwide who are pursuing an education in professional audio. Brunner, a long-time Shure executive, PAMA founding member, and leading voice in the audio community who passed away in 2020, had an unwavering passion for education and mentorship throughout his career. $2,000 scholarships are targeted to recipients following their passion for audio in an accredited audio program. PAMA and Shure are specifically interested to learn how the applicants plan to share their knowledge with others in a manner consistent with Mark’s legacy. Scholarship applications are open as of April 1, with a submission deadline of May 31.

Mark Brunner

Visit pamalliance.org/scholarship for more information and to submit an application.

The recipients of the first scholarship were Dennis Freeman from Middle Tennessee State University and Emma Brooks from Berklee College of Music. The second scholarship went again to Freeman and Brooks, as well as Benjamin Nix-Bradley of CSU Northridge. The third went to Freeman and Nix-Bradley, as well as Valor Swezey of University of New Haven.

For more information, go to pamalliance.org/scholarship.

Make music with Analog Lab Play for your chance to win an Arturia MatrixBrute Noir ($2299 value)
Make some music with Arturia's free Analog Lab Play for a chance to win the incredibly powerful MatrixBrute Noir Edition.

Pinkpad, A DIY Laptop You Must Print In PinkLooking to build a laptop all on your own? Check out the Pinkpad, a DIY laptop project that as if appeared out of nowhere, gives you a based on an off-the-shelf Dell motherboard. This build projects an aura of unabashed competence – the website brings you to a different universe, the documentation is as curt as it is extensive, and the build evidently works.
With a Thinkpad x61 keyboard, a reasonably modern (Dell Vostro 5481, Ryzen possible) motherboard embeddable inside, and a 10″ 1024×768 screen, this ~11″ laptop packs a certain kind of punch for what’s a build-it-yourself project. Most of the value of this design is in the 3D files – which were done in Google SketchUp, and the laptop is small enough that you could print its shell reasonably quickly. Not that you should follow the parts list religiously – the screen in particular might just warrant reconsideration in your eyes. On the other hand, we wish you all the luck on your SketchUp journey if you want to modify the shell. It also isn’t lost on us that the parts list doesn’t list a battery in it.
This is an impressive project to see open-sourced, and we hope it can inspire some hackers in the custom laptop building cohort. One prominent flaw of consumer-facing technology is that you can’t always get your devices in pink, and printing your laptop’s chassis yourself is a surefire way to combat this. If this laptop’s form-factor is too commonplace for you, we’ve seen no shortage of custom laptops grace our pages, from miniature ones to CRT luggable beasts, and click on the tags below if you’d like to see more!
We thank [Max_UA] for sharing this with us!

SatCat5: UART, SPI and I2C via Ethernet With FPGA-Based DesignArty A7-based prototype of SatCat5 with custom switch I/O board. (Credit: The Aerospace Corporation)
To the average microcontroller, Ethernet networks are quite a step up from the basic I2C, SPI and UART interfaces, requiring either a built-in Ethernet MAC or SPI-based MAC, with tedious translation between Ethernet and those other interfaces. Yet what if this translation could be done automatically and transparently?  This is what the SatCat5 FPGA-based project by [The Aerospace Corporation] aims to provide: a gateway akin to an unmanaged Ethernet switch that also supports those non-Ethernet links. Recently they answered a range of questions about the project on Hacker News.
The project name comes from the primary target audience: smallsat and cubesat developers, which is an area where being able to route more traffic over a common Ethernet-based bus is a major boon. The provided Xilinx Artix-7-based reference design (pictured) gives a good idea of how it can be used: it combines an Arty A7 development board with a custom PCB containing an Ethernet switch IC (SJA1105), TJA1100 transceiver, two RJ45 jacks and four PMOD connectors, here connected to two UARTs for bidirectional communication between them. Ethernet frame encapsulation is provided using the standard Serial Line Internet Protocol (SLIP), with more details covered in the FAQ. At a minimum an FPGA like a Lattice iCE40 is required, with an MCU capable of using the provided C++ libraries, or a custom implementation.
Thanks to [STR-Alorman] for the tip.

