What is it?

In-ear monitors have been a core part of pro audio for decades now, and particularly central to the task of saving gigging musicians’ skins. They’re a lynchpin of modern live audio monitoring - a welcome reprieve from the feedback-y squall of the monitor wedge, and a vital barrier against the often-damaging sound levels on stage. In recent years, their appeal has broadened, as has their affordability.

Today, in-ear monitoring is much less a preserve of the touring pros, and more so an option for bands, musicians and artists of every stripe. Building a budget IEM rig for your band is easier and more cost-effective than ever, and building your own self-monitoring system is as easy as buying a splitter cable. DJs are even getting in on the action, with in-ear monitors being a welcome alternative to bulky DJ headphones for sound isolation and accurate sound reproduction. As such, there’s an extremely vibrant market for beginner-grade, entry-level and otherwise cost-effective IEMs - at the centre of which, you’ll find the Sennheiser IE 100 Pro.

Sennheiser’s IE 100 Pro are a set of wired in-ear monitors that set out to marry affordability with pro-grade monitoring accuracy, and throw in some viable sound isolation and hearing protection in the process. They are single-driver in-ears, each bud sporting a 10mm dynamic driver with a frequency range of 20Hz to 18kHz - plenty for a clean, natural sound that’s honest without being unpleasant.

The IE 100 Pro are low-impedance at 20 ohms, enough to be driven by pretty much anything you’d want to use to drive them (smartphones inclusive). Despite the low impedance, they promise low distortion too.

Being also tasked with isolating your lugholes from the sounds of the outside world, the IE 100 Pro aim to create some decent in-ear conditions for piping in your monitor feed. The specs state noise attenuation of up to 26dB, which is some not-inconsiderable reduction - particularly when many of the best earplugs for musicians aim somewhere around the 21dB mark.

There are three colour variants of the IE 100 Pro: a tasteful matte black, a somewhat-nostalgic translucent red and a clear version. It’s the clear set on my desk for this review, and at first glance they look every bit the part. In the box you get the in-ears, their 1.3m connecting cable (which terminates in a 3.5mm stereo jack), three sizes of silicone ear tip, an additional pair of foam ear tips, a handy-dandy cleaning tool and a pleather carry pouch to keep it all in.

Sennheiser also sells a wireless bundle, which swaps out the analogue connecting cable for a Bluetooth be-dongled cable with a built-in mic and aptX codec support. This wireless cable system can be bought separately as an accessory, if you ever have the desire to make your IE 100 Pro drivers do double duty as day-to-day earbuds.

But here, I’m reviewing the IE 100 Pro as they come and at their most basic: a wired set of passive IEMs for analogue connection to sound sources, monitoring rigs and DJ mixers inclusive. And, in a word, I’m impressed.

Performance

From first impressions and on build quality alone, the Sennheiser IE 100 Pro are a compelling pair. The earbud bodies are plastic, but they’re in no way thin or flimsy; they feel fully robust in-hand, without being too heavy to wear comfortably.

Being small of earhole, I elected to install the smallest size of provided ear tip. The IE 100 Pro ship with the medium tips attached, but replacing them proved to be remarkably easy – without being too easy. The new ear tips snapped into place, and felt extremely secure thereafter.

The silicon ear tips provided with the IE 100 Pro are familiar in form and feel; they’re single-flanged, which is a small shame when other shapes with better fits are a possibility. I, personally, don’t love single-flanged ear tips much, for the fact there’s so much material contact in your ear - which can lead to sweatiness and irritation in short order, against the gentler yet tighter-fitting potential of a double flange. This is nitpicky stuff though, really, and especially so at this price.

Where the wires connect to each earbud, there’s a length of posable cable so you can route them comfortably around the back of your ear, and be sure that they stay when you move your hands away. Putting the earbuds in and getting the cables settled feels as natural as tucking your hair behind your ears. More generally, the IE 100 Pro are surprisingly comfortable at first ‘plug’; they slot gamely into place, and are very content to stay without much in the way of rubbing or discomfort.

My first test with the IE 100 Pro was at my desk, listening to audio streamed from Qobuz via my laptop’s headphone output, so as to get a sense of their sound profile. I was happy with what I heard, too. Queens Of The Stone Age’s Era Vulgaris was my go-to album, and the separation between parts was remarkable. I did find the sound itself to be oddly impersonal; it’s an analytical frame that gives a lot of definition and even preference to mids and high mids especially. Coupled with a bit of treble roll-off, it adds up to something that initially feels quite biased – but on further testing, makes perfect sense.

Taking the IE 100 Pro out to the studio for a live rehearsal, much of the low end that I felt was getting short shrift simply made it into my body via other means. I wouldn’t use these for mixing at home, but they prove hugely beneficial for making mix decisions in loud rooms. That preference for upper-range information was not only analytically representative, but also hugely practical for filling in everything that gets attenuated by plugging your ears airtight with two plastic clumps.

