Cherry Audio launches plugin emulation of the Roland CR-78 drum machine – famously used on Phil Collins’ In the Air TonightCherry Audio is launching into the drum machine game, its first release a plugin emulating the Roland CR-78, made famous by Blondie and Phil Collins.
According to Cherry Audio, the CR drum machine aims to recreate the sound and look of the original, but also adds 16 or 24-step X0X-style programming for a smoother workflow.

READ MORE: Four Tet announces New York festival and confirms new album, Three

In addition to this is a song mode for pattern chaining and looping, swing and velocity features, and a preset library offering more than 250 additional sounds in multiple styles and genres.
The brand has also employed “modelled synthesis” which gives users the option to access extensive parameter tweaking options that go further than what is offered on the Roland CR-78.
There’s also plenty of effects and mixing options such as level and mute controls, and the option to adjust the overdrive, flanger, delay and gated reverb. As well as this is effect send buttons for each voice, along with a master compressor and a six-band graphic EQ.
The Roland CompuRhythm CR-78 was released in 1978, and was famed for its use in Blondie’s Heart of Glass, Phil Collins’ In The Air Tonight and Hall & Oats’ I Can’t Go For That (No Can Do).

The original device was hailed as being the first of it’s kind, as the first programmable, microprocessor-controlled analogue beatbox.
To showcase the release Cherry Audio and musician Tim Shoebridge have teamed up to create an extensive video that introduces users to the classic CR-78 sounds and the features on the new CR-78 drum machine.
“I’ve had absolutely tons and tons of fun with this particular plugin. I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it as much as I have,” says Shoebridge. “I’m not making it up. This is the most fun I’ve had with any plugin I’ve ever played.”
You can watch the video below:

For more information on the CR-78 drum machine, you can head to Cherry Audio.
The post Cherry Audio launches plugin emulation of the Roland CR-78 drum machine – famously used on Phil Collins’ In the Air Tonight appeared first on MusicTech.

87.6% of all musicians releasing music are ‘Undiscovered’A new Chartmetric report puts grim stats to just how difficult it is to make it in music, with the vast majority classified as "Undiscovered" - which it defines as artists that have yet to establish a brand or following...
The post 87.6% of all musicians releasing music are ‘Undiscovered’ appeared first on Hypebot.

Book Smart vs. Street Smarts: Why you need both in the music businessIt is very important to get an education, but it is equally important to learn from experience. You can learn a lot from books and courses, but an evening spent at a band's merch table can be as instructive as a full semester of learning...
The post Book Smart vs. Street Smarts: Why you need both in the music business appeared first on Hypebot.

A musician’s guide: What are UPC and ISRC codes and why you need to know about them?Did you know that whenever you release new music, you need a UPC for every album or single and an ISRC for each individual track? by Chris Robley from the. Continue reading
The post A musician’s guide: What are UPC and ISRC codes and why you need to know about them? appeared first on Hypebot.

Rod Stewart sells catalog to Iconic Artists Group for around $100m; company raises $1bn to buy more music rightsIrving Azoff’s Iconic Artists Group has secured a strategic investment from HPS Investment Partners (HPS)
Source

CR-78: First virtual drum machine from Cherry Audio CR-78 becomes the first drum machine to join the Cherry Audio line-up, offering a modern take on Roland’s CR-78.

Four Tet announces New York festival and confirms new album, ThreeFour Tet fans rejoice: he’s just confirmed a new album is coming, released a new single, AND announced his own festival, Four Tet & Friends, in New York later this year.
Teasing everything on Instagram, the electronic musician – real name Kieran Hebden – first revealed his festival, Four Tet & Friends, which is taking place at Under The K Bridge park in Brooklyn, New York.

READ MORE: Bandsintown integrated directly into Spotify to “boost concert and festival discovery worldwide”

This will see extended sets from the man himself, as well as sets from Ben UFO, Daphni, Floating Points, and loads more.
Four Tet & Friends is taking place on 4 and 5 May 2024. There’s no information yet as of pricing, however considering that his 2023 Four Tet All-Dayer festival in Finsbury Park cost around £65, we’d expect it to be priced around that mark, accounting for currency conversion to USD, of course.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Four Tet (@fourtetkieran)

Following on from this, the London-born musician then went on to launch a new single, Daydream Repeat, before confirming that his hotly awaited album is arriving in the next 30 days.
“New track Daydream Repeat is out today,” he says on Instagram. “Taken from my next album which is called Three and is going to be released on 15 March 2024. Shops are doing preorders for the vinyl and CD.”