RELEASE DETAILS
Release title:
Sauce
Main artist name:
KingPollo
Release date:
21st Mar, 2024
https://publme.lnk.to/Sauce
#newmusic #Release #Music #indepedent #artist #rap #hiphop

Bandsintown adds Waitlist to gather fan contact info on sold-out showsMusicians seldom have access to the contact information of fans who buy tickets to their shows, but Bandsintown has just added a tool to their growing toolkit that rights that wrong......
The post Bandsintown adds Waitlist to gather fan contact info on sold-out shows appeared first on Hypebot.

Get FREE LIMITER Plugin By Mastering The Mix — CLICK HERE! 🎁
Instead of making jokes on April 1st, we decided to do something more productive for our readers (thank you so much for supporting BPB!). Mastering The Mix kindly provided 25,000 FREE copies of the LIMITER (€58,95 value) plugin for Bedroom Producers Blog readers, and we will give them away on April Fools’ Day. To get [...]
View post: Get FREE LIMITER Plugin By Mastering The Mix — CLICK HERE! 🎁

10 SXSW Music Panels 2024 you can listen to nowSXSW records many of its past panels and makes them available for free to listen to. Here are some notable choices from this year's conference.....
The post 10 SXSW Music Panels 2024 you can listen to now appeared first on Hypebot.

Beyoncés Cowboy Carter breaks Spotify and Amazon one-day recordsMove over Taylor Swift. On Friday, Beyoncé’s COWBOY CARTER became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day in 2024.....
The post Beyoncés Cowboy Carter breaks Spotify and Amazon one-day records appeared first on Hypebot.

Steve Lillywhite Scholarship at Confetti Institute Confetti launch a new Scholarship which aims to provide exceptional opportunities for UK-based students pursuing a career in music production.

Sequential to discontinue the Prophet X due to “unavailability of several key components”Sequential has announced the discontinuation of its Prophet X hybrid synth, citing the unavailability of key components.
Engineered by late synthmaker Dave Smith, whose brainchild included the legendary Prophet-5 and the Oberheim OB-X8, the Prophet X was released in 2018 and is what the brand describes as a “bi-timbral, 8-voice-stereo (16-voice mono) synthesiser that combines samples and synthesis.”

READ MORE: “Spent months making new versions of everything for this and you wonder why I never play EDM festivals”: Calvin Harris responds to criticism that his Ultra Music set was “underwhelming”

Announcing the news on their social media accounts, Sequential said: “Since its debut in 2018, the Prophet X has been a constant source of sonic adventure for musicians around the world, blending the warmth of analog synthesis with the endless potential of sampling.”
“With a heavy heart, we must announce that due to the unavailability of several key components, we’ll be waving goodbye to new Prophet X units after our current stock depletes.”
The brand did however assure existing users that they are “committed to ongoing support”, while their friends at 8Dio “will carry on offering a treasure trove of PX Add-On sample packs to keep your sound palette fresh and evolving.”
“If you’ve been considering bringing a Prophet X into your creative fold, now is the time! A limited number of units are still available at your favourite music stores,” the post continued.
“Thank you to everyone who has embraced Prophet X and made it such a beloved instrument. While production is ending, the Prophet X’s impact on music will continue to resonate for decades to come.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Sequential (@sequential_llc)

Remaining Sequential Prophet X units are currently available at $3499,99/ €3499, while stocks last.
In the meantime, check out MusicTech’s list of some of the best polyphonic synths you can buy — at a range of prices — in 2024.
Learn more at Sequential.
The post Sequential to discontinue the Prophet X due to “unavailability of several key components” appeared first on MusicTech.

