Universal Music Group generated 51% of its 2023 recorded music revenues in North America… and 8 other things we learned from its new annual reportMBW takes a deep dive through Universal's latest in-depth financial report
Source

Omnisphere is “one of the most inspiring instruments,” says TouristTourist has commended the “inspiring” presets found on Spectrasonics’ Omnisphere plugin synth, hailing it as a solid “starting point for sounds”.

READ MORE: Mike Dean leaks a glimpse of Moog’s Muse, a forthcoming mystery synth

The British producer and Grammy-winning songwriter – real name William Edward Phillips – hailed Omnisphere in the latest episode of My Forever Studio. It’s a podcast on which artists, producers and musicians dream up a fantasy studio setup, picking a limited number of items.
In this episode, the award-winning plugin (Version 2.8 was launched in 2021) is named by Tourist as a key starting point when starting a new project. He also emphasises his desire to find instruments that “inspire him”.
“It’s one of the most inspiring instruments,” Tourist says of the plugin. “You open it and it’s like, you know, it’s such a good starting point for sounds.”
He also addresses the stigma surrounding the use of presets in music production, emphasising the importance of embracing inspiration in any form. He asserts, “If you find inspiration in a preset, don’t in any way judge yourself for thinking like that. You’re immediately pissing on your own fire of inspiration.”
“It’s so important that that inspiration is what carries you through the rest of the record because there’s nothing wrong with it, you know? That’s me embracing using presets. So much of my music is just Omnisphere presets, but that’s fine.”

At another point in the episode, Tourist discusses the preciousness around collecting treasured gear that doesn’t end up being used by its owners. He says, “Your studio is not a museum. You don’t want to feel intimidated by it. You want to feel like you can revel in its creativity. I’m not like ‘This one here…’ Like a fucking wine cellar.”
“The emotional value of something sometimes is what you create with it. To some extent, these things are tools and the tools allow you to make magic, and the magic is what you need to get from these tools.”
Listen to the episode below:

My Forever Studio invites guests, in the form of producers, musicians, songwriters and studio engineers, to dream up a fantasy studio they’ll make music in forever. This studio can be anywhere in the world, but there is a catch – each guest is only allowed to pick six studio items. Before you ask, no, these cannot be plugin bundles. *sounds the ‘no bundles’ klaxon*
Find all episodes of My Forever Studio via MusicTech.
The post Omnisphere is “one of the most inspiring instruments,” says Tourist appeared first on MusicTech.

Plugin Boutique is offering its “lowest prices ever” on a range of Universal Audio UAD pluginsThere’s an age-old adage: you can never have too many plugins. Okay, that isn’t a thing, but it’s true, right? Until the end of this month (30 April), you can grab a number of killer savings on Universal Audio UAD plugins over at Plugin Boutique.
Universal Audio’s UAD plugins are some of the best in the biz, and you pick up a select number for as little as $29 apiece until the end of the month.

READ MORE: Get Excite Audio’s VISION 4X Lite or Audified’s U78 Saturator totally free with any purchase at Plugin Boutique

Up for grabs for $29 each are a selection of effects – Pure Plate Reverb, Studio D Chorus, Oxide Tape Recorder, Brigade Chorus Pedal, and Waterfall Rotary Speaker – while there are a number of other products with up to 80 percent discount applied, too.
They include the Manley Tube Preamp, which is available for $74 at a 50 percent discount, Verve Analogue Machines for $99 at a 50 percent discount, PolyMAX Synth for $39 at a whopping 80 percent off, Waterfall B3 Organ with a cool 75 percent off, and Ravel Grand Piano for $39, again with a huge 80 percent knocked off its price tag.
Universal Audio UAD plugins usually come with pretty high price tags – reflective of their demand and standing among professional producers – so now’s your chance to grab one or two – or even the whole lot – while saving an awful lot of money.
As we say, these deals are available until 30 April (less than two weeks to go), so act fast if you want to treat your in-the-box studio setup to a cheeky little upgrade.
For more info, head to Plugin Boutique.
The post Plugin Boutique is offering its “lowest prices ever” on a range of Universal Audio UAD plugins appeared first on MusicTech.

MPG Awards: Discounted balcony tickets The MPG are kindly offering the Sound On Sound community a 40% discount on balcony tickets for the upcoming MPG Awards 2024.

My Forever Studio: Tourist wants antiques, not museum pieces“When I was 13 year old, my dream was a laptop and an audio interface, and nothing else”, says Tourist. Luckily, for the Grammy-winning producer and songwriter, he’s in the right place.
On the 66th episode of My Forever Studio, the podcast presented by MusicTech and Audient, British artist Tourist joins us to dream up his fantasy Forever Studio. Of course, he must adhere to the rules: only six musical items are allowed in his studio, beyond a computer, DAW and audio interface.
In the show, Tourist — real name Will Phillips — tells us about the one app he can’t live without, why he doesn’t agree with “sneery” synthesizers and collecting gear as relics, and the importance of not shying away from presets.

Tourist’s celebrating the upcoming launch of his fifth album, Memory Morning, which he says is “one of those albums that really took shape as I wrote it. I had absolutely no point of reference to start from, and that was equal parts liberating and daunting.”
“Often my music draws from specific life events but this album really lives in and was borne from my imagination. I wanted to write something that felt like it whisked you away, an album that felt like a ‘place’, its own world, somewhere you might find new corners with each listen.  It truly is the first album I’ve written that feels like the sum of all of my influences.”
In the past decade, Tourist’s blend of emotive, melancholy and synth-driven dance music — which he once coined “SDM – sad dance music” — has garnered a devoted fanbase and critical acclaim across the globe. In 2015, he was awarded a Grammy for Song Of The Year for co-writing Sam Smith’s Stay With Me, and has racked up millions of streams on tracks such as Run and We Stayed Up All Night. 

 
In the previous episode of My Forever Studio, Benn Jordan revealed the extremely budget rig he mixed and mastered his early music on, explained why less than half of all synth owners make music, and shared the only Forever Studio item he really couldn’t live without.
The My Forever Studio podcast sees artists, producers and engineers create their dream fantasy Forever Studio, wherever they want in the universe. However, there are strict rules in the Forever Studio. Our guests are permitted a limited number of items in their creative space, so they must choose carefully. There will be nostalgia. There will be anecdotes. There may be gags. But there will be no bundles!

Subscribe to My Forever Studio on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and check out all episodes so far via musictech.com

The post My Forever Studio: Tourist wants antiques, not museum pieces appeared first on MusicTech.

Lewitt’s Ray microphone tries to solve an age-old problem with recording vocals£299/$349, lewitt-audio.com
The fundamentals of studio microphone technology have remained relatively static over the years, with few major developments in recent decades — except for the now-common all-in-one USB microphone. Rarely does a manufacturer try to address an issue which is just sort of accepted as an inconvenient part of the recording process But that is what Lewitt has done with its new Ray microphone. So how is it different from other microphones?

READ MORE: AstroLab is one giant leap for Arturia — but will it really take off?

Ray looks like a conventional all-analogue studio condenser mic, connected to your interface by XLR and using phantom power. It ships with a shockmount and a magnetic pop filter that attaches neatly to the body and is small enough not to look unsightly should you be using the mic on camera. The build quality and finish are excellent, and it looks pretty cool too.
Ray’s unique innovation is what the company calls “autofocus for your voice”. Anyone who has used a microphone knows that your voice gets quieter and thinner the further away you are from it, and increasingly loud and boomy as you come up close. The way this has always been managed has been to regulate your physical distance, being careful not to go too close or too far away when speaking or singing. It’s so ingrained that you don’t really think about it – but what if there was another way?
Lewitt has come up with a system it calls AURA which, when activated, is able to dynamically adapt the microphone’s level and tonal qualities based on your distance from it. It all happens inside the mic and though the developers don’t explicitly reveal how, it uses some kind of infrared beam or sensor coupled with DSP to judge distance and then adjust level.
This is activated using a simple button on the mic — otherwise it just operates in regular, non-adjusting mode — and is something of a revelation. You can move back and forth by a couple of feet (obviously not really far because there are practical limits) and the level remains consistent. Producers would normally use some compression to achieve a similar if not identical result, though that can come with the issue of latency and the effect is also printed onto your take. And riding a gain fader during recording is not really practical.

With the dynamic feature on you quickly forget that you are not supposed to be shifting position since the audio level in your headphones doesn’t change – it’s surprisingly easy to get used to. When you get very close to the mic, male voices especially will exhibit more low end but the proximity effect isn’t evident and you do have to get really quite close to experience this anyway.
There’s a second feature that uses the AURA technology and that’s “mute by distance”, the other button on the mic body. Choose one of several pre-set distances and when you move further away the mic will mute itself. Again, you can approximate it using a software or hardware noise gate, but finding the right threshold setting can be fiddly.
The practical uses for this are pretty compelling. For singers it means you can step back between takes or verses, muting the mic and ensuring that bleed, background noise or off-mic chatter are not picked up, saving editing time later. For podcasters, it means you can swing the mic off to one side if it’s on a boom, or physically move back to temporarily mute the mic. This doesn’t mean that you’ll have to do no editing, mixing or processing after recording but it can cut down on the amount of work by letting people mute and unmute themselves in real time.
Whether you use these features or not, Ray delivers a clean and neutral-sounding signal via its one-inch gold-sputtered capsule with a cardioid pickup pattern that rejects sound from behind. There’s a very low self-noise level of 8dB and a sound pressure upper limit of 131 dBSPL so loud performances aren’t a problem. Favoured by engineers and producers working with artists including Justin Bieber and the Rolling Stones, Lewitt’s mics enjoy a good reputation and certainly here it’s well justified.

Is the AURA stuff enough to make Ray stand out in this price bracket? We think so.
It’s a stellar mic to begin with — if it wasn’t, no extra features could make up for that. But these are genuinely useful additions. While both the auto-gain and the auto-mute will be helpful for all users, we’d suggest that the gain will be particularly appreciated by singers, who tend to move to differing extents during a performance and whose vocals can naturally vary in volume. If you want to capture those variations you can of course just turn the gain feature off.
Small variations in volume are less of a problem for streamers or podcasters but many could still make use of the auto gain. For these people, being able to mute yourself while others speak for longer periods by just moving back slightly will also be a really useful thing to be able to do. While these are mostly possible to achieve in a more long-winded and arguably less effective format by using live mixing or plugins, here it’s super simple. Just a couple of button presses on the mic will do it.
The price, while reasonable for a high-performing studio mic, might count out more casual content creators. Otherwise, Ray is an easy recommendation for anyone recording vocals, be it singing, spoken word, podcast or voiceover. Being analogue, it’s going to have to be connected to an interface or mixer with phantom power so perhaps not one for the run-and-gun crowd, but Ray is an innovative solution to a problem so long established in the recording world that we had stopped noticing it was a problem.
Lewitt Ray key features

Cardioid condenser microphone
1-inch gold sputtered capsule
AURA technology for voice autofocus
Mute by distance feature
“Record-ready” sound
Supplied with shock mount and magnetic pop shield
8 dB self-noise
131 dBSPL sound pressure tolerance
Configurable distance mute settings
Works as regular mic with autofocus turned off

The post Lewitt’s Ray microphone tries to solve an age-old problem with recording vocals appeared first on MusicTech.

Battalion drum machine from Unfiltered Audio Battalion aims to combine the character of iconic drum synths with the programming flexibility and sampling features offered by modern drum machines. 

Your Livestream Strategy Sucks! K-Pop’s lessons on reaching a global audience Haven't had much success with live streaming lately or given up altogether? If you're going to learn from anyone, look at how live-streaming contributed to K-Pop artist's global success.....
The post Your Livestream Strategy Sucks! K-Pop’s lessons on reaching a global audience  appeared first on Hypebot.

Beginner’s guide to getting more YouTube Subscribers with Ads [Brian Hazard]Calling all music promo newbies! Here's a step-by-step breakdown of how to get more YouTube subscribers with ads. ....
The post Beginner’s guide to getting more YouTube Subscribers with Ads [Brian Hazard] appeared first on Hypebot.

Why must musicians get the short end of OpenAI’s Bad Business Model?Tech companies claim AI needs free access to copyrighted materials for proper and accurate training, leaving artists uncompensated for the use of their property and with more AI-created competition.....
The post Why must musicians get the short end of OpenAI’s Bad Business Model? appeared first on Hypebot.

“Your studio is not a museum”: Tourist says you shouldn’t be precious about treasured gearMusician and songwriter Tourist has discussed the act of collecting studio gear but not using it, making the statement, “Your studio is not a museum”.

READ MORE: Tourist: “Sampling is mind-blowing; it’s the biggest advancement in music technology since the early 80s”

The British electronic music producer and Grammy-winning songwriter discussed the topic during the latest episode of My Forever Studio, a podcast on which popular music makers tell listeners about a dream studio.
In this episode, Tourist talks about the preciousness people can have over gear, suggesting instead that it should be used, not gawked at. “This one was owned by David Bowie’s personal assistant,” he jokes. “If you like feeling important, then that’s great,” he says.
“Your studio is not a museum. You don’t want to feel intimidated by it. You want to feel like you can revel in its creativity. I’m not like ‘This one here…’. Like a fucking wine cellar.”
“The emotional value of something sometimes is what you create with it,” says Tourist – real name William Edward Phillips. “To some extent, these things are tools. The tools allow you to make magic, and the magic is what you need to get from these tools.”
Listen to the episode below:

Funnily enough, Phillips’ statement contrasts what The Flashbulb musician Benn Jordan said when he guested on the same podcast last week.
On that episode, which you can listen to Apple Podcasts, Jordan defends synth collectors who don’t regularly use their equipment to make music, saying, “There’s no shame in it at all”.
“The people who buy music gear and are keeping the companies afloat, I would say more than half of them are not really making music on it,” he says. “They’re just collecting it and playing with it.
“Even DAWs and software. They just buy the software, they play with the knobs, they listen to it for a second, and there’s no shame in it at all. Everybody pretends they’re making music, but there are a lot of people who just like collecting synths and collecting DAWs and learning. Because they’re not producing music that people are listening to, for some reason they’re not as validated. I think that’s nonsense because it is a hobby one way or another.”
The My Forever Studio podcast, created in partnership with Audient, sees guests in the form of musicians, producers, songwriters and studio engineers conjure up the image of a fantasy studio. This music-making space – and its contents – must be where they make music forever. The catch? Each guest must pick only six studio items, and that does not include plugin bundles. *sounds ‘no bundles’ klaxon*
Find all episodes of My Forever Studio on MusicTech.
The post “Your studio is not a museum”: Tourist says you shouldn’t be precious about treasured gear appeared first on MusicTech.

Denise Audio Releases Motion Filter Plugin With 43% OFF Intro Price
Today, Denise Audio launched the Motion Filter digital filter plugin at an introductory price of $39 – 43% off the list price of $69.  Motion Filter is a 64-bit only Windows and macOS release for VST, VST3, AU, and AAX. Denise Audio describes Motion Filter as a “state-of-the-art digital filter with two configurable motion modes to [...]
View post: Denise Audio Releases Motion Filter Plugin With 43% OFF Intro Price

How to bring the outside world into your beatsIf you’re tired of drudging through sample packs and presets for that perfect snare, fret not — there is an infinite library of noises just outside your studio to inspire you. And, with a small amount of editing and processing, those real-world sounds can become a unique snare, kick, or any other kind of drum hit.

READ MORE: Zoom’s H6essential puts clip-free recording in the palm of your hand

Adding field recordings to a track is a tried and tested production trick. Whether you want to create a drum hit from scratch or add some sounds on top of your favourite sample, its a fantastic way to make your rhythms stand out.
The whole process is surprisingly easy. Let’s walk through the essential steps.
Get Inspired by Field Recordings
Start by gathering some audio. There are no rules! Everything from a barking dog to water droplets can be mixed into your production. However, it can help to think critically about what kind of drum hit you want to make and what kind of real-world sound is best suited.
We’re going to create a custom snare hit, and our ingredients will be the sound of a branch snapping, a can being crushed, and a foot scuffing against concrete. The branch will give us a strong percussive transient; the can will add some mid-range body to our sound; and the foot scuff can approximate some white-noise sizzle.
Image: Hinterhaus Production / Getty Images
If you’re heading out to do some recording, Tascam’s Portacapture X6, or Zoom’s new H1essential, H4essential, and H6essential are strong options for capturing sounds on the fly. But don’t feel like you need expensive gear to get started; your smartphone, plus a recording app, is all you really need.
[products ids=”3F1QXNsVoq5A5PVo2jTv6x”]
Hit record on a few interesting sounds then head back to your computer to get stuck into the creative side of things.
Slice and Layer
First and foremost, a little clean-up. Take your field recordings and import them into your favourite DAW. For each sound, look for the transient in the waveform. You’ll want to cut the audio file just before the start of the transient and also after the tail of the sound.
Finding the transient
Essentially, you want to isolate the “hit” from any background noise, leaving you with a sample that is relatively short and snappy—perfect for playing as part of your kit.
If you recorded multiple takes of the same sound, like we did with our branch snaps, then repeat this editing process for some of the best takes; three to five will do. To finish, add a very small fade to the start and end of each sample.
If you’re in a hurry, the new XLN Life plugin can automate this entire process. With a convenient recording app for iOS and Android, the plugin seamlessly segments field recordings into drum hits and also comes with a fantastic beat generator.
[products ids=”3HDtLE631bil1vfFTupXth”]
On its own, our recording of a snapping branch didn’t have a lot of punch, so to add some weight we layered multiple different sounds on top of each other.

Our stack included five different sounds of a branch breaking, one crushed can, and one sound of a shoe scuffing on the concrete, resulting in something a bit fuller with a good amount of mids. When you’ve got something you like, bounce the sound out as a single file and import it back into your session, this will make it much easier to process and apply effects.
Dial in the EQ

There are plenty of ways to EQ your sound, so if you’re not sure where to begin, use a reference sample to help guide your decisions. An EQ plugin with an analyser can make it easy to see the frequency spread, and we used one to compare our recording with an off-the-shelf snare sample.
Snare hits have little to no bass frequencies below 100Hz, and have a consistent level of mid and high frequencies. With that in mind, we added a low-shelf cut to remove the bass frequencies.
Build Your Sound

With that groundwork out of the way, you can start having fun. We added a small amount of reverb to help our sound ring our, and then built up the texture by adding some distortion. This highlighted the crisp and crackling character we got from our can-crush and foot-scuff recordings, and helped the glue the whole sound together into one solid hit. Finally, we played with pitch shifting to nudge the sound into the sweet spot.
These effects can have a big impact on the final sound. If you’re out to make a hefty kick drum, then pitch shifting down and soaking it in reverb, for example, might produce something interesting. Use these effects and any others you want to spin out a collection of different samples.
Drop the Sample Into a Beat

You should now have some handcrafted hits that you can use to personalise your beat. Simply load the sound you’ve created into your favourite drum sequencer, sampler, or beat generator listen to the difference.
Find more music production techniques on MusicTech. 
The post How to bring the outside world into your beats appeared first on MusicTech.

“I almost didn’t want to finish it because I was having so much fun”: Jamie xx will release second album soon “if all things go to plan”Jamie xx has confirmed a new album is in the pipeline, and shared its first single, Baddy On The Floor. He’s also shared footage of him making the new single in his deliciously scenic London studio

READ MORE: “We’ve started making some music and I’m really excited about it”: Romy confirms The xx are back in the studio

Baddy On The Floor, made in collaboration with Chicago-born producer Honey Dijon, is a summer-ready funky house jam filled with jutting filtered vocals, a bulging bassline and loads of explosive disco samples. Listen to the track below:

The release of Baddy On The Floor, out now on Young – a sub-label of XL Recordings – coincides with a number of public appearances from the xx band leader, including a three-hour DJ set at week one of Coachella and a new interview on BBC Radio 1.
Presenter Jack Saunders interviewed Jamie xx on BBC Radio 1 on Monday 15 April, during which he hit play on the track for the first time in public and confirmed to Saunders that a much-anticipated second solo album is due to be released soon.
“I’ve been playing a lot of [this music] out at festivals over the past couple of years and this is the first thing,” says Jamie.
“First thing around… a record?” asks Saunders. “Yeah,” responds Jamie.
“So, we’re going to get our first Jamie xx album since In Colour in 2015?”
“Yes, if all things go to plan.”
Jamie admits that he does “feel pressure all the time” to release new music, but says that the Covid-19 lockdown offered him a chance to pause and “enjoy the process of making music”.
“One of the reasons this album took so long was because I almost didn’t want to finish it because I was having so much fun,” he tells Radio 1.
Alongside the revealing of the track, Jamie posted a video on Instagram of him creating it in his London studio. In it, Jamie tinkers with drool-worthy studio gear in a studio overlooking the city skyline. There are too many items to mention really, but it’s a vintage collector’s dream. Watch the clip below:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Jamie xx (@jamie___xx)

We’ll continue to feed you updates on Jamie xx’s second album, but in the meantime you can follow him on Bandcamp.
The post “I almost didn’t want to finish it because I was having so much fun”: Jamie xx will release second album soon “if all things go to plan” appeared first on MusicTech.

SOS Case Study: Focusrite Scarlett The latest addition to our recently introduced web article series is now available in the Case Study section of the SOS website.