Signing Stories: Alex LambertDate Signed: January 2026Label: Big Loud TexasType of Music: Soul-CountryManagement: Cabell Moskal, cabell@makewake.net; Blake Ferguson, blake@makewake.net; Dylan Wright, dylan@deeprootsmgmt.comBooking: Chris Burrus, chris.burrus@caa.com; Jacob Lapidus, jacob.lapidus@caa.comPublicity: Corey Brewer, corey@bigloud.com; Rachel Heatherly,rachel@bigloud.com - Big LoudA&R: Jon Randall, Sara KnabeWeb: alex-lambert.com

Getting signed isn’t always about making strategic moves. Sometimes, it’s a random twist of fate that makes the difference. For Alex Lambert, having a famous last name was key. He’d been releasing music independently when Miranda Lambert’s assistant stumbled across his song “Cryin’ In the Rain.” She sent it to the country superstar and inquired whether the two were related. “We could be cousins, because she’s from Lindale, TX,” muses the other Lambert, who grew up in Fort Worth. “All my family is from within 30 to 45 minutes of there.”

Regardless of their blood connection, the more famous Lambert loved what she heard. As one of the architects behind Big Loud Texas, a new imprint of Nashville-based Big Loud, she was on the hunt for promising acts. Both Lamberts and the rest of the label’s squad, including fellow artist and Big Loud Texas co-founder Jon Randall, decided to meet up. “I played them a couple songs, and we were off to the races,” tells the singer.

Big Loud was one of approximately 10 labels that courted the soul country performer. Industry attention began in ’22, when Lambert had a viral moment on TikTok. But Big Loud Texas stood out, in part, because other musicians run it. After a career in flipping houses, he’d gone to L.A. to pursue music and eventually began doing whatever his team wanted. “I wasn’t staying true to myself as an artist,” he confesses. “I got burned out.” Now living in Music City, he’s determined to pursue the sounds he loves.

Also, Chris Kappy, founder of his management team Make Wake Artists, stressed that Big Loud was the best choice imaginable. “It was just obvious,” Lambert recalls. “It didn’t feel like we were making a decision. It felt like it was made for us.”

Alex Lambert’s Big Loud Texas debut comes out this year. By way of selecting which songs to put on the record, he hung out and drank tequila with Randall and Miranda Lambert at her home studio. “They knew all my demos,” remarks the crooner. Their deep familiarity with his material reassured him that he’d found the right home. The post Signing Stories: Alex Lambert first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.

SEC is no longer a 'cop on the beat‘ on crypto, says US lawmakerRepresentative Stephen Lynch voiced concerns about the direction of the SEC under Donald Trump, citing dropped investigations and enforcement actions on crypto companies.

Wikipedia cracks down on the use of AI in article writingThe site, whose policies are subject to change, has struggled with the issue of AI-generated writing.