Give Your Pi Pico Captouch Inputs For All Your Music NeedsUnlike many modern microcontrollers, RP2040 doesn’t come with a native capacitive touch peripheral. This doesn’t mean you can’t do it – the usual software-driven way works wonderfully, and only requires an external pullup resistor! In case you wanted a demonstration or you have a capacitive touch project in mind, this lighthearted video by [Jeremy Cook] is a must watch, and he’s got a healthy amount of resources for you in store, too!
In this video, [Jeremy] presents you with a KiCad schematic and an PCB design you can use to quickly add whole 23 capacitive touch sensing inputs to a Pi Pico! The board is flexible mechanically, easy to assemble as [Jeremy] demonstrates, and all the pins involved can still be used as regular GPIOs if you’d like. Plus, it’s fully open-source, can easily be assembled on your own, and available on Tindie too!
Of course, such a board doesn’t get created for no reason – [Jeremy] has a healthy amount of musical creations and nifty ideas to show off. We quite liked the trick of using old PCBs as capacitive touch sensing, using copper fills as electrodes – which has helped create an amusing “macropad of macropads”, and, there’s quite a bit more to see.
If capacitive touch projects ever struck a chord with you and you enjoy music-related hacking, [Jeremy]’s got a whole YouTube channel you ought to check out. Oh, and if one of the musical projects in the video caught your eye, it might just be the one we’ve featured previously!

TechCrunch Mobility: Fisker enters into dumpster fire territory and Tesla chases FSD revenueTechCrunch Mobility is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click TechCrunch Mobility — to receive the newsletter every weekend in your inbox. Subscribe for free. Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Remember in the last edition of TechCrunch […]
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ESP-Drone: Building an ESP32-Based Quadcopter For Not Much CashThe fully assembled ESP-Drone flying around. (Credit: Circuit Digest)
What’s the cheapest quadcopter you can build? As [Circuit Digest] demonstrates with their variant of the ESP-Drone project by Espressif, you only need a minimum of parts, with at the core an ESP32 MCU module, inertial measurement unit (IMU, e.g. the MPU6050) and four MOSFETs to drive the brushless DC motors. As the PCB also forms the structural frame and landing struts for the quadcopter, not even a 3D printer is needed, with [Circuit Digest] coming to a total BOM cost coming to around 1,000 Indian Rupees, or about $12 USD.
While this [Circuit Digest] project gets you the basic done with IMU functionality, the Espressif project also has a few expansion boards detailed on its hardware page, depending on the base model of the mainboard you pick. The [Circuit Digest] project follows the ESPlane-V2-S2 version with no expansion boards, but the ESP32-S2-Drone V1.2 mainboard can be extended with position-hold, pressure and compass modules, as well as custom boards. As a derivative of the Bitcraze Crazyflie project, the ESP-Drone firmware also supports the rather nifty cfclient software for remote monitoring, logging and control. This may also be in the [Circuit Digest] firmware, but wasn’t listed among the features.

A nice feature of using cfclient is that you can use a standard (game) controller to control the quadcopter, while also getting a lot of flight data back. The other option is to use the Android or iOS app from Espressif (with source code available via their GitHub) and control the drone that way. Regardless of the method, you’ll be limited to the limits of the local WiFi network in terms of range, which probably resolves the issue of it not having a camera feed to steer from. This makes it arguably more of an (indoor) toy than a DJI competitor, but as a DIY quadcopter project it definitely is a lot of fun, while costing a lot less than most hobbies.

New Kids On the Block Are Still KidsIt seems quaint in retrospect, doesn’t it? Five kids band together to form a musical group that goes on to achieve unimaginable levels of commercial success across the world. Say what you will about boy bands from yesteryear—or pop music in general—but there was a charm to New Kids on the Block, who formed in the mid-1980s, that wasn’t matched in subsequent decades by far more temporal YouTube sensations and the like.

Indeed, the affectionately nicknamed “NKOTB” from Dorchester, MA, achieved even more unexpected success by maintaining their presence on commercial radio and MTV. Sure, *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys blew up too—but only after the quintet of Jonathan and Jordan Knight, Joey McIntyre (who now goes by “Joe”), Donnie Wahlberg and Danny Wood blazed the boy-band trail. (Fun fact: NKOTB and Backstreet Boys joined forces and performed together from 2010 to 2012 as “NKOTBSB.”)

Say what you will about the lasting power of pop music—whether it be from the good ol’ days or contemporary times—but NKOTB defied all expectations by achieving stardom over the course of multiple albums. They broke through in 1988 thanks to the whopping smash hit “You Got It (The Right Stuff)” and stayed together until 1994.