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Four Tet (@fourtetkieran)

In more Four Tet news, fellow producer Logic1000 recently shared that Hebden still has a humble sense of “innocence” and is “shocked at his life”.
“We were sitting in Pret before a show and he mentioned how shocked he was at his life, and what his career had enabled him to do and experience,” she told NME. “This is someone who has been in the industry for so long and still had this innocence of someone who couldn’t believe what position he was in. He had this bright-eyed, not jaded disposition and that really stuck with me even if I didn’t realise it at the time.”
Three will be released on 15 March 2024 on all streaming platforms, vinyl and CD.
You can preorder it now via his website.
The post Four Tet announces New York festival and confirms new album, Three appeared first on MusicTech.

D16 Group’s Nepheton 2 breathes exciting new life into a drum machine legend€119, d16.pl
Following a refresh of its 909 and 303 plugins, it’s no surprise to see D16 Group divert its attention to updating Nepheton; an emulation of the iconic 808 drum machine.

READ MORE: Arturia Pigments 5 – still one of the best soft synths for sound design

You only have to search the Internet for 808 sample packs and software instruments to see that the sound of Roland’s classic is a well-trodden path. But Nepheton 2 manages to cover new ground, largely thanks to a superb new effects section. Other new features include separate channel strips for each sound and a greatly improved step sequencer. Is this finally the one 808 to rule them all?

How does the Nepheton 2 sound?
The main sound sources include the familiar 16 synthesised percussion sounds, plus an extra zappy kick drum called Lazer Gun.
The Synth tab shows simple controls for each, including a mix of Tone, Decay, Tune and Snappy dials, plus a few extras relevant to each individual sound. It goes beyond what’s offered on the original Roland TR-808, and also what’s often found on most virtual 808 instruments, so off the bat you have more control for refining your sound.
D16 should be praised for offering up this extra editing power, but it missed a trick by not letting you freely tune the kick drum or some of the other sounds. Yes, it’s more authentic to the original, but if you could pitch the kick (in particular) up and down more, then it would be easier to get it to sit in the mix and fit the key of your track.
To refine things further, a Strips tab presents channel strips for each sound. This gives you resonant low cut and high cut filters, two bands of EQ, a compressor with lookahead, and Pan, Spread, and Level controls. It’s worth noting that although the Spread effect sounds nice, it’s merely a simple Haas delay that could cause issues when collapsed to mono.
Nepheton 2 Strips tab
What effects does the Nepheton 2 have?
This brings us on to the routing and effects, which are what really helps to set Nepheton apart from its competition.
There are two effects buses with five slots in each, and options for distortion, bitcrush, chorus, delay, reverb, filter, and two modules for EQs and dynamics.
D16 is known for its excellent sounding effects, and these processors don’t disappoint. The distortion in particular is wonderful and can go from subtle, warming harmonics through to out-and-out destruction. It also has a frequency split feature, so you can leave the low-end alone and only saturate the highs.
Other notable features include side chains in the Dynamics and Filter modules that can take their input from any internal sound, extended parameters such as dither and jitter for flexible editing of the bitcrusher, and modulation on reverb tails. The only disappointment here is that the layouts are quite simple, with little visual feedback — you can’t see if or how the Dynamics modules are compressing, for example.
Nepheton 2 effects
Bus routes
Routing to effects is incredibly flexible. You can choose to route the outputs directly to bus 1 or 2, or you can direct a portion of the sound as a send. Not only that, but you can choose where in the chain you want your signal to go, so you could have a booming kick going through a distortion in slot 1 while you have a softer clave sound go through a reverb in slot 5. As the chain runs in serial, this would mean the clave avoids the distortion.
To further add to the brain melt, you can even select a position in chain 1 from which to send the signal over to Bus 2. Understandably, this level of complexity takes a bit of getting used to, but having the flexibility to process each sound in slightly different ways helps to create much more interesting kits.
Of course, since Nepheton can send 16 stereo outs to your DAW, you could alternatively choose to route each channel externally and process it using your own effects. Or you can bypass the effect buses and go straight to the master bus, which has its own editing tab. This includes a three-band compressor and a glorious limiter that can go a long way to crunching up your beats and giving them a production-ready sound. Switch on the soft clipping, set the attack and release and then pull down the threshold to get some instant extra punch and character.
Nepheton 2 main GUI
Mapping Nepheton 2
The final tab on the top half of the user interface lets you change the drum mapping to match your controller, DAW, or an external instrument (Nepheton can send MIDI out), and also create audible trigger pulses akin to a feature on the original 808 units.
Other notable additions include separate real-time and offline quality settings (a welcome feature on any plugin), and MIDI learn, which can be setup when you right click on any control. Similarly, this is how you set up parameters for automation in your host. When you want to automate a parameter you right click on it and this makes it visible in the DAW. As Nepheton has hundreds of potential parameters, you have to choose which ones you want your DAW to see. It takes a little extra thought, but it’s a reasonable workaround that’s better than scrolling through an enormous list.
Nepheton 2’s Sequencer
With the sound generation section taken care of, we should move on to the sequencer, which takes up the bottom portion of the screen.
This has seen a dramatic improvement over the previous version, as you can now see sequencer lanes for all 17 sounds in a single grid, greatly speeding up programming. You have various options for copying, pasting and moving patterns of up to 64 steps. There are also options to add accents, swing, and flams or fast rolls, so it’s easy to program those signature trap hi-hat edits. If you want to, you can choose to tap in patterns live, and there’s even a fairly comprehensive randomise function that lets you choose which lanes to change and how complicated the generated patterns should be.
Nepheton 2 sequencer
To the right of the sequencer there’s a Song section that lets you save four banks of 12 patterns, which can be performed live or triggered by MIDI. If you’d prefer to refine the edit in the piano roll then you can simply drag and drop the MIDI pattern to your DAW and switch off the sequencer, which also shrinks the interface down to keep things streamlined. Alternatively, you can drag and drop patterns between instances of Nepheton. Overall it’s a solid sequencer that makes programming a relatively quick affair.
Lighting up
It’s worth mentioning that some of the effects, functions and mute/solo buttons are activated by clicking on small LED-like buttons. This is a touch fiddly, depending on how large you set the resizable window, but it’s something that you get used to fairly quickly. One nice touch, though, is the way that there are several places throughout the layout that you can either select a certain sound, or switch on mute/solo. If you’re working in the step sequencer, for instance, then it has its own mute and solo buttons next to each lane so you don’t have to move your cursor around as much. It’s a small thing, but it goes to show how much care and attention have gone into refining the workflow.
There’s a large collection of well-programmed presets that can be accessed from a browser with a search function, favourites and tagging. You can actually save and load separate presets for the Scene (which covers the whole plugin), the Drum Kit (the sounds only), the master effects settings, and the patterns. However, it seems like a missed opportunity not to provide presets for the excellent effects buses.
Nepheton 2 presets
A king is born?
The CPU usage can get a touch high when running in full quality with all the effects, but Nepheton has the benefit of a much smaller high-def footprint than some sample-based alternatives. Our previous go-to was Wave Alchemy’s excellent Revolution Kontakt instrument, but the added flexibility afforded by the synth engines here means it might have been superseded.
The complexity of the effects and routing is not for the faint of heart, but it’s worth investing some time into as it’s at the core of what makes Nepheton stand out from the crowd. It helps to give the familiar 808 sound much needed versatility along with a modern freshness. Sure, you can craft standard 808 sounds and beats, but if you’re looking for something a little more edgy, then Nepheton can also get creative, and it sounds incredible when doing so.
Key features

Virtual 808 drum machine
32-/64-bit Windows, 64-bit Mac (VST3, VST3, AU, AAX)
17 Synthesised percussion instruments
Dedicated channel strip for every sound
2 flexible effects buses (distortion, bitcrush, chorus, delay, reverb, filter, 2 x EQ & 2 x dynamics)
Master effects with 3-band compressor, and limiter with soft clipping
Over 1200 presets for Scene, Drum Kit, Pattern and master effects
16 stereo outputs for multi-output routing in DAW
64-step sequencer with randomisation
Per-step flam and substep note fills
Store and trigger up to 48 patterns
MIDI drum map editor and audible trigger out sounds
Resizable user interface

The post D16 Group’s Nepheton 2 breathes exciting new life into a drum machine legend appeared first on MusicTech.

Accentize update dxRevive The latest version of dxRevive kits out Accentize's acclaimed audio restoration plug-in with a host of new features.

Tony Orlando Discusses Farewell Tour, Showbiz in the '70s, His Biggest HitsOrlando spoke with AllMusic a little over one month before what will be his final concert, and was up for discussing such hits as "Tie a Yellow Ribbon" and "Knock Three Times," a famous close friend who died far too young, and how he got involved in radio.

Live Nation and Music Forward Foundation Launch 2024 Scholarship ProgramsLive Nation Entertainment, the world’s leading live entertainment company, and Music Forward Foundation, today launched their 2024 scholarship application period for college students pursuing careers in the music and live entertainment industry.

Five $10,000 scholarships will be awarded to outstanding college students—in either their junior or senior year—majoring in music, music business, production, and/or related fields at an accredited college or university in the U.S. The opportunity is specifically designed to support students interested in the core aspects of the concert business, including concert promotion, venue operation, ticketing, sponsorship, hospitality, artist management, etc. Applications for 2024 must be submitted online by March 31 at http://musicforwardfoundation.org/scholarships. 