Speaking of which, the isolation here is great. Even at home, typing on a keyboard and auditioning some DAW mixes, I couldn’t hear my own keystrokes, or even the slam of the front door when my wife returned home. In practice, I found it very easy to focus on what I was hearing in-ear against a loud PA system.

The final test, really, was the longevity test. After a certain point, you simply forget that they’re in there; I could easily have gone over an hour wearing them without needing to take a break, and that’s not really how any of us wear in-ears anyway. One time, I took them out after a long stint at the DJ decks, and my ears sort-of missed them.

Final verdict

I think the Sennheiser IE 100 Pro, ultimately, are excellent. They’re as comfortable as they could ever be at this price point, they do an excellent job of feeding you exactly what you need to hear in a loud, boomy environment, and they’re hardy enough that I’m not too worried about dropping them a bunch at soundcheck (though I’d be a little more worried if I stood on them).

There are some shortcomings to the IE 100 Pro; useful as the sound profile is, there’s still a little missing low end that could be useful elsewhere – and the high end does roll off in a noticeable way, though not in a gig-breaking way. If these are the kinds of things that are likely to get in your way on the IEM front, you simply need to be upping your budget. In my view, these exemplify value for money.

Specification

• Drivers: Single 10mm dynamic
• Frequency range: 20Hz – 18kHz
• Impedance: 20 ohms
• Sound pressure level: 115dB (1kHz/1Vrms)
• Total harmonic distortion (THD): <0.1% (1kHz, 94 dB)
• Noise attenuation: <26 dB
• Weight: 160g
• In the box: 1.3m cable; x3 silicone ear tips (S, M, L); x1 foam ear tips (M); soft pouch; cleaning tool
• Contact: Sennheiser

Also consider

Hands-on demos

Sennheiser

The Headphone Show

What is it?

There’s a certain point in every home studio’s evolution where the limitations of smaller speakers become difficult to ignore. You can only ask so much of a compact set of budget monitors, particularly when you’re working with bass-heavy music or need something capable of filling a larger room. With its Forty Sixty monitors, M-Audio is offering a relatively affordable route to something altogether more substantial.

The Forty Sixty is a two-way active studio monitor built around a 6.5” Kevlar woofer and a 1” soft dome tweeter. Each speaker has its own 100W Class AB bi-amplification system, split between 60W for the woofer and 40W for the tweeter, with a rear bass-reflex port helping to extend low-frequency response. Internally, M-Audio has also incorporated some fancy DSP-based crossover and equalisation to help it thrive in different listening situations.

Where the Forty Sixty differs from more conventional studio monitors is in its willingness to embrace features usually associated with consumer audio equipment. Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity, for example, allows wireless playback from a phone or tablet, while a dedicated button on the front panel provides quick access to different listening modes, including ‘Flat’ for flat-frequency response studio work and ‘Hype’, which provides a more flattering output designed for gaming, movies or regular music listening. There’s also a custom setting, accessible through a companion app, which incorporates a five-band EQ for tailoring the sound to individual preferences or room characteristics.

For conventional studio duties, connectivity comes courtesy of balanced XLR and quarter-inch TRS inputs, with a rear-mounted level control. At 335mm tall and weighing over seven kilograms each, these are large speakers, particularly if you’re graduating from smaller desktop monitors.

The overall proposition is straightforward though. Heavy-duty amplification, larger drivers and modern connectivity, all at a price that puts the Forty Sixty within reach of home producers looking for a more capable monitoring setup.

Features & performance

Coming from a pair of 5” monitors, namely the trusty M-Audio BX5 D2 I’ve been using for donkey’s years, the first thing that struck me about the Forty Sixty was their sheer physical presence. These are relatively large speakers, and positioning them in my studio required a little more consideration than I’d anticipated. In fact, their weight was enough to make my generic metal speaker stands wobble slightly under the weight, although that probably says more about my habit of cheaping out on the non-exciting parts of my studio than the speakers themselves. Either way, you’ll want to make sure you have somewhere suitably sturdy to place them.

Once everything was connected, however, the benefits of larger cabinets and drivers became immediately apparent. The Forty Sixty sounded phenomenal in my studio, providing a sense of scale and authority that represented a significant improvement over the smaller monitors I’d been using previously.

Most of my testing involved a MacBook Pro, connected through a Native Instruments Komplete Audio 6 interface and running Ableton Live 12 and IK Multimedia’s excellent Tonex amp simulator, providing a familiar setup for evaluating the speakers across music production and everyday listening tasks. I also connected a Eurorack modular synthesizer, giving the Forty Sixty pair an opportunity to handle a different type of sound source.

