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
Source

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.

Tom Oberheim on synth emulations: “Anything that brings new sounds is exciting — I don’t care what the brand is”Legendary synthesizer designer Tom Oberheim has spoken about the various emulations of hardware synths on the market, saying that he finds them exciting no matter who releases them.
Right now, there are plenty of different ways to get your hands on an Oberheim-style sound if you can’t shell out $5,000 for an OB-X8, for example. Arturia has its OP-Xa V synth plugin, while GForce has a handful of Oberheim-endorsed plugins. If you want a hardware emulation, Behringer’s UB-Xa, which is a top-seller at Thomann at the time of writing. Whether they sound like the real deal is another question, but there certainly seems to be a market for such products.
Tom Oberheim isn’t fazed by them. Instead, he says in a new interview with MusicTech that “Anything that brings new sounds to, let’s say, young musicians just starting out, is exciting to me. And I don’t care what the brand is.”
“There have been a few different simulations of Oberheim over the years and, I have to say, GForce did a great job,” he continues. GForce has emulated the OB-X, the Oberheim 8-Voice, the DMX and the SEM. You can even get them all in a single bundle.
“I don’t have the ear training to get into the fine details [of the sound of the emulations],” Oberheim says.
“I’ve been relying on musicians to tell me what sounds good since the ‘70s. But the reaction to the GForce stuff was very positive, and I certainly think it sounds really good…I mean, the fact that you can spend $1,000 and get a great system in your bedroom is exciting, no matter what’s being simulated. Imagine if you were able to do this in 1970.”
Oberheim appears keen to bring more synthesizers into the studios and homes of synth enthusiasts. His latest synth, the TEO-5 is the most affordable Oberheim synth ever. Meanwhile, Behringer claims that it got consent from Tom Oberheim to create the UB-Xa — “He designed a fantastic product. [The UB-Xa] is no copy but took inspiration from the original synth and brought it to a complete new level…We discussed the UB-Xa with Tom Oberheim and got his consent…”
And Oberheim still thinks there’s plenty more to do.
“Some people think the industry’s reached a pinnacle. I don’t see that…I think we’ll continue to see a lot of creativity in this business because you can take a certain bag of parts and do a lot of different things with it.”
Read more music tech news
The post Tom Oberheim on synth emulations: “Anything that brings new sounds is exciting — I don’t care what the brand is” appeared first on MusicTech.

“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 artistsGenerally speaking, the best DAW for any producer is the one they feel most comfortable using and are most familiar with.
That said, Pro Tools is (or was, at least) regarded as the industry-standard digital audio workstation – although many find it to be a little too convoluted for their requirements – and for some audio professionals, using anything else is tantamount to blasphemy.

READ MORE: Apple unveils Logic Pro 11 and Logic Pro For iPad 2 – with AI front and centre

Award-winning Nigerian producer and artist Sarz found this out the hard way when he told a client he used Fruity Loops, now FL Studio. The client then refused to work with him, claiming he only worked with producers who used Pro Tools.
Sarz tells the story in a new episode of MusicTech’s My Forever Studio podcast, in which we invite producers to chat all things music and hypothetically kit out their perfect recording studio.
“Early in my career, there was this artist from Nigeria – one of the biggest artists at that time – he wanted me to make some beats for him, and I was so excited, you know, like this would be big for me. And I played some beats, he loved them. And he asked me what I make music with. I said, ‘Fruity Loops,’ and he was like, ‘I only work with people who use Pro Tools.
While Sarz doesn’t explicitly name the artist whose demands cost him a job, he says that he is “not relevant anymore”.
Elsewhere in the conversation, Sarz – who has collaborated with the likes of Skepta, WizKid, Skrillex and Gunna to date – discusses why producer tags on tracks are more important than ever, which Amapiano sound he thinks is “genius, and how a software mishap early in his career made him the producer he is today.

To listen to all the latest episodes of the My Forever Studio podcast, head to MusicTech.
The post “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 appeared first on MusicTech.

Navigating the Music Streaming Landscape: New Challenges for ArtistsIn this oversaturated music market, artists face endless challenges in getting their music heard on platforms like Spotify. To overcome these hurdles, you first need to identify and understand them....
The post Navigating the Music Streaming Landscape: New Challenges for Artists appeared first on Hypebot.