How tape machines shape the lo-fi sound
Learn about the origins of the lo-fi sound, including saturation, wow, flutter, and tape delay—and how the quirks of analog tape machines have translated to the digital domain.

Americana Music Association Announces 2023 Lifetime, Trailblazers and Legacy Award HonoreesThe Americana Music Association announced this year's Lifetime Achievement, Trailblazer and Legacy Award honorees for its 22nd Annual Americana Honors & Awards show on Wednesday, September 20. This group of top-honor recipients includes The Avett Brothers, George Fontaine Sr., Patty Griffin, Bettye LaVette and Nickel Creek. This year's honorees will be celebrated during the prestigious ceremony held at the Ryman Auditorium, which serves as the hallmark event of the association's annual AMERICANAFEST, taking place Sept. 19-23 in Nashville, TN.

"This year's Lifetime Achievement honorees represent the diverse sounds that contribute to the American roots music canon," said Jed Hilly, Executive Director of the Americana Music Association and Foundation. "Our honorees have inspired this community individually and have collectively changed the landscape of the music industry. We are truly humbled to be in the same room with them."

In addition to these Lifetime Achievement Awards, the association will also honor distinguished members of the music community with six member-voted annual awards, revealing the winners on Americana music's biggest night at the Ryman Auditorium. View this year's nominees here.

Tickets to the Americana Honors & Awards are on sale now here. For more information on the association and AMERICANAFEST, visit www.americanamusic.org.

Cybertruck spied with updated interiorThe summer of 2023 is almost over and still we don’t have a Cybertruck. But thanks to an apparent serendipitous visit to a regular ol’ parking lot in San Francisco, there are some fresh images of the unreleased, polygonal electric truck. New photos of Elon Musk’s Cybertruck, shared by Tesla watchers The Kilowatts, offer an updated […]

Solar Guitars Unveils "Wolfmaster"Solar Guitars has announced a new Solar Signature Artist, Jonas Wolf from the world renown eclectic Swiss folk metal band, Eluveitie. Aptly coined the “Wolfmaster”, there are two V-Type models available now on the company’s website in vintage white and metallic purple. Says Jonas Wolf, “I‘m super excited to unveil my first ever signature guitar, the Solar Wolfmaster! If you’re looking for a lean & mean sounding workhorse featuring a badass look & feel this just might be your best new companion to join you on your Rock N Roll journey!”. Sporting gold hardware, it features alder body, roasted maple neck, Fishman Fluence pickup, Floyd Rose 1000 and a finally a Tesi Kill-Switch to maximize the Wolf-style attack as seen and heard from Jonas on his recent world tour with Eluveitie.

 Videos: https://youtu.be/VU_4rtaf7Lc          https://youtu.be/C3uxd4khk0U       https://youtu.be/3OThveYs-M0  V1.6MP Wolfmaster: 1399€ (EU)/  1299$ (INTL). Available in metallic purple gloss finish. 

6 string Type V – Jonas Wolf (Eluveitie) Signature model  – alder body – 3 piece roasted maple neck (thin C profile) with roasted maple fingerboard – 25,5” scale - 24 super jumbo stainless steel frets – Solar locking 18:1 tuners – Floyd Rose 1000 vibrato  – Fishman Fluence Modern Ceramic bridge pickup – 1 volume w/ push pull for voice selection, Tesi Kill-switch – gigbag included. V1.6VW Wolfmaster: 1399€ (EU)/  1299$ (INTL). Available in vintage white matte finish.

6 string Type V – Jonas Wolf (Eluveitie) Signature model  – alder body – 3 piece roasted maple neck (thin C profile) with roasted maple fingerboard – 25,5” scale - 24 super jumbo stainless steel frets – Solar locking 18:1 tuners – Floyd Rose 1000 vibrato  – Fishman Fluence Modern Ceramic bridge pickup – 1 volume w/ push pull for voice selection, Tesi Kill-switch – gigbag included. Jonas Wolf Links:https://eluveitie.ch/https://es-es.facebook.com/eluveitie/https://www.instagram.com/eluveitie_official/https://www.illumishade.ch

Crypto Biz: Coinbase’s lending bet, a new ads policy at Google and Marathon’s mining performanceThis week’s Crypto Biz explores Coinbase's lending platform, Marathon Digital’s latest Bitcoin mining report, Hana Bank’s move to offer crypto custody and Google’s new crypto ads policy.