“We are happy to once again work with the Music Forward scholarship program as we continue to invest in talented, driven, and dedicated young people pursuing careers in live entertainment," said Jordan Zachary, Co-President of US Concerts, Live Nation. “Our ongoing partnership with the Music Forward Foundation reinforces our commitment to champion and empower the next generation of leaders in our industry,” added Omar Al-joulani, Co-President of US Concerts, Live Nation.

“Scholarships remain a pivotal part of our community outreach and recruitment programming,” said Nurit Smith, Executive Director, Music Forward Foundation. "Music Forward’s mission is to support young people hoping to enter the music and live entertainment industry and this program expands our reach to a wide range of students who may not otherwise be afforded the opportunity to pursue dream careers.” 

Scholarship recipient selections will be made by a panel of industry executives and thought leaders across academic, entertainment, civic, and corporate sectors. Criteria for selection include academic achievement, essay responses, and recommendations. Scholarships will be announced in June 2024, and awards will be given for the Fall 2024 semester.

The five scholarships will be awarded to students nationwide in the following areas: 

Governors Ball Scholarship: Established to support students native to the five boroughs of New York City, with preference to Queens, pursuing a degree in live entertainment, with a focus on music. The $10,000 scholarship will help further the student’s career pathway in performance, live production, music engineering, music business, and related fields of study. 

Steven J. Finkel Service Excellence Scholarship: Established in memory of a Live Nation employee who went above and beyond to improve the concert experience for fans, artists, and staff, this $10,000 scholarship is designed to support the ever-growing customer service expectations within the live entertainment industry. 

Tiffany Green Operator Scholarship: Established in memory of one of Live Nation’s first female concert production specialists, this $10,000 scholarship is designed to support women pursuing a career in live entertainment. 

Live Nation Scholarship: Established to support students interested in the core areas of Live Nation’s business, this $10,000 scholarship is designed to support students focused on concert promotion, venue operation, sponsorship, ticketing, and artist management. 

David E. Ballard Scholarship: Established in 2019 in memory of David E. Ballard in partnership with Inherit the Music, this $10,000 scholarship supports youth who have experienced homelessness and/or been part of the foster care system and are pursuing a career in live entertainment.  

For more information on additional scholarships offered by Music Forward Foundation, please visit: https://musicforwardfoundation.org/programs/scholarships/. 

Transgressive Records expands to the US, names Jack Hedges General Manager, North America and brings Canvasback Music imprint into the foldNews arrives just over a year after Transgressive partnered with Firebird Music Holdings
Source

Ron Perry, Chairman and CEO of Columbia Records, named UJA-Federation’s Music Visionary of the YearPerry joins such previous honorees as Rob Stringer, Michele Anthony, Steve Boom and Daniel Ek
Source

Bandsintown integrated directly into Spotify to “boost concert and festival discovery worldwide”Live event discovery platform Bandsintown has now been integrated directly into Spotify in an effort to “boost concert and festival discovery worldwide, empower more artists, and enhance fan experiences”.
Fans can now find their favourite artists’ event listings via their artist page and also in the ‘Now Playing’ View, available when listening to a track. Upcoming live shows will also be available in the dedicated Live Events Feed.

READ MORE: Spotify introduces new TikTok-style vertical feed for discovering new music

Bandsintown data reveals that 150,000 more concerts took place in 2023 than in 2022, meaning artists and venues face rising costs and increased competition. Bandsintown and Spotify are aiming to “bridge the gap and ensure every artist gets their deserved spotlight”, with Spotify having increased impressions for live events across its platform by 10x in the last 12 months alone.
The free Bandsintown for Artists platform is already used by over half a million musicians, and it gives artists full control of their event listings. Artists can simply link their Spotify profiles and publish their shows on Bandsintown to expand their reach to listeners.
“Bandsintown is on a mission to help artists get discovered and sell out shows. With Spotify on board, we are bringing artists and fans closer in a world where every show counts, and every fan matters,” says Fabrice Sergent, co-founder and managing partner of Bandsintown.
“Our partnership with Bandsintown reinforces our commitment to help artists connect with and monetize their fan bases,” adds Jon Ostrow, Associate Director of Growth & Discovery, Live Events at Spotify.
“With more concert listings and data directly sourced from artists, this integration gives artists more control to update their tour schedules on Spotify and ultimately improves the fan experience of discovering and purchasing tickets.”
Find out more, including how to set up your Bandsintown for Artists account, over on the official Bandsintown website.
The post Bandsintown integrated directly into Spotify to “boost concert and festival discovery worldwide” appeared first on MusicTech.

Our love language is listening
We’ve recently launched some updates that we hope will make you feel even more loved up for Splice.