Music Tech Focus

Editor At Large Andy has an MA in Music Technology and has been writing about it for 25 years. He has launched and edited several magazines in the subject and was Editor of MusicTech for four years. Naturally, he has far too many synthesisers. Dave i

Welcome to the first of many workshops in Logic Pro 2020, MusicTech’s special annual issue completely dedicated to Apple’s amazing DAW. This year, we have completely pulled the stops out and filmed an entire tutorial series on Logic for you to digest

This is, quite simply, the best-ever edition of MusicTech, completely dedicated to Logic Pro. Not only do we have more workshops than ever dedicated to Apple’s incredible DAW, but we’ve managed to secure a world exclusive: a complete video course ded

REDD.47 £2,149 This is a rackmount version of the microphone preamplifiers found in the EMI REDD.51 valve consoles used in Abbey Road Studios up to the end of 1968. This is the sound heard on all The Beatles’ classic albums, up to and including ‘The

One of our favourite applications of Logic Pro’s Alchemy synth is the creation of pad sounds. There are many aspects of Alchemy that make this powerful synth perfect in the application of pads – including a range of synthesis methods, super-weighty v

The quest for the ultimate soft synth has been hotting up of late, with many companies really pulling out all the stops to reside in your hard-drive space. There have been great-looking options with incredible UIs, including the likes of Arturia’s Pi

Zero-G has released some exceptionally interesting products, as I saw recently with its excellent Ethera EVI package. This latest creative offering from the company brings us a very tweakable and useful sample-based synth in software form. Once you h

Subtractive synthesis has long been the most established and prevalent form of synthesis. Like a good pair of well-worn shoes, it provides the user with a familiar environment, which can be taken from one synth to the next. Bolt, however, is billed a

I’ll let fellow MusicTech reviewer John Pickford take the credit for noting a recent seismic and historical shift in studio-monitor quality. Our advice used to be to pay £1,000 or more for decent monitors, but recently, John noted that: “Advances in

The general rule about Bluetooth headphones is they’re very handy for music listening, but not always the best for studio monitoring. There may be latency issues and the whole Bluetooth ‘thing’ surely brings in some kind of degradation in signal qual

We looked at the bulk of the new Scarlett range of interfaces recently in MusicTech. This is the third generation of those best-selling interfaces and is Focusrite’s relatively low-cost entry point to pro audio. The range costs from around £99 to £44

Price £20 Contact Plugin Boutique pluginboutique.com For producers old enough to remember the obsession with reducing noise in recordings over the 80s and 90s, it might come as something of a surprise that generating additional noise has become a fav

Price £29 Contact LoopLords looplords.net We know and love LoopLords for its focused and practical plug-ins based on specific subjects – fancy some Depeche Mode, Kraftwerk or Blade Runner-style playable sounds? Electro Urban Drums maintains the devel

Contact Native Instruments | native-instruments.com We know from our reviews of Native’s latest ranges of Komplete Kontrol keyboards, that the company is on a bit of a mission to bring huge hardware and software bundles to newcomers in music producti

Contact Loopmasters/Plugin Boutique | pluginboutique.com There’s no real hiding what Khords is from the outset. This is a sample-based virtual instrument that plays chords in various categories, all based on a 400MB collection of 315 samples. Where i

Contact AIR Music Technology | airmusictech.com Drum Synth 500 is a collaboration between AIR Music Technology, Akai and Alesis, the latter two certainly having form when it comes to drums. It aims to create a 500-series module experience with so muc

Price £34 Contact Loopmasters loopmasters.com Taking its influence from a range of classic blues styles, this pack from Loopmasters contains just over 1GB of 24-bit audio in a choice of formats, including 56 sampler patches. You’ll find some surprisi

Price $29.99 Contact Beta Monkey Music betamonkey.com This library from Beta Monkey Music features 60s and 70s rock’n’ roll and Motown drums performed on a booming, vintage Ludwig Black Oyster drum kit, with 285 loops and fills ranging from a groovin

Price £29.95 Contact Loopmasters loopmasters.com Acoustic Blueprints is a new pack from Loopmasters that’s jammed with a plethora of plucked-instrument loops, including acoustic guitars, electric bass, mandolin, slide guitar, ukuleles, dulcimers and

Price £29.95 Contact loopmasters.com Rising star Whiney is the latest Hospital Records member to craft a d’n’b pack for Loopmasters and this one includes nearly 700MB of 24-bit audio in a range of formats. You’ll find 201 loops covering tight basslin

Price £34 Contact loopmasters.com This new collection from Loopmasters ticks all the housemusic boxes, with jackin’ drums, lively piano riffs, funk guitars and deep, bouncing basslines. The 1.2GB of audio is divided up into 414 loops and 187 crunchy