Fast forward to 2008, when NKOTB reunited and proved that they could still draw tremendous crowds. The reunion, bolstered by a new album (The Block) and tour, went so well that the group decided to stick together. In 2013, they released another full-length record of original material, 10, and further expanded their presence with BlockCon (their version of ComicCon) and a cruise for their fans, the earliest of which were all grown up.

NKOTB return again in May with Still Kids, their first album of new material in 11 years. Music Connection touched base with Donnie Wahlberg and McIntyre (separately) before the album’s announcement and shortly before the group unveiled its new single on The Kelly Clarkson Show. They pulled back the curtain on how the album came together, why NKOTB decided to reissue The Block and how they still feel young at heart.

Music Connection: Congratulations on coming out with your first album of new material in 11 years. It must be an exciting time.

Joe McEntyre:It is. We’ve made some music over the years to keep the fires burning—some bonus tracks, some Christmas tunes. But it’s nice to have a new album.

MC: When did you start working on Still Kids?

McEntyre: Donnie was itching to make some new music, so he started a couple years ago. Jordan later jumped on a bunch of tracks. He usually jumps in early in the process.

Initially, I wasn’t super-engaged. But [that changed] when we decided as a group to make a new album, and Donnie said, “We’re ready for you.” I was trying to listen to my heart before getting involved. I started writing with [up-and-coming producer] Sean Thomas, who I toured with last year, and we ended up writing and producing about half the album: six songs. I was on the road a lot last year and had a lot of ideas.

[Still Kids] really picked up steam for me in September. It was go time, because we had to finish it by the end of November to make sure to came out [before summer]. Like most projects, no matter how much we plan, all of a sudden, when deadline arrives, you’re scrambling to finish it, making last tweaks and whatnot.

MC: That’s cool he gives you space to come into the process when you’re ready.

McEntyre: Yeah, initially I told him I wasn’t quite ready to jump in. He lovingly gives me that space.

Donnie was really excited and ambitious about making another album. If you know Donnie close-up, you’ll see he’s very good at managing the artistic process. A big part [of the writing process] is sharing what we’ve come up with to the [whole] group and hoping they receive it and are excited about it. We’re five guys with five lives and we’re not in the same city and we’re not coming up to the studio every day.

MC: What themes did you notice emerging during the writing process?

McEntyre: Where I am in my life, getting older, having a family and a successful marriage, and being part of the group. We’ve been working together in some form or another for almost 40 years. Between the five of us, there are a lot of relationships, so there’s a lot [of territory covered] on the album. The beauty of us being able to stay together is that our music just naturally feels cohesive.

“Stay,” the last song on the album, is one I wrote that’s more of a romantic song that I probably couldn’t have written until I became a father. But even that song could be applied to a platonic relationship that has a lot of love and history [in it]. It could even be about our group staying together or what we’ve been through with our fans. That’s what I love most about music: that it can take pull from all sorts of different experiences.

Another song, “Old School Love,” is about returning to a simple [expression] of love, just being together and connecting on a very basic level that [doesn’t involve] texting.

MC: I see that Taylor Dayne guests on that song.

McEntyre: Yeah. Especially for our generation, she’s beloved and has an iconic sound. She fitted. I haven’t heard the version [of the song] with her on it yet. We’ve always celebrated artists that we came up with, that we admired and loved.

MC: It must’ve been fun collaborating with DJ Jazzy Jeff too, for “Get Down.”

McEntyre: Yeah, he’s [coming on tour] with us, so to have him on the record is very cool.

I also wrote a song for Jon Knight, who historically doesn’t sing a lot of leads in the group. It’s called “Better Days” and celebrates his relationship with his partner Harley [Rodriguez].

[Knight] lives across the country to work on [an HGTV] show called Farmhouse Fixer. I tried to be patient and not push him too much. When I went to New York City for press to announce [our last] tour, he and I recorded his vocals in a hotel room. We banged it out after he said, “Let’s go. I know the fans are going to love it.”

MC: Between the [NKOTB] convention and cruise, in addition to touring and everything else, you must be really in touch with your fans.

McEntyre: Yeah, it’s really cool. This sounds corny, but sometimes we’ll get a message on social media that’ll cause us to sing our hearts out in an arena.

MC: How come you also decided to revisit The Block after 15 years?

Donnie Wahlberg: First and foremost, I think it’s a really good album, and I think most of our fans would agree. It’s one of the best albums, if not the best album, we’ve ever done. The band was reuniting, and we had drifted away for a while. The album [also] came along at a perfect time. If you recall, the country was in a real financial mess. It seemed like people needed some relief, and the album was a reminder of simpler times. Also, I was going through a divorce at the time, so it’s a very personal album. My life was in a real crisis point and [The Block] gave me something that I could enjoy again.

If I hear one of the songs on my iTunes, I can immediately go back to a time of both great personal duress but also tremendous joy. It was really fun and special and was [released at a time when] things started happening again with me and my band and our fans. We meet 200 fans a night [when we tour]. I think [The Block] allowed everyone to remember to love yourself again too.

It was [also] a very contemporary album. We worked with very relevant producers and people who [were] making some of the biggest music in the world at the time, like Lady Gaga and RedOne. We worked with different producers and hopped from studio session to studio session.

[Still Kids] will be a lot more in the vein of reflecting on life and looking back at the long journey we shared as a band and with our fans. The tenor of The Block overall was that we were still only in our 30s, still young enough to have a good time. We’re still young enough to do what we love to do. We’re not using our moms’ credit cards anymore—we have our own credit cards. But it’s important not to forget to serve that need for joy in our lives. We [started having] responsibilities that we didn’t have when we were kids.

The Block reminded everyone, “Hey, put an oxygen mask on yourself before you start helping everyone around you. If you’re not getting your own oxygen, if you forget about the joy and happiness in your own heart, it might [prevent] you from giving as much happiness as you can to everything else. It was hard for me to learn that [at the time], to have self-love.

MC: Are “joy” and “happiness” words you’d use to describe the new album as well?

Wahlberg: Yeah—but I would probably put “grateful” at the core of [Still Kids]. We tried to not take ourselves too seriously. We’ve struggled with that … there’s no manual on how to manage the level of success that we had at such a young age. Even the people around us oftentimes didn’t know how to handle it, as experienced as they were in the music industry. Very few people have seen that level of hysteria and mania.

Everyone was learning on the fly, even the experts who were entrusted to navigate us through [massive popularity]. It was hard to manage that when we were 19 years old. It’s hard when your dream is to be on the cover of Rolling Stone, and we were [in 1989]—but we were voted “the worst” in every poll in the magazine.

MC: Do you feel like Still Kids helps define your legacy?

Wahlberg: I don’t think we get to determine our band’s legacy. That’s for other people to determine—for every individual fan to determine. But we’ve really settled into a great sense of gratitude, of wanting to give back to our fans as much as possible. Ironically, the less we focus on [our success], we focus more on giving the fans what they deserve. The tone of how people respond to New Kids now is completely different than it was [before,] because we have longevity, we’ve proven to ourselves.

We truly became the opposite of what we started out as, in terms of this heavily marketed thing that was all about marketing and the corporate machine. When we got back together, we were independent. Of course, we did a record deal with Interscope and stuff… we pulled that together because of my relationship with [label co-founder] Jimmy Iovine. (I helped bring my brother’s album, Marky Mark [and the Funky Bunch’s Music for the People in 1991], to Jimmy.) [The Block] was a self-financed album. But [it didn’t feel like] there was a corporate machine behind us, just each other, the band, and the fans. We become aware when our fans really want a new album [from NKOTB].

The Block built a lot of confidence in me as a songwriter and as a vocalist—and even as a producer. I performed on many records [and had] written and produced a couple of number one songs, but I’d been away from [making music] for a while—I’d been really focused on building an acting career. When I felt inspired to bring the group back together, I trusted my ear [and believed] that I could still hear a hit record and knew what a good song was.

I didn’t know how involved I would become in the writing process. And, frankly, most of the records I produced were rap records and hip-hop songs. It was exciting to sit at a piano with RedOne and Lady Gaga, for example, and write a song from the ground up—even though I had produced and written a lot of songs. I oftentimes reverse-engineered a song based on a drum loop or something. I co-wrote “Good Vibrations” [by Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch]… I basically wrote the piano solo—but I didn’t really know how to play the piano. I sang it to a musician in the studio, and he played what I sang.