Cool WAV Theme Pack Vol. 2 - FL Studio 21 Theme Pack Vol. 2 comes with 3 custom themes for FL Studio 21: Ghost, Mint, and Violet. https://youtu.be/GDPdht4hhy0 Read More

Cool WAV Everything Bundle Get all paid Cool WAV products in the Everything Bundle and save 86% until October 1st. Highlights: Over 1,800 Presets: AIR Flavor Pro - 75 Presets. Arturia... Read More

From Concord’s $468.8m Round Hill deal to Universal and Deezer’s new artist-centric model… it’s MBW’s Weekly Round-UpThe five biggest stories to hit our headlines over the past seven days
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Davisynth Audio Offers FREE Spiral Delay Plugin
Davisynth Audio has released Spiral Delay, a creative delay effect for macOS and Windows, and you can download it for free now. Spiral Delay offers all the functionality of a typical modern delay plugin, including a bandpass filter and advanced tempo matching. The advanced tempo matching includes dotted notes and triplets. But Davisynth Audio goes [...]
View post: Davisynth Audio Offers FREE Spiral Delay Plugin

How KOAN Sound built a galaxy for their new album, Led By An Ancient Light: “It felt like being a beginner again”Two men – long-lost comrades in trials of exploration through the unknown reaches of space – reunite for one final mission: searching for a daughter long thought dead. Together, they traverse a galaxy ravaged by machines and, along the way, they’re reminded of what it means to be human.
No, this is not the synopsis of the latest sci-fi epic hitting cinemas. It’s the core narrative of Led By An Ancient Light, the second album from the alternative electronic outfit, KOAN Sound.
READ MORE: Mac DeMarco: “I like to respect the way that recordings come to be”
With this new LP, the Bristol-born duo went beyond creating a collection of music. Each of the 13 tracks is paired with a chapter in a novella and a visual scene created by the digital artist Eelco.