Seeing soundsGrowing up in Mexico and Texas, Mariano Salcedo ’25 couldn’t readily indulge his passion for creating music. “There are no bands in Mexican public schools,” he says. While some families could pay for instruments and lessons, others, like Salcedo’s, were less fortunate.“I’ve always loved music,” he continues. “I was a listener.” Salcedo, the Alex Rigopulos (1992) Fellow in Music Technology and Computation, earned an BS in Artificial Intelligence and Decision Making from MIT, where he explored signal processing in machine learning and how a classical understanding of signals can inform how we understand AI. Now he’s one of five master’s students in the Music Technology and Computation Graduate Program’s inaugural cohort. The program, directed by professor of the practice in music technology Eran Egozy ’93, MNG ’95, is a collaboration between the Music and Theater Arts Section in the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (SHASS), and the School of Engineering. It invites practitioners to study, discover, and develop new computational approaches to music. It also includes a speaker series that exposes students and the broader MIT community to music industry professionals, artists, technologists, and other researchers.Rigopulos ’92, SM ’94 is a video game designer, musician, and former CEO of Harmonix Music Systems, a company he co-founded with Egozy in 1995. Harmonix is now a part of Epic Games, where Rigopulos is the director of game development music.“MIT is where I was first able to pursue my passion for music technology decades ago, and that experience was the springboard for a long and fulfilling career,” says Rigopulos. “So, when MIT launched an advanced degree program in music technology, I was thrilled to fund a fellowship to help propel this exciting new program.”Salcedo’s research focuses on neural cellular automata (NCA), which merges classical cellular automata with machine learning techniques to grow images that can regenerate. When paired with a stimulus like music, these images can “show” sounds in action.“This approach enables anyone to create music-driven visuals while leveraging the expressive and sometimes unpredictable dynamics of self-organized systems,” Salcedo says. Through the web interface Salcedo designed, users can adjust the relationship between the music’s energy and the NCA system to create unique visual performances using any music audio stream.“I want the visuals to complement and elevate the listening experience,” he says.Egozy is enthusiastic about Salcedo’s work and his commitment to further exploring its possibilities. “He is a beautiful example of a multidisciplinary researcher who thinks deeply about how to best use technology to enhance and expand human creativity,” he says.Salcedo has been selected to deliver the student address at the 2026 Advanced Degree Ceremony for SHASS. “It’s an honor, and it’s daunting,” he says. “It feels like a huge responsibility,” though one he’s eager to embrace. His selection also pleases Egozy. “I am super excited that Marino was chosen to deliver this year’s keynote,” he enthuses. Changing gearsSalcedo began his MIT journey as a mechanical engineering (MechE) student, applying to MIT through the Questbridge program. “I heard if you like engineering and science that attending MIT would be a great choice,” he recalls. “Nerds are welcomed and embraced.” While he dutifully worked toward completing his MechE curriculum, music and technology came calling after a chance encounter with a large language model (LLM).“I was introduced to an LLM chatbot and was blown away,” he recalls. “This was something that was speaking to me. I was both awed and frightened.” After his encounter with the chatbot, Salcedo switched his major from mechanical engineering to artificial intelligence and decision-making.“I basically started over, after being two-thirds of the way through the MechE curriculum,” he says. He learned about the possibilities available with AI but also confronted some of the challenges bedeviling researchers and developers, including its potential power, ensuring its responsible use, human bias, limited access for people from underrepresented groups, and a lack of diversity among developers. He decided he might be able to change that picture.“I thought, one more person in the field could make a difference,” he says. While completing his undergraduate studies, Salcedo’s love of music resurfaced. “I began DJing at MIT and was hooked,” he says. While he hadn’t learned to play a traditional instrument, he discovered he could create engaging soundscapes with technology. “I bought a digital audio work station to help me make music,” he continues.Egozy and Salcedo met in 2024, while Salcedo completed an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program rotation as a game developer in Egozy’s lab. “He was incredibly curious and has grown tremendously over a very short time period,” Egozy says. Egozy became an informal, although important, mentor to Salcedo. “He brings great energy and thoughtfulness to his work, and to supporting others in the [music technology and computation graduate] program,” Egozy notes.Salcedo also took a class with Egozy, 21M.385/21M.585/6.4450 (Interactive Music Systems), which further fed his appetite for the creativity he craved while also allowing him to indulge his fascination with music’s possibilities. By taking advantage of courses in the SHASS curriculum, he further developed his understanding of music theory and related technologies. “I took a class with professor Leslie Tilley, 21M.240 (Critically Thinking in Music), which helped establish a valuable framework for understanding music making,” he says, “while a class like 6.3000 (Signal Processing) helped me connect intuition with science.” Working across disciplinesWhile Salcedo is passionate about his music and his research, he’s also invested in building relationships with his fellow students. He’s a member of the fraternity Sigma Nu, where he says he “found a home and community.” He also took a MISTI trip to Chile in summer 2023, where he conducted music technology research. Salcedo praises the culture of camaraderie at MIT and is grateful for its influence on his work as a scholar. “MIT has taught me how to learn,” he says.Professors encouraged him to present his research and findings. He presented his work — Artificial Dancing Intelligence: Neural Cellular Automata for Visual Performance of Music — at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference in Singapore in January 2026. Salcedo believes his research can potentially move beyond music visualization. “What if we could improve the ways we model self-organized systems?” he asks. “That is, systems like multicellular organisms, flocks of birds, or societies that interact locally but exhibit interesting behaviors.” Any system, Salcedo says, where the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Developing the technology used to design his application can potentially help answer important ethical questions regarding AI’s continued expansion and growth. The path to his work’s development is both daunting and lonely, but those challenges feed his work ethic. “It’s intimidating to pursue this path when the academy is currently focused on LLMs,” he says. “But it’s also important to explain and explore the base technology before digging into more nuanced work, which can help audiences understand it better.” Knowing that he has the support of his professors helps Salcedo maintain excitement for his ideas. “They only ask that we ground our interests in research,” he says. His investigations are impacting his work as a musician. “My music has gotten more interesting because of the classes I’m taking,” he says. He’s also interested in understanding whose music the academy and the world hears, exploring biases toward Western music in the canon and exploring how to reduce biases related to which kinds of music are valued.“The work we do as technologists is far less subjective than we’re led to believe,” he believes.Salcedo is especially grateful for the support he’s received during his time at MIT. “Program faculty encourage a variety of pursuits,” he says, “and ask us to advance our individual aims, rather than focusing on theirs.” During his time in the graduate program, he notes with enthusiasm how often he’s been challenged to pursue his ideas. Ultimately, Salcedo wants people to experience the joy he feels working at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. Music and technology impact nearly everyone. Inviting audiences into his laboratory as participants in the creative and research processes offers the same kind of satisfaction he gets from crafting a great beat or solving for a thorny technical challenge. Helping audiences understand his work’s value fuels his drive to succeed.“I want users to feel movement and explore sounds and their impact more fully,” he says.

Looking at a bike built for the apocalypseSo-called bug out cars are a rather silly venture that serve little purpose more than snagging your jumper. The odds of a car working well through a nuclear winter are rather minimal. But what about a bicycle? On paper it’s a better choice, with extreme efficiency, reliability, and runs off whatever sustenance you can find in the barren landscape of a collapsed society. But [Seth] over at Berm Peak proved an apocalypse bike is at least as silly as a bug out car.
While a utilitarian bike fit for a cross-country trek across a nuclear wasteland can certainly be a reasonable venture, this particular bicycle is not that. This three wheeled monstrosity of a bicycle (is it still a bicycle if it has three wheels?) was built by [TOMO] for the Bespoked bike show’s apocalypse buildoff. It placed second among a number of strange bikes with features ranging from pedal driven circular saws to beer keg grills. But this particular example of apocalypse bike is easily the strangest example of the lot.

The features on this custom build are rather extensive, but the star of the show is the trailing link two wheel drive rear end. The third wheel was thrown on last minute with a random shock providing some measure of compliance to the rather unwieldy system. But while adding unnecessary complexity, the third wheel does offer the benefit of bringing along a number of spare parts on the last bikepacking trip of a lifetime. Moreover, it can be easily removed to get something resembling bicycle.
The aforementioned front of the bike while being an actual bike, is likewise a rather strange build. It’s best described as a fat-tired long nosed tall cargo bike. The removable cargo rack is quite effective in storing heavy loads by keeping the center of gravity near or below the axles, it can remain rideable with quite heavy loads. But, if ground clearance is needed, then simply remove the cargo rack, and the bike becomes a bike capable of navigating the nuclear wasteland it was made for.
While this is a silly and questionable bike, it’s certainly not the first strange bike we have seen.

Wide Blue Sound releases Tracer, a free beat-synced oscilloscope plugin
Wide Blue Sound has released Tracer, a beat-synced oscilloscope plugin that is free for a limited time. After the promo period, it will cost $39. There is no clear information about when the free offer ends, so if this sounds interesting, download it as soon as you can. To get it, you can simply enter [...]
View post: Wide Blue Sound releases Tracer, a free beat-synced oscilloscope plugin

Kreativ Sound Daft PlastiCZ Sounds — 102 Free Presets for reFX PlastiCZ (Legacy Release)Daft PlastiCZ Sounds is a collection of 102 original presets created for the reFX PlastiCZ synthesizer. This is a legacy release from Kreativ Sound — shared for archival, creative exploration, and inspiration. While PlastiCZ has been discontinued, the sounds still carry a distinct digital character — raw, synthetic, and slightly unpredictable. What's Inside – 102 handcrafted presets – Digital leads and synthetic tones – Experimental textures and sequences – Early Kreativ Sound design work. Sound Character – Raw digital timbres – Slightly unstable / lo-fi textures – Classic early VST aesthetic – Imperfect, exploratory sound design. Important. reFX PlastiCZ is a discontinued synthesizer. This soundset is provided: – for archival use – for experimentation – as a free creative resource. No updates or support are planned. Free Download. https://kreativ.gumroad.com/l/daft-free-plasticz-presets Read More

ASMR Choir from SRM Sounds Captured at the main live room at the composer’s Studio Richter Mahr facility, the collection includes four separate instruments that focus on close-miked, ‘tiny’ sounds.

Primary Wave makes strategic investment in Vietnam’s POPS Music – with plans to ramp up catalog deals in Southeast AsiaPOPS claims to be 'home to the largest catalog of Vietnamese and Indonesian music'
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Get Bloom Ensemble Strings Lite for under $1 at Plugin Boutique and claim a FREE gift
You can use the coupon code amacam8 to drop the price of Excite Audio’s Bloom Ensemble Strings Lite to under $1 at Plugin Boutique. Bloom Ensemble Strings Lite normally costs $29 and is already on sale for $19, but applying the code amacam8 at checkout brings it down to around $0.66 (the exact amount may [...]
View post: Get Bloom Ensemble Strings Lite for under $1 at Plugin Boutique and claim a FREE gift

Dynamic Range Day 2026 Friday 27 March will mark Dynamic Range Day 2026, the annual day of online activity that was started in 2010 by mastering engineer Ian Shepherd.

Your ears, your mix: Personalised Dolby Atmos headphone monitoring lands on mobileSonarworks has teamed up with Dolby to launch SoundID Tools, a free mobile app that allows you to generate Dolby Atmos personalisation profiles for headphone monitoring.
Available now on iOS and Android, SoundID Tools brings a surprisingly advanced piece of studio tech into your pocket. Using your phone’s camera to scan your head and ears, the app captures your unique physical characteristics and applies Dolby’s personalisation technology to generate a Dolby Headphone Personalisation profile – a calibration file tailored to how you perceive spatial audio.

READ MORE: A full Dolby Atmos set up for £169: Meet Majority’s new flagship Bowfell surround sound systems and soundbars

That distinction is key. Immersive audio isn’t just about speaker placement or binaural rendering. It’s shaped by the listener’s anatomy.
As David Gould, Senior Director of Content Creation and Distribution at Dolby Laboratories puts it, “Every creator’s physical characteristics are unique, which affects how they experience immersive audio over headphones. By combining Dolby’s technology with Sonarworks’ calibration expertise, the app enables more accurate Dolby Atmos monitoring.”
The process itself is designed to be frictionless. After a quick scan, the app generates a profile in minutes, ready to be loaded into the Dolby Atmos Renderer standalone app or used within supported DAWs via native Dolby Atmos rendering. No additional hardware is required beyond your phone and a pair of headphones.
Once applied, the improvements land where they matter most. Direction, distance, and height in a headphone mix become more accurately perceived, giving you greater confidence that your spatial decisions will translate. In practical terms, that means fewer surprises when checking your immersive mixes across different playback systems.
Credit: Sonarworks
The app’s promise is simple but ambitious: create a monitoring baseline that travels with you. Whether working in a professional studio or a makeshift mobile setup, the personalised profile aims to deliver consistent spatial accuracy, tonal balance, and mix confidence. No two creators hear a soundstage the same way, and SoundID Tools is built around correcting for exactly that.
For Sonarworks – whose SoundID Reference calibration software is used in over 300,000 studios worldwide – the collaboration marks a natural step into immersive workflows.
“At Sonarworks, our mission has always been to help creators hear their mixes accurately and with confidence, no matter where they work,” says Sonarworks CPO and co-founder Martins Popelis. “We are thrilled to partner with Dolby to help Dolby Atmos creators make great-sounding immersive mixes on headphones – and to deliver more value to the broad community of users who rely on SoundID Reference calibration for accuracy.”
With SoundID Tools free to download and Dolby Atmos profile creation available at no cost, personalised immersive monitoring is no longer a high-end studio luxury.
Learn more at Sonarworks.
The post Your ears, your mix: Personalised Dolby Atmos headphone monitoring lands on mobile appeared first on MusicTech.

Novation’s Launch Control 3 is a go-anywhere MIDI controller for almost every producer£130, novationmusic.com
Following the release of the Launch Control XL3 in 2025, Novation has redesigned its smaller sibling and put many of the concepts I love about the XL into a more compact form factor.
Launch Control 3 has been fully redesigned, dropping the toy-like look and feel of its predecessor in favour of a much more sleek, minimal and —dare I say it— Native Instruments-style finish. It’s still incredibly portable, however, and designed to be carried anywhere, taking up minimal space even on the smallest desk or table.

READ MORE: “An important tool regardless of how you make music”: Novation Launch Control XL MK3 review

The hardware is lightweight yet well-built, with a partly rubberised underside ensuring it stays still on any flat surface. It powers and sends data over USB-C or, when used in standalone mode, is powered by any USB-C power supply. The rear panel has three 5-pin MIDI ports – one in, one out and one that doubles as a MIDI thru, meaning the controller can be used to link MIDI hardware through its circuitry without the need for a computer. Plus, handily, incoming USB MIDI data can be routed onwards to the MIDI thru port.
As with Novation’s other gear, you manage the Launch Control 3 via the dedicated Components app, which is also available in your web browser. The app provides access to the configuration of the controls and lets you upload and download templates for various instruments and your custom setups. This works well, and the web app option means plugging into any computer and logging in lets you make edits even when away from home.
Image: Press
Launch Control has two main modes: DAW and Custom. Within DAW mode, there are two separate modes: DAW Mixer for setting levels, panning and sends, and DAW Control for tweaking your DAW’s plugins and devices. The front panel has eight assignable buttons and 16 endless rotary encoders with multicoloured dimming LEDs to denote their various functions, and adjustable response curves. There’s also a small but adequate OLED display, Page and Track select buttons as well as mode select, Shift and Function buttons.
DAW integration is key to Launch Control, and it has direct support for most major DAWs, including Ableton Live, Logic Pro, Cubase and FL Studio, with additional support for Pro Tools, Reaper, Studio One and more via the Mackie HUI protocol. As is often the case, Ableton Live integration is the smoothest, with the controller being automatically recognised and selected. Installing the Cubase script makes the controller appear easily in that software too, while Logic Pro’s script triggered an auto-set up process on loading, and successfully mapped itself.
Once set up, the hardware controls map to various parameters in your software. These vary by DAW, but essentially, in Mixer mode, the encoders will change fader levels, send levels and panning, and in DAW Control mode, they are mapped to devices or channel EQs and the like. Buttons control track solo, record arm and mute, depending on how you want them to behave. Navigating around tracks is easy too, though there are no transport controls mapped as part of the standard presets that I could find.
Launch Control 3 and Cubase. Image: Press
Specific mappings change slightly with each DAW, and some (like Cubase) have detailed re-mapping tools actually available inside a project. While you initially need to read up a bit about which mappings do what, the chances are you’re probably using one DAW most of the time so the learning curve isn’t particularly steep or long-winded; things do become familiar quickly. The HUI protocol is a bit more basic, as ever, but it does work as advertised.
It’s also possible to remap controls on the hardware, a process that the Components system makes extremely accessible. This also ties in nicely with the hardware control functions, where you can dig into the MIDI parameters linked to any controller-message function of any gear and map it directly to the controller. This is incredibly useful for taking hands-on control of things that might well be buried inside many levels of menu on hardware.
Of course, this requires some setup and figuring out which MIDI controller messages are linked to what, but it’s eminently achievable for anyone with a moderate grasp of music technology. The Launch Control has seven custom mode presets, accessible via the buttons, which are pretty much essential if you’re using it in any kind of live situation, jumping between devices or combinations of setups without needing to go back into configuration screens. The ability to have presets that control software and hardware at the same time is also valuable for the people out there running a mix of studio and live rigs.
Image: Press
Novation throws in some software goodies with your purchase, which is a nice bonus. After registering the hardware, you get access to limited-version DAWs, Ableton Live Lite and Cubase SE, plus plugins Klevgrand’s Fosfat transient designer, Baby Audio’s Parallel Aggressor effect and Output Movement, an effect modulator. There aren’t any individual software instruments bundled, though the DAWs have some of their own.
Launch Control 3 is a fun and flexible little controller but it does trade some functionality for portability. Although the full-size MIDI ports are handy for incorporating external gear there are no control voltage outputs like you’d get on some of the smaller Arturia controllers. The XL3 is significantly larger and by definition, less portable, and while the smaller model does a fine job of fitting a lot of that functionality behind mode and shift buttons, I do miss the dedicated transport controls of the XL. You can program things like Play and Stop using Components, but separate physical buttons would be so useful.
Perhaps those two are just examples of the compromises required to achieve this ultra-portability, and they’re probably not deal-breakers for most creators. In terms of price, £130 is reasonable, but perhaps fractionally high — it’s £50 more for the XL version, and other compact controllers like the Akai MidiMix are cheaper, though older and less elegant. Fundamentally, this unit gives you control over a wide selection of DAW mixing and plugin parameters as well as letting you bring external gear into the fold as well. And it does all this while taking up about as much space as a paperback, which is pretty impressive.
Image: Press
Key features

MIDI controller
19 endless rotary encoders with dimming LED lights
8 assignable buttons
Track navigation and page / mode / function buttons
USB-C power and data
5-pin MIDI in, out and thru
Monochrome OLED display
Support for leading DAWs and Mackie HUI protocol

The post Novation’s Launch Control 3 is a go-anywhere MIDI controller for almost every producer appeared first on MusicTech.

The AI skills gap is here, says AI company, and power users are pulling aheadAnthropic finds AI isn’t replacing jobs yet, but early data shows growing inequality as experienced users gain an edge, raising concerns about future displacement and workforce divides.

Warmth.dev Reel Deal Magnetic Tape SimulationReel Deal - Magnetic Tape Simulation Plugin Add authentic analog tape warmth to your digital recordings. What It Does Reel Deal simulates the sound of vintage reel-to-reel tape machines. It adds warmth, saturation, and subtle character that makes digital recordings sound more natural and cohesive. This effect is based on an advanced, physical simulation of magnetic tape properties, as a result of our original research. Features Tape saturation with adjustable drive and character. Variable tape speeds (3.75 - 15 ips) for different tones. Input and output gain controls. VST3 + CLAP + AU formats. macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon), Windows, Linux. Sound 15 ips: Bright and clean, minimal coloration. 7.5 ips: Classic warm tape sound. 3.75 ips: Dark and lo-fi. Lower speeds sound darker. Higher speeds are brighter. Stacks with other Warmth plugins Reel Deal pairs well with other plugins in our lineup: Run it with Pale Horse Transparent Overdrive for tape-saturated drive tones. Use it with Keys for instant lo-fi piano. Combine with Tape Wobble for full tape sound. From Warmth - warmth.dev Read More