Across these more traditionally studio-based applications, the speakers performed superbly. I had in mind the smaller speakers I was used to and found the difference was almost night and day. There was much more clean headroom, and the greater low-frequency capability was particularly welcome, giving bass tracks on a song I’m working on in Live much more definition which, in turn, made mixing much easier.

Likewise, the overall experience felt far bigger and more rounded than I was used to from my previous setup. Testing out some streamed video content - Visionquest, if you’re interested - demonstrated a much broader sonic palette too although, realistically, these are likely to be pure studio monitors in my possession rather than do-it-all speakers. Nice to hear the difference a larger speaker can make in everyday life though.

Of course, it’s important to distinguish between a speaker that sounds impressive, and one that provides an accurate reference for mixing. Larger drivers and greater bass extension can make an immediate difference to how enjoyable music sounds, but room acoustics, speaker position and familiarity remain just as important when making critical production decisions. Here, the Forty Sixty pair made a compelling case for moving up from a smaller monitoring system. It’s everything you think you’ve heard previously, only more of it.

Connectivity is another strength. The balanced analogue inputs made integration with my existing studio equipment straightforward, as you’d expect, while the Bluetooth is a useful thing to have alongside. I also like that the pairing button is on the front, not hidden away round the back of the unit. Would I use the Bluetooth functionality regularly? Probably not. My studio is primarily a music-making space, and a wired connection through my interface remains the obvious choice for recording and production. Bluetooth introduces latency, making it less suitable for time-critical monitoring, but it’s handy for casual listening or checking material from another device.

I felt similarly about the selectable listening modes. Being able to switch between Flat and Hype modes from the front panel is convenient, and the additional custom EQ functionality adds flexibility. However I suspect many users with dedicated studios will set-and-forget their chosen mode and rarely, if ever, change it.

Competition is strong in this category. While a step up in price is clear, Adam Audio’s T7V offers a 7” woofer and the brands’ distinctive U-ART tweeter, while KRK’s Rokit RP7 G5 combines a 7” driver with extensive DSP equalisation options. Pioneer’s VM70, meanwhile, provides similarly sized drivers and flexible voicing options, particularly for producers and DJs. All three deserve consideration, however the M-Audio Forty Sixty stand out through their combination of features and their pricing. For someone upgrading from basic monitors, or looking to equip a slightly larger studio without spending a fortune, the Forty Sixty makes a persuasive argument.

Final verdict

The M-Audio Forty Sixty shows you can buy a lot of monitor for not a lot of cash, relatively speaking. With powerful amplification, large drivers and a surprisingly comprehensive feature list, they deliver an experience that feels considerably more ambitious than the price might suggest.

For me, the biggest revelation was the improvement over my previous 5” monitors. Pound for pound, the old speakers have done well over the years but the additional scale and low-frequency presence made working with synths, tracking guitars and mixing a much more pleasurable experience. That alone makes them a compelling upgrade for anyone who feels they’ve outgrown a smaller monitoring setup.

There are compromises. These speakers need space and appropriate support, and their size might make optimal placement more difficult if your space is smaller. Likewise, some of the headline features might prove unnecessary in a dedicated production environment.

Bluetooth and selectable EQ modes are welcome conveniences but they’re unlikely to change the workflow of someone who already has a well-established studio setup.

Still, those extras don’t detract from the fundamentals. The M-Audio Forty Sixty offers impressive sound, straightforward connectivity and enough flexibility to appeal to producers, creators and enthusiasts alike.

Specifications

• Type: Two-way active nearfield studio monitor
• Woofer: 6.5-inch / 165mm Kevlar
• Tweeter: 1-inch / 25mm soft dome
• Amplification: 100W per speaker, bi-amplified Class AB (60W LF / 40W HF)
• Frequency response: 39Hz–22kHz (-10dB)
• Maximum SPL: 113dB
• Inputs: Balanced XLR and 6.35mm TRS
• Wireless: Bluetooth 5.3, True Wireless Stereo
• Processing: DSP crossover, Flat/Hype/Custom modes, app-based five-band EQ
• Enclosure: Rear-ported, vinyl-wrapped MDF
• Dimensions (H × W × D): 335 × 216 × 218mm
• Weight: 7.2kg per speaker
• Contact: M-Audio

Hands-on demos

Gear4Music

Taps Das

On paper, the second album by 80s sensations Frankie Goes To Hollywood should have been a nailed on cert. Released 40 years ago today, Liverpool was the sequel to the triple-platinum double-album excess of Welcome to the Pleasuredome and this was a band that finally had the time and money to grow and make good on their early, rough-and-ready promise. So when and how did Frankie’s wheels fