XO Variable Crossover from Great Eastern FX Co. XO Variable Crossover has been designed to provides users with a way of extracting new sounds from their existing pedals. 

API startup Noname Security nears $500M deal to sell itself to AkamaiAkamai Technologies is in advanced acquisition talks with Noname Security, an API cybersecurity startup, according to a people person familiar with the deal.
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OPPS: CHICAGO INTERNATIONAL MUSIC COMPETITION AND FESTIVALWe are thrilled to announce that the 7th Chicago International Music Competition and Festival will take place from July 17 to 25, 2024 in Chicago, USA. Musicians from all over the world are encouraged to apply and participate at Ganz Hall for a chance at $35,000 in total prize money. Our competition provides young musicians with the most unique and affordable platform to learn from the world's top artists and be immersed in an inspiring environment. Deadline for competition entry is April 15, 2024. Apply at https://www.cimcusa.org/index.mhtml

Analog vs. digital drum sound design: The definitive guide
In this in-depth tutorial, we break down the unique workflows, benefits, and drawbacks of analog and digital drum sound design.

HDMI DDC Keypad Controls Monitor From RackSometime last year, [Jon Petter Skagmo] bought a Dell U3421WE monitor. It’s really quite cool, with a KVM switch and picture-by-picture support for two inputs at the same time. The only downside is that control is limited to a tiny joystick hiding behind the bezel. It’s such a pain to use that [Jon] doesn’t even use all of the features available.
[Jon] tried ddcutil, but ultimately it didn’t work out. Enter the rack-mounted custom controller keyboard, a solution which gives [Jon] single keypress control of adjusting the brightness up and down, toggling picture-by-picture mode, changing source, and more.
How does it work? It uses the display data channel (DDC), which is an I²C bus on the monitor’s HDMI connector. More specifically, it has a PIC18 microcontroller sending those commands via eight Cherry MX-style blues.
Check this out — [Jon] isn’t even wasting one of the four monitor inputs because this build uses an HDMI through port. The finished build looks exquisite and fits right into the rack with its CNC-routed aluminium front panel. Be sure to check it out in action after the break.
Ever wonder how given keyboard registers the key you’re pressing? Here’s a brief history of keyboard encoding.

Taylor Swift has a laudable history of standing up to Big Tech in the name of artist compensation. By embracing TikTok in 2024, she’s broken ranks with that narrative.When Swift grappled with Apple in 2015, she noted that the fight was "not about me" – it was about other artists. The TikTok situation is the exact opposite.
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Crank-Powered Train Uses No Batteries or PlugsThe prolific [Peter Waldraff] is at back it with another gorgeous micro train layout. This time, there are no plugs and no batteries. And although it’s crank-powered, it can run on its own with the flip of a switch. How? With a supercapacitor, of course.
The crank handle is connected a 50 RPM motor that acts as a generator, producing the voltage necessary to both power the train and charge up the supercapacitor. As you’ll see in the video below, [Peter] only has to move the train back and forth about two or three times before he’s able to flip the switch and watch it run between the gem mine and the cliff by itself.
The supercapacitor also lights up the gem mine to show off the toiling dwarfs, and there’s a couple of reed switches at either end of the track and a relay that handles the auto-reverse capability. Be sure to stick around to the second half of the video where [Peter] shows how he built this entire thing — the box, the layout, and the circuit.
Want to see more of [Peter]’s trains and other work? Here you go.

Coachella’s Quasar stage illuminates the art of longer-form DJing – we’re here for itCoachella is introducing the Quasar stage to California. It’s a DJ-centric stage set to grace its 642-acre desert site for the first time this April.
The difference between Quasar and Coachella’s other dance stages, Yuma, Sahara and DoLab, is that on each day, only one DJ set will take place, with each running for a minimum of three hours.
The first week sees Honey Dijon b2b Green Velvet, a valiant – and no doubt, glowing return from Michael Bibi following his announcement in 2023 about being cancer-free, plus Jamie XX B2B Floating Points B2B Daphni. Phwoar. In the second week, there’s Rufus Du Sol, Eric Prydz B2B Anyma and Diplo B2B Mau P.
READ MORE: Diplo: “We downloaded so many different plugins to try and recreate the TB-303 and they were so hard to programme”
Plonking prolonged DJ sets on a pedestal is a major move from Coachella, and reflects the shift towards more long-form consumption of EDM in the US.
Watching an artist play their music live for an hour works, but a DJ set is a different style of performance. It’s unfair to make a DJ play for just an hour when they don’t have time to read the crowd, settle themselves, explore their record collection or experiment.

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Jamie xx, Daphni and Floating Points might gradually transition from more organic disco and funk to leftfield electronic wonkiness. The crowd might need to be more patient, but when this transformation takes place, it will pay off. They’ll respond more because they’ll be aware of where the set started – in a completely different place. That’s the entertaining factor of an extended set.
From a punter’s side, an extended set means you can embark on a holistic journey that morphs from one place unexpectedly to another or, if you’ve got people you want to see, dip in and out with the comfort of knowing they‘re staying put. For DJs like Diplo and Eric Prydz, it’s a chance to loosen up, away from 3D astronauts and flying cakes.
Eric Prydz at Coachella 2023. Image: Getty
Sunwaves in Romania has become a destination for marathon sets (tINI and Bill Patrick once played for 31 hours), as have the likes of Dimensions in Croatia, Dekmantel in Amsterdam, and Houghton in the UK. Even underground US festivals like Shambala, Desert Hearts, or the now-retired Symbiosis festival lighten the lineups so DJs can really express themselves over the space of multiple hours and craft a sonic journey.
No-frills, drawn-out sets aren’t new to Coachella either. James Murphy and Soulwax’s Despacio sound system landed at Coachella in 2016 and at This Ain’t No Picnic in LA in 2022, later making another appearance at Coachella in 2023. It’s a small room with minimal lighting and an enormous sound system, where the DJs go back-to-back for six hours or more, playing only vinyl records and turning the focus on the sound and dancefloor.

Having experienced his fair share of longer DJ sets, Sean Johnston of A Love From Outer Space, a moniker shared with the late Andrew Weatherall, agrees that the Quasar stage has “got to be a good thing”.
“The late Andrew Weatherall founded A Love From Outer Space with the specific idea of playing longer sets and slower music as an antidote to the prevailing ADHD-DJ culture,” says Sean.
“I enjoy playing longer DJ sets because it lets you set the scene, develop different moods and control the dynamics on the dancefloor as opposed to a bunch of DJs playing their ten biggest records in an hour. Longer sets equal a massively improved experience for dancers.
Image: A Love From Outer Space; Andrew Weatherall and Sean Jonhston
“The longest set we played was at the iconic and now sadly defunct Festival Number 6, where we played for 8.5 hours on an outdoor stage overlooking a beautiful estuary and mountains. We started in the early afternoon with beatless music gradually working our way up to psychedelic techno at the end of the set.
Sean admits that he’s never been to Coachella, nor would he consider three hours to be an extended set, “but it’s got to be a good thing,” he says.
“EDM completely dumbed down dance music to its worst elements. Anything that gets away from white guys with masks, cakes and trumpets and puts the focus on the actual music and gives DJs a chance to expand a little on what has become the de facto formula can only be a good thing. Festivals need to remind themselves that the music came from queer black clubs and should do everything they can to diversify their line-ups.
“Sadly, from what I’ve seen, the EDM scenes in the US have taken the worst aspects of dance music here and somehow managed to make them even shitter. That said, hopefully, these three-hour slots may give the DJs a chance to expand their repertoire, and the crowd the opportunity to learn that there can be so much more.”
The Quasar stage, then, perhaps reflects a shift in EDM in America away from fast short sets, big lights, big shows, and big stage production. Fans understand now that that energy can, if you want it to, be spread out across more time.
When you consider that Coachella usually sets the tone for other festivals, Quasar is a positive sign for the integration of underground dance music culture into festivals. Dance music, EDM, noise, whatever you want to call it – it’s here. It’s alive. It’s kicking.
The post Coachella’s Quasar stage illuminates the art of longer-form DJing – we’re here for it appeared first on MusicTech.

The story behind AC/DC's Hell's Bell Mike Milsom was the Bellmaster tasked with casting, tuning and striking the iconic bell that featured on AC/DC's legendary album and live shows.

From Taylor Swift’s return to TikTok to Spotify’s move on manipulated audio… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-UpThe five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days…
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Spotify to help fans edit, speed up songs and promises to pay artistsAccording to a new WSJ report, Spotify will add tools that allow fans to speed up, mash-up, and edit songs without prior permission.....
The post Spotify to help fans edit, speed up songs and promises to pay artists appeared first on Hypebot.

Will you actively support WIN’s Global Values for Independent Music?Music trade group WIN (Worldwide Independent Network) has announced a new set of Global Independent Values as part of its ongoing campaign to unify and clarify the sector's positions.....
The post Will you actively support WIN’s Global Values for Independent Music? appeared first on Hypebot.

Last Minute Tax Advice for Musicians and SongwritersThe federal tax filing deadline in the US is this coming Monday, April 15th, so this week's Hypebot Flashback Friday post offers links to three articles that offer practical advice.....
The post Last Minute Tax Advice for Musicians and Songwriters appeared first on Hypebot.

AstroLab is one giant leap for Arturia — but will it really take off?Price: $1,600/£1,390/€1,599
Arturia isn’t pulling punches with the AstroLab. Its 60-page manual opens with a note from company founder and CEO Frédéric Brun declaring: ‘AstroLab encapsulates everything we’ve ever wanted to achieve; the seamless fusion of software and hardware […], the feeling of absolute creative freedom.’
Big words.
READ MORE: Arturia’s AstroLab: The story of an instrument 10 years in the making
What is Arturia’s AstroLab?
The AstroLab is ostensibly a hardware extension of Arturia’s Analog Lab plugin; a vast library of bespoke presets across dozens — though not all — of their category-leading V Collection software instruments (the latest edition of which MusicTech reviewed favourably). It’s a performance-focused, easy-access environment that has always necessitated a computer to run. Until now.
That’s right: the AstroLab allows presets from Analog Lab — included in the package, as it happens — to be loaded into a hardware instrument and taken onstage or into the studio with no computer in sight. Of course, it can also sync seamlessly, wirelessly if desired, with a computer running Analog Lab in real-time so, in the studio MIDI data can be retroactively assigned to any Analog Lab preset to have its sound edited and re-edited long after the player has left the building.

How do you use AstroLab?
The AstroLab is a weighty beast at a formidable ten kilograms, but it’s smart and ergonomic, too.
Its panel is centred around what Arturia calls the Screen Encoder; a circular, full-colour screen that’s also an encoder and button for selecting presets, adjusting effects, changing settings and a whole lot more.
Looking like Iron Man’s chest-worn arc reactor, the Screen Encoder greets you upon power up, bids you goodbye upon power down, and is generally the engine behind the AstroLab’s overall workflow.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
It’s no mystery why so much thought has gone into the Screen Encoder: things can get menu-heavy quickly here, so quick and intuitive navigation is key. We find on several instances that pushing the button also leads the encoder to scroll down an extra item, making for a wrong selection; but overall Arturia has got this right. The Home menu offers several ways to filter the AstroLab’s presets: by instrument, by instrument type, by favourites and even by artists — here, the AstroLab offers fairly faithful recreations of iconic synth and keys sounds from a selection of artists, from The Beatles to Bruno Mars and more.
There doesn’t seem to be a way to customise this list, at least from the panel (at the time of writing the literature for synchronising the Astrolab with Analog Lab is not yet available, nor the AstroLab Connect software for syncing over wi-fi). So, whether or not you consider yourself an A-Ha fan, you might find yourself stuck with the preset for Take On Me regardless. Perhaps this will become an option in future firmware versions.
As with Analog Lab, one supremely useful function comes in the form of Playlists. They’re very much editable from the panel and a place where presets can be arranged in specific orders for quick access during any song or set.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Beyond the Screen Encoder are simple controls for sound sculpting, effects (offering delay, reverb and two assignable effects), arpeggio and chord modes (with a variety of scales on offer). Record and Play buttons create MIDI loops, while buttons for splitting the keyboard into regions allow presets to be mixed and matched, whether split across the keyboard or layered on top of each other.
The AstroLab’s build quality is outstanding— which is important with so much emphasis on the hardware component. Wooden side panels, a spacious layout, immaculately responsive LED value displays and, of course, the AstroLab’s talismanic central Screen Encoder.
Who is AstroLab made for? 
As we’ll come to shortly, it’s as if Arturia could have populated the panel of this incredibly powerful instrument a little more, but the intention is clear from the get-go: whether in the studio or onstage, this instrument is designed for performance. Varying instrument-to-instrument, parameters are combined and boiled down to just four primary controls — except conventional expression controls; such as velocity, aftertouch and the mod wheel. On the panel, these are labelled Brightness, Timbre, Time and Movement, with the shift-accessed parameters beneath these offering voice volume and a three-band EQ.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
On the included Mini V preset, ‘A Bass You’ll Use’, for instance, Brightness controls the filter, Timbre is filter resonance, Time is the envelope release (with an extreme setting resulting in a latched drone) and Movement controls both the frequency and amplitude of an LFO routed to the filter.
Another, very different example is the ‘Walk Of Life’ organ preset: this time, Brightness increases harmonic content by incrementally, virtually pulling out organ stops. Timbre controls drive, the higher the Time setting the slower the attack (emulating the swell of a volume pedal), and Movement intensifies the rate of a virtual Leslie speaker for some satisfyingly warbling Hammond-style vibrato.
Now, in one sense, this teeters dangerously close to making the AstroLab a blunt instrument, belying the customizability of Arturia’s fabulously deep software emulations and in turn the joy of translating that into a hardware environment. But remember: this is also something of the remit— and strength— of its parent Analog Lab, which has identical controls in its onscreen environment. And, while offering deeper editing of presets, as such provides a considerably streamlined array of instruments for those primarily in the business of reaching their desired sounds quickly. There’s also a balancing act to consider: too many assignable controls with no direct labels would make it easy to forget what any given knob does— particularly in a low-light, live setting.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
The point is, Arturia clearly expects the lion’s share of preset editing to be taken care of long before taking it out onto the stage. Spend hours at home or in the studio finding the exact Juno or Augmented Strings sound you need, then take it out on the road with just the four parameters to worry about for confident, low-risk, hands-on variation and performability; with the aforementioned FX A and B and delay and reverb on hand as well.
Arturia had the classy idea to make the AstroLab’s knobs capacitive, so simply touching one with your finger brings up the parameter value onscreen without needing to move it— an onstage bugbear of many a synthesis.
Image: Simon Vinall for MusicTech
Should you buy Arturia’s AstroLab?
All things considered, it’s hard to imagine a better companion to the already-proven Analog Lab than the AstroLab and, by extension, a better-suited instrument for taking carefully curated sounds out of the studio and out on the road for stress-free gigging.
Arturia has long proven itself as a leading developer in both the worlds of software and hardware, and with AstroLab has managed to build a wholly new type of bridge between the two. The price is steep and will definitely be a barrier for many — indeed, people online have already pointed out that buying an Arturia Keylab Essential mk3, an affordable Windows tablet and V collection would be more affordable and potentially more powerful — if not a completely different concept and workflow approach.
Still, AstroLab is a strong move from Arturia and we wouldn’t be surprised if it inspires a plethora of other developers to attempt the same.
The post AstroLab is one giant leap for Arturia — but will it really take off? appeared first on MusicTech.

Can’t cross the moat? Walk around itThe music business is bifurcating. On one side, a new AI, fandom, and creation centred business is coalescing. On the other, the traditional business is pulling the draw bridge over its moat by pushing up streaming royalty thresholds to ensure the soon-to-explode long tail knows it is not welcome. AI has arrived at just the right time, acting as the change catalyst that will propel the consumerisation of creation to the fore. The news of music AI start up Udio’s $10 million raise is just another piece in the puzzle.

The traditional music business has a long tradition of building moats. The genesis of the recorded music business was the first moat. Until the phonograph, everyone and anyone could be a performer and take part in music. Then suddenly, a business was built around those deemed ‘good enough’ to be able to record. The music business’ moat was thus dug, with the audience on one side and the artists firmly on the other. In later years, the moat was widened with a succession of developments, such as record label marketing budgets, TV appearances, exclusive licensing deals, expensive recording technology, and so forth.

The rise of the creator economy, AI, and consumer creation will probably not drain that moat. High quality music and artists are not going to be replaced – that is simply not the point of AI. Virtual artists are an entirely different proposition (!) but AI and consumer creation open up another, entirely new path. Instead of having to swim across the traditional industry’s century-old moat, this new, parallel movement / industry can, and will, simply walk around it and carve out its own space. This will be a good thing for both sides of the future industry and mirrors what already happens in video.

No one confuses a TikTok short for a Netflix original because they operate in entirely different lanes. Right now, both sides of music occupy the same places (streaming and social). For as long as it was only the long tail of single millions of independent artists, that awkward cohabitation just about worked. But not for much longer. Now, we have tens of millions of creators uploading music to social (but not streaming) and we face the prospect of hundreds of millions of consumer creations, perhaps even a billion, according to Bandlab’s Meng Ru Kuok.

And as much as this consumerisation trend will largely happen outside of the moat, some of it will happen inside it too. Look no further than the reports that Spotify is planning to allow users to modify songs. So, perhaps the demarcation will be modification within the moat and fully fledged creation outside of it.

What is fast approaching in the music industry’s rear view mirror is what MIDiA termed ‘Music’s Instagram Moment’, where making music becomes just as accessible to the average consumer as photos and video are now. Thom Yorke might have uttered the words ‘anyone can play guitar’ but in practice, most people don’t – either because they do not have a guitar or the will to learn. But anyone can write a text prompt. The traditional music industry’s moat kept the accomplished safely clear of the enthusiast. AI changes all of that.

Of course, the counter argument is that all this consumer creation will likely be garbage. But that misses the point. This is not about music as consumption, nor even fandom. It is music as expression and identity. Professional photographers did not look at Kodak and call them merchants of garbage because they enabled millions of consumers to take overly exposed holiday snaps with fingers obscuring the lens. 

The current fear around AI is it creating million stream songs, but that is not the point either. Don’t worry about the one AI track with a million streams, worry about the million AI tracks with one stream.

After all, who is going to listen to all this consumer creation? The friends and family of those who make it.  If each consumer creator has, say, ten people who will listen to what they create, and they make a track a month, that results in 120 streams minimum per year (assuming each person only listens once). Turn that one consumer creator into 100 million people (15% of Spotify’s current user base) and you end up with 12 billion streams. Now imagine that 25% of those 100 million consumer creators make two tracks a month, have more than 30 friends that listen, and that their music is good enough for those friends to each listen twice, then the total annual streams becomes 45 billion. Now imagine if those consumer creators make music every single day….

It is when you consider this sort of scale that it becomes clear why it is good for both sides of the business that they occupy different spaces, because they serve different purposes. 

Yes, consumer creation will compete for time. It will turn a considerable amount of time that is currently spent listening into time spent creating. Surely that is only a positive thing. Music as a form of expression and creation. It can – and should – be for everyone. 

If this kind of thing interests you, then keep an eye out for a major new report coming from MIDiA: Bifurcation theory: How today’s music business will become two. More on that soon!