“When I heard Antenna, I was finally convinced of synthesizer music,” says Former Kraftwerk drummer Wolfgang FlürFormer Kraftwerk drummer Wolfgang Flür has recalled his time with the band in a new interview with Uncut, explaining how, even as a member of one of the world’s most iconic electronic music acts, he took his time to come around to the sound of the synthesizer, at first.
Flür joined the German electronic music pioneers in 1973, and played with them for 15 years until 1987. He appeared on several albums, including 1974’s Autobahn and 1975’s Radio-Activity.

READ MORE: Grammy’s 2025: Dan Nigro is awarded Producer Of The Year after working on Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan albums

“I had already contributed to the electrification of the group with my self-made electro-pads board, so Radio-Activity was the second album in which I was able to participate as an electronic percussionist,” he says.
“When Ralf [Hütter] and Florian [Schneider] first invited me to the rehearsal rooms on Mintrop Street in the hot summer of 1973, I saw and heard a so-called synthesizer for the first time in my life. The sound was overwhelmingly rich for me and their experimental style was not convincing me at once.
“But when I heard Antenna on one occasion on Berger Allee, where some of us lived, I was finally convinced of synthesizer music. The piece had powerful strength and crunchy, rich sounds. It still touches me more today than Autobahn.”

Elsewhere, Flür cites the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles and King Crimson as pivotal in his musical development.
“Jimi Hendrix played a special role for me,” he says. “Not only did I really like his recordings, I also thought he was a beautiful person. The craziest thing comes now: he had a German girlfriend, Monika Danneman, and in the Düsseldorf townhouse where I had my apartment on the ground floor, an elderly lady named Danneman lived on the third floor. I found out it was Monika’s mother.
“One evening, I heard loud English-speaking people in the stairwell, ran to my door and peeped through the peephole. It was Jimi Hendrix himself, with Monika. He had a little luggage and his guitar case with him. I didn’t dare run out and ask him for an autograph!”
The post “When I heard Antenna, I was finally convinced of synthesizer music,” says Former Kraftwerk drummer Wolfgang Flür appeared first on MusicTech.

Steinberg Backbone Drum Designer is FREE With Any Purchase on Plugin Boutique
Plugin Boutique offers Steinberg’s Backbone drum designer (normally €149) for free with any purchase in February 2025.  Backbone is a 64-bit-only release for macOS (VST3, AU, AAX) and Windows (VST3, AAX).  The plugin is free with any paid purchase on Plugin Boutique, but free products don’t count for the giveaway. The promo ends on March [...]
View post: Steinberg Backbone Drum Designer is FREE With Any Purchase on Plugin Boutique

Native Instruments Kontakt 8: A leap forward or a stumble sideways?£269 / $299 / € 299
Upgrade price £89 / $99 / €99
native-instruments.com
As one of music production’s most ubiquitous and long-running pieces of software, few were expecting surprises from the eighth iteration of Native Instruments’ Kontakt, but that’s just what they got.
In a series of firsts, the acclaimed sample player has introduced new ways of handling MIDI, performing with samples, and synthesising sounds. Together with a modernised user interface, it would seem that a new vision for Kontakt is emerging. No longer is this just a creative facilitator, it’s now also an idea generator.

READ MORE: Why Komplete 15 is Native Instruments’ most creative sound library ever

The first major addition to Kontakt is Tools. Billed as a rapid-fire solution to writer’s block, Tools is a set of creative MIDI effects, currently with two offerings – Chords and Phrases. Chords will trigger stacked harmonies from just a single root note, while Phrases will do the same but for melodic passages.
In essence, these are the same MIDI transformation functions you might already use in your DAW but baked into Komplete. By itself this is not that exciting, but what sets Tools apart is just how fast and straightforward it makes the process – not to mention the massive library of preset MIDI patterns it draws from. Phrases arrives with 181 melody presets, while Chords gets 130 harmonic progressions. For users trying to kick off an idea, or overcome a creative roadblock, this is a significant store of musical material to build upon.