A lot of growth came with The Block and [2013’s] 10. I walked into the studio at the start of recording The Block... anxious and hopeful and somewhat confident, but unsure of what was going to happen. Now, I know that what is certain is that I’m going to enjoy the process and need to trust it, that my heart’s open and that I don’t indulge in any of my fears. In going through old footage of working with [producers of The Block], I could see how fun it was for me. The collaboration we’re doing on Still Kids are more with each other [than guest producers and featured performers]. 

MC: If you were able to give advice to your younger self, what would it be? 

McEntyre: Well, I’ve always felt like I was shot out of a cannon when I was 15 years old and have been catching up ever since. That sounds dramatic, but it’s really the truth. There was no way to stop the train. There is some arrested development that comes with being in the top group in the world when you’re 15, 16, 17 and 18 years old. Having just turned 50, I still feel very young. Which is a good thing, because our music is vulnerable and passionate and has a [theme of] going after something with reckless abandon, without thinking too much about it.

Having said all that, to answer your question, I’d [tell myself] to have the courage to slow down, take a breath and ask [myself,] “What do [I] really want?”

Ever since we were kids, we’ve always thrived and haven’t ever really lost [our creative momentum].

Wahlberg: I would probably say, “It’s all going to be OK, no matter what happens.”

You know, we all came from such humble beginnings, and some of us from fractured families… there was divorce and alcoholism and a lot of chaos. When you become successful, it fills a lot of the holes… but it [also came] with so much criticism, it was frightening. We set out on this journey as a band… when we started to achieve success, it was very simple: get our songs on the radio and have a few people show up at our concerts in Boston instead of just our parents. Next thing we knew, we were a worldwide phenomenon. It was more than any of us could have imagined—and more than any of us were prepared for.

There were times we didn’t feel worthy of [our success]. “Gosh, do we deserve to be on the same stage as Whitney Houston tonight? This is insane.” We also wanted to defend our music and speak up for ourselves… there was [also] this fear that it was all going to be taken away at any second. Neither one of those things are completely true. All these years later, [we believe we] didn’t deserve to be number one on the Forbes list [of highest-paid entertainers in 1991] over Madonna and Michael Jackson. But, at the same time, we did work really hard to be successful and started committing to learning what was truly important.

We learned how to own who we were and what we are and to be honest and true to ourselves as artists — while servicing our fans [too]. We want to give them our very best, for all they give us and all the time and hard-earned money they spend on us. It’s important to give them as much our ourselves as possible—while being mature enough to realize that we aren’t entitled, but honored and humbled. I think we’ve done a good job of that.

So, I would tell my younger self to enjoy the journey, and that it’s not about awards and trophies, and sales and numbers. “One day, young Donnie, you’re gonna be backstage at a show and going through one of the hardest personal times in your life. You’re going to get a hug from a fan who’s gonna tell you that they’re going through the exact thing as you.”

QuickFacts

Mark Wahlberg (a.k.a. “Marky Mark”) was an original member of New Kids on the Block—but didn’t last long, quitting due to lack of interest in the group.

In 2001, Jonathan and Jordan Knight gave a rare interview to Oprah Winfrey, speaking about panic attacks and anxiety disorders.

Only one song from NKOTB’s first album, which was self-titled, reached the charts. It was the follow-up to their 1986 debut, 1988’s Hangin’ Tough, that brought massive success to the group, via the hit songs “Please Don’t Go Girl,” “You Got It (The Right Stuff),” “I’ll Be Loving You (Forever),” “Hangin’ Tough” and “Cover Girl.”

NKOTB almost broke up after the lackluster performance of their self-titled debut, but producer Maurice Starr convinced Columbia Records to give the group another shot

Starr first tapped Donnie Wahlberg to form NKOTB. He was responsible for recruiting the additional members of the group

More Hangin’ Tough, a 30th anniversary edition of the 1988 album, brought NKOTB back into the upper echelon (No.18) of the Billboard 200 in 2019. The reissue included remixed and instrumental versions of the album, in addition to some newly recorded tracks