The project is comparable to a film soundtrack. Though there are no moving images, the music, words, and imagery all align into one cohesive body of work.
The bedrock for this unity is based on the fact that the themes of the story applied to the real lives of members Will Weeks and Jim Bastow: reconnecting with their humanity in a society that’s become, in many ways, enslaved to technology.
Credit: Sarah Koury
“The idea to explore that aspect of life came from a progression of spending a lot of time, as every producer does, in a repetitive cycle of being locked to your computer screen and grinding away by yourself. Having time to step away physically and mentally is really important,” says Weeks, speaking to MusicTech over Zoom from the UK. “That journey to a better, more wholesome existence is what we wanted to explore with this album thematically and musically.”
Bastow found his version of that journey in a more literal sense, relocating from the UK to Canada a few years ago. Now, much of his time is spent outdoors: hiking, skiing, and backpacking the country’s dramatic natural landscapes.
“It brings a sense of peace. I find those experiences very enriching,” says Bastow who is dialing to the same Zoom call from abroad. “I certainly struggled during the pandemic; I felt very isolated and lost a sense of overall direction in my life and also our careers. Moving to Canada, I found this sense of possibility and openness that wasn’t there before. Partly in the culture, partly in myself, and partly in the environment where there’s this vast, expansive open space.”
Credit: Sarah Koury
With their alignment on this theme, Weeks and Bastow began creating Led By An Ancient Light. Considering the prevalence of exploration in their own lives, the process was starkly compared to their previous bodies of work.
Rather than simply making music together “for the sake of it,” as Weeks describes, they decided to, for the first time, make music to a story.
“It felt like this exploration of possibility was a really cool exercise to see, if we follow what we’re interested in and follow these small ideas, how they can really gain momentum and become this much bigger thing,” says Bastow.
Like the two characters in the novella, Weeks and Bastow set out on their own adventure to align narrative and music. This adventure would take them to places they had never visited before.
Credit: Sarah Koury
In the album’s early stages, there were two coinciding frameworks they developed: A general outline of the story; who the characters were; what they would do; and their environment. Secondly, a list of genres they intended to include on the record: drum & bass, garage, techno, and so on.
“The central challenge of the whole album was making each track work as a standalone electronic music piece, but also as a film soundtrack,” says Weeks.
As seasoned producers, the music side came naturally, but the writing side was alien to both of them. The story (which is available free online for you to read along with the album) clocks in at just under 9,000 words. And it took them 18 months to write.
However, as KOAN Sound engaged in this different form of creation, they discovered something familiar about it:
“I was personally surprised by how similar it felt to writing music,” Bastow says of crafting the narrative. “There were a lot more actual conversations between us, but certain things just felt right when we arrived at them. We would go away, think about it for a bit, reflect and then come back, and then add to it and iterate on it, and so in that respect, it’s very similar to how we write music.”
Credit: Sarah Koury
As the two processes combined into one, the writing and the music began to feed one another, allowing Weeks and Bastow to hone in on the emotional tones of both sides, forming a sonic mirror for what’s happening in the story.
For example, on Voices of Dissent, a ship carrying the two protagonists, Jak and Ryker, is attacked as soon after they’re off-planet. The track begins with an ominous build-up constructed from dissonant sound design before launching into a tense broken-beat topped with a sharp, searing squeal.
Then later on Liquid Levity, when they head to a bar midway through their celestial journey, the music adopts a wonky lo-fi hip-hop feel, stretching the kicks and snares further and further from the central beat as they become more and more inebriated.

Across the album, the sonic quality lives on a deeper level than what’s happening on the surface. It permeates the minds of the characters.
“[We had] lots of conversations about why the people in this universe would act the way they do or why they would think the way they think,” says Weeks.
“A big part of the story is the characters’ emotional worlds and how those develop over time,” says Bastow. To tap into that development, KOAN Sound knew they would need a sonic palette that stretched beyond software.
And so in keeping with the theme of integrating more humanity into this tech-heavy world, they built the sound of the album in another way that was new to them. They used two instruments renowned for their ability to capture human emotions: the cello and piano.
“We chose those instruments partly because they’re so versatile. We associate them on one hand with emotiveness and vulnerability. On the other hand, they could be transformed into these much more aggressive and foreboding elements. That was really fun for us to explore all the different types of energies that we could create through processing them in different ways,” says Bastow.
The unfiltered sounds of piano and cello are present in every track on the album, punctuating the more raw and intense emotions of the story. For example, when Ryker meets the Ardor (an ancient race of beings that share an intimate connection with the sun), he’s reminded of what life was like before he submitted his humanity to computer-generated memories.
Credit: Sarah Koury
Many of the more futuristic sounds – the ones that hinge on the science-fiction elements – were created from piano and cello. Voices of Dissent was created using nothing but cello recordings. But there’s a twist to these recordings.
“Being literally close to the instruments that we were recording you get these incredibly detailed and up close takes,” says Weeks. “It makes you want to let them breathe and let them exist by themselves.”
Weeks discovered that the cello produces waveforms akin to a sawtooth wave when it plays low notes. So, he would tune the cello down as low as possible and process those ‘saw waves’ as he would if it came from a software synth in a DAW. He also used various mallets and beaters to tap the wooden body of the cello, recording those sounds and processing them into completely new forms.
For the piano, Bastow borrowed a recording technique from Nils Frahm: covering the strings of the piano with felt and placing the microphones extremely close to grab the mechanical sounds of the hammers and other internal components of the piano, which they then processed into oblivion.
All in all, the recording process – from the genesis of the project in creating music to a narrative – was built around the idea of exploration.
“One of the most exciting things about this project is that it felt like being a beginner producer again. We tried so many new things; literally everything about the process was new,” says Weeks. “It’s very freeing to reset to everything being new. Suddenly everything is possible.”
Beyond the recording techniques, Weeks, for the first time, built a modular rig to process the recordings, which brought more tactility and unpredictability.
Credit: Sarah Koury
Bastow, who had been playing piano since he was young, redefined his relationship with the instrument through the making of this album.
“Only in the last few years have I really developed more of my own voice through the instrument as I stopped worrying about playing classical repertoire and just actually playing for myself,” Bastow says. “That process was one of the driving factors for me behind this album. It opened up an emotional landscape that wasn’t there before.”
Throughout Jak and Ryker’s interstellar journey, they too discover new emotional landscapes, and their lives change forever as a result.
Whether or not they find the daughter…well you’ll have to read and listen to find out.
Listen to Led By An Ancient Light and learn more about the duo at koansound.com
The post How KOAN Sound built a galaxy for their new album, Led By An Ancient Light: “It felt like being a beginner again” appeared first on MusicTech.

Bela’s touch-controlled module, Gliss, brings human expression to EurorackEurorack manufacturer Bela has launched Gliss, a touch-controlled module for controlling Eurorack modular systems with human gestures.

READ MORE:  Analogue Solutions’ new Ample synthesizer is as analogue as it gets

Gliss sports a big capacitive touch sensor with two VC outputs, allowing you to produce two signals based on your touch: one follows your finger’s position, and the other responds to how hard you touch the sensor pad.
These signals can be used for a variety of control purposes. You can record gestures for up to 75 seconds and use them for modulation, LFOs, envelopes, and more. You can also loop recorded gestures to create LFOs with custom waveforms and trigger recorded gestures for custom envelopes.

It features 23 addressable RGB LEDs beneath its faceplate for visual feedback. The lights glow when you touch it, helping you see what you’re doing and also giving you information about the music you’re making and which mode you’re in.
Gliss also includes a menu with a keyboard, sequencer, waveshaper, and more. It’s also open-source for customisation and expansion.
Gliss operates seamlessly with standard Eurorack power supplies (-12V to 12V) and comes with a ribbon power cable for convenience. Additionally, it provides a USB micro socket for firmware updates, customization, and user hacking possibilities.
Bela Gliss
Bela is not the only brand to come up with more expressive ways to control Eurorack gear. In an unexpected turn, a Kickstarter was launched in June for a module that allows users to control their synths through the power of an old Wii Balance Board. It’s time to dust off those old Wii nunchucks, too, we guess.
Gliss is now being produced after, according to Bela, the brand raised $73,753 in funding – more than five times its initial goal of $14,000 set in January 2023.
Find out more about Bela’s Gliss at bela.io.
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Redeye, distribution partner of Beggars, Domino and other leading indie labels, acquired by Exceleration MusicIndependent digital and physical distribution/services company Redeye has been acquired by Exceleration Music for an undisclosed sum
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UMG, Deezer artist-centric payments could be better, says MIDiA’s Mark MulliganDeezer and Universal Music Group have come together to improve and update an outdated system to benefit modern musicians in this artist-centric proposal. by Mark Mulligan of Music Industry Blog. Continue reading
The post UMG, Deezer artist-centric payments could be better, says MIDiA’s Mark Mulligan appeared first on Hypebot.

It’s not too late for every artist to be part of Band Shirt DayThe annual Band Shirt Day will be on Friday, September 15th, and it’s not too late for every musician to participate in this global charity fundraising event, which celebrates the. Continue reading
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‘Blinding Lights’ and how playlist culture is changing modern songwritingIt seems as though strategy in being interjected into music creation today in a way that may be hindering artistic authenticity. And it seems like playlist culture is the first. Continue reading
The post ‘Blinding Lights’ and how playlist culture is changing modern songwriting appeared first on Hypebot.