Tools is instrument-agnostic and so can be used on any sample instrument loaded in Kontakt. Annoyingly, however, when auditioning Tools presets you’ll hear Kontakt’s new Piano Uno instrument, and not the sound of the sample instrument you currently have loaded. This can lead to a frustrating back-and-forth, as patterns and chords you thought were on point may actually sound naff when played with your instrument of choice.
With the ability to randomise parts, to invert the voicing and change the starting position of melodic passages, to add nuanced humanisation functions to chords, and to drag all of this out as MIDI regions for further editing, there’s enough depth here to make Chords and Phrases genuinely useful in the right context. Can Tools go toe-to-toe with the generative MIDI magic of something like Plugin Boutique’s Scalar 2? No, but there’s still plenty to like.
Chords Tool. Image: MusicTech
Leap is the next newcomer to Kontakt. A performance-focused sampler, it turns the white notes on your keyboard into triggers that fire off one-shot samples and tempo-synced loops. There are 12 Leap-specific expansion packs that ship with the full version of Kontakt, but you can also bring in samples from any Maschine expansion packs you own, or drag in audio files from your computer.
Leap lends itself to improvisational writing, with a highly intuitive interface that largely stays out of your way if you just want to jam through the 16 available sample slots without too much thought. The black notes of the keyboard are given over to performance effects. It’s simple to slap on pitch and time shifts, stutter, granulation, and other sonic modifications without breaking your stride.
For those who do want to dive deeper, Leap offers a surprisingly extensive set of sample editing tools and this adds real scope for building up custom kits that pull samples from multiple sources. Similarly, most performance effects come with additional parameters for fine-tuning how they’re executed – the exceptions are the pitch and tempo effects, which are locked to an octave, and halftime or double time, respectively.
Leap UI. Image: MusicTech
Unfortunately, all performance effects are applied to the entire track, and there is no ability to assign performance effects to individual samples. Leap is also limited to a stereo output, so if you want to record out multiple stems for further processing and mixing, then no dice. These are shortcomings that feel minor at first but grow the longer you live with them. As a performance-focused sampling platform it’s fun and genuinely useful for starting ideas. But as a serious creative workhorse, Leap stumbles.
That said, there is a strong foundation here, and, much the same as Tools, it significantly extends Kontakt’s creative capabilities and has the potential to grow into a real powerhouse.
Speaking of power and potential, Kontakt has supercharged its existing wavetable synthesis engine to now include FM, and phase and ring modulation. The first instrument to take advantage of all this is Conflux, an abundantly capable hybrid that pairs sampling with synthesis and throws in a welcome range of modulation options and audio effects. In use, it excels at evolving textures, big swamping bass swells, and cinematic sound design.
Leap Sample Edit Page. Image: MusicTech
Alongside these flashy additions, there are a number of bread-and-butter improvements across the board – including a new user interface, and expanded preset search, and audition functions. For those who’ve built an established workflow around Kontakt, an interface refresh can spell major disruptions or major benefits. Luckily, Kontakt 8’s new lick of paint mostly falls into the latter category.
The most notable improvement is the new Side Panel, which gives an overview of the instrument rack, quick access for loading and unloading libraries or Tools, and, best of all, the ability to search through and demo presets from any instrument in your library. In Kontakt 7 this required flicking into Library View, so being able to manage all this without leaving the Performance View is a small yet vastly-appreciated advancement.
On the other hand, we seem to have lost the ability to hide an instrument’s user interface. If you stack up multiple libraries into a combined instrument, you’re forced to scroll through all the pretty Performance View pictures in order to find the one setting you want to tweak. This is a frustrating, and time-consuming oversight, and hopefully one that Native Instruments will address in future updates.
New Side Panel. Image: MusicTech
You can still switch things back to Classic View, so, with a bit of leg work, it’s possible to get the best of both worlds.
All in all, this is the most significant update to Kontakt in quite some time. For users of the free Kontakt Player, the addition of Tools and Leap – albeit with only one expansion library – is the very definition of added value. However, the full version, at £269 for new users, hits a price point that’s hard to recommend as a standalone purchase. The obvious and intended upsell is Komplete 15 Standard. It comes with Kontakt 8 bundled in (as do higher Komplete tiers), plus 95-plus excellent sample instruments for £538, or less if you catch it on sale.
There was a time when Kontakt felt completely indispensable for anyone making music with sample instruments. This is no longer the case. EastWest’s OPUS player offers an excellent workflow for orchestral scoring, UVI’s Falcon 3 has serious synthesis capabilities alongside a streamlined sampling workflow, while the spectral oscillator in Steinberg’s HALion 7 turns samples into easy fodder for sound designers.
Hiding Performance UI in Classic View. Image: MusicTech
Ultimately, the biggest drawcard for Kontakt 8 is the same as always: access to the richest ecosystem for samples on the market. The ease with which it hosts third-party instruments remains industry-leading and, when paired with Komplete, it becomes a truly formidable musical force.
Tools, Leap, and the new wavetable engine are certainly all intriguing steps forward, showing a desire and potential to move Kontakt beyond its traditional supporting role In their current form though, these new creative features are simply ‘nice to have’ rather than being ‘must-haves’.

Key features

Standalone player and VST3 / AU / AAX plugin
Tools and Leap included in both free and full version
New hybrid wavetable instrument, Conflux, included in full version
12 Leap expansion libraries included in full version
Factory Library includes an expansive set of band, orchestral, and electronic instruments
Refreshed interface
Support for third-party developers
Rich ecosystem when integrated with Komplete

The post Native Instruments Kontakt 8: A leap forward or a stumble sideways? appeared first on MusicTech.

PSPaudioware launch PSP Wobbler PSP Wobbler faithfully recreates the Frequency Translator, a handmade experimental device built by Keith Adkins which created the unique modulation effect heard on ‘Time’ from Pink Floyd’s ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’.

Grammy’s 2025: Dan Nigro is awarded Producer Of The Year after working on Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan albumsAmerican producer Daniel Nigro has been crowned Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical at the 67th Grammy Awards. The Grammy 2025 winner notably worked on recent records by Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo, which are also nominated for other categories in the ceremony.
READ MORE: CARRTOONS: “My most successful records were made using a Scarlett interface before I could afford anything else”
In the Producer Of The Year category, Nigro beats fellow producers Alissia, Mustard, Dernst “D’Mile” Emile II and Ian Fitchuk. His work on Chappel Roan’s 2023 album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess and on Rodrigo’s 2024 Guts and Guts (Spilled) likely put him ahead of other nominees. The former artist is up for six Grammys in 2025, and the latter is up for one Grammy (but took home a cool three Grammys in 2022).
This isn’t the first win Nigro has picked up at the Grammys — he won in the 2022 Best Pop Vocal Album category for his work as producer and engineer on Rodrigo’s album Sour. 
In his acceptance speech at the 2025 Grammys, Nigro said: “I’d like to thank my wife, Emily; my daughter, Saoirse; my manager, Ian; Island Records; Interscope; Chappell Roan; Olivia Rodrigo; Dana Meyerson; Sony; Thomas Scout; Katie Nick; [and] lastly, my friend Justin Raisen. We grew up together and we started hanging out when we were five years old. I got him into [the] guitar. He got me into [music] production. We’re both here tonight, I think, because of each other.”
Watch his acceptance speech below.

Other producers taking home Grammy awards this evening include French dance duo Justice for Best Dance/Electronic Recording; Elaine Martone for Producer Of The Year, Classical; Peter Gabriel for Best Immersive Audio Album; Hans Zimmer for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media thanks to his work on Dune: Part Two. 
More Grammy-winning producers and engineers will be announced as the ceremony unfolds.
 Read more music production news. 
The post Grammy’s 2025: Dan Nigro is awarded Producer Of The Year after working on Olivia Rodrigo and Chappell Roan albums appeared first on MusicTech.

Trump's trade war will send BTC price 'violently higher' — analyst"This is undoubtedly my highest conviction macro trade for the year," Bitwise executive and analyst Jeff Park wrote on social media.

Is Fire Conductive Enough To Power a Lamp?Is fire conductive? As ridiculous that may sound at first glance, from a physics perspective the rapid oxidation process we call ‘fire’ produces a lot of substances that can reduce the electrical insulating (dielectric) properties of air. Is this change enough to allow for significant current to pass? To test this, [The Action Lab] on YouTube ran some experiments after being called out on this apparent fact in the comments to an earlier video.
Ultimately what you need to make ‘fire’ conductive is to have an appreciable amount of plasma to reduce the dielectric constant, which means that you cannot just use any rapid oxidation process. In the demonstration with lights and what appears to be a (relatively clean-burning) butane torch, the current conducted is not enough to light up an incandescent or LED light bulb, but can light up a 5 mm LED. When using his arm as a de-facto sensor, it does not conduct enough current to be noticeable.
The more interesting experiment here demonstrates the difference in dielectric breakdown of air at different temperatures. As the dielectric constant for hot air is much lower than for room temperature air, even a clean burning torch is enough to register on a multimeter. Ultimately this seems to be the biggest hazard with fire around exposed (HV) electrical systems, as the ionic density of most types of fire just isn’t high enough.
To reliably strike a conductive plasma arc, you’d need something like explosive (copper) wire and a few thousand joules to pump through it.

Strymon Big Sky MX Plug into BigSky and instantly lift your sound into the stratosphere. The world below you fades into the distance, and you're elevated into a glow of lush, glorious, radiant reverbs. ... Read More

zazz Dynamic Mid SideUsing four frequency bands allows control over the correlated and uncorrelated parts of the signal. E.g. for reducing reverb, or noise-like elements in the recordings. It can be used for auto-balancing... Read More

Dub: the copy trading app that has teens talkingSocial media changed everything from news consumption to shopping. Now, Dub thinks it can do the same for investing through an influencer-driven marketplace where users can follow the trades of top investors with a few taps. Think of it as TikTok meets Wall Street. Founded by 23-year-old Steven Wang — a Harvard drop-out who began […]
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Giving a Proprietary Power Supply the BootYou’ve probably noticed that everywhere you go — the doctor’s office, hotels, or retail shops, there are tiny PCs everywhere. These small PCs often show up on the surplus market for a very good price, but they aren’t quite full-blown PCs. They usually have little option for expansion and are made to be cheap and small. That means many of them have custom and anemic power supplies. We aren’t sure if [bm_00] needed a regular power supply to handle a graphics card or if the original power supply died, but either way, the HP small-form-factor box needed a new power supply. It took some clever work to be able to use a normal power supply in the little box.
At first, we thought this wouldn’t be much of a story. The motherboard surely took all the regular pins, so it would just be a matter of making an adapter, right? Apparently not. The computers run totally on 12V and the motherboard handles things like turning the computer on and off. The computer also was trying to run the power supply’s fan which needed some work arounds.

Granted, you could just wire the power supply to be on all the time, but it is nice to be able to turn everything off. The plan was to use the always-on 5V standby rail to drive a pair of relays. One relay senses the computer’s on/off switch and triggers the ATX power supply to turn on.
The problem is the computer wants to draw a little 12V power all the time. So, in an odd turn of events, a small boost converter changes the 5V standby voltage to enough current to drive the PC in the “off” mode.  When the power supply’s 5V rails turn on, they throw the other relay to disconnect the boost converter and supply the real 12V supply.
There’s only one problem with that. The motherboard sees a power glitch when the switch occurs. So, there’s a hefty capacitor to smooth out the transient. Well, there’s another problem. In some cases, though, the boost converter couldn’t provide enough power for the motherboard before the boot process.
Honestly, we think we would just put a switch or a power strip in the supply’s AC cord and have been done with it. But we admire the tenacity and ingenuity.
Then again, you could just put the PC in the power supply. Around here, old power supplies usually get benched.

Warm Audio introduce five-year warranty Warm Audio have announced the introduction of a new five-year warranty across their entire product line-up.

On… Lola Young, M-UK-GA!, and communing.MBW founder Tim Ingham's latest Review commentary
Source

Gallery: Glassnote welcomes in 2025 at HMV Oxford StreetEvent at HMV's historic 363 Oxford Street store was attended by quite the who's who of the UK music biz
Source

X expands lawsuit over advertiser ‘boycott’ to include Lego, Nestlé, Pinterest, and othersX is now suing more advertisers in an antitrust lawsuit focusing on what the company’s CEO Linda Yaccarino has claimed is a “systematic illegal boycott.” The company formerly known as Twitter first filed the lawsuit against the World Federation of Advertisers and its brand safety initiative known as the Global Alliance of Responsible Media in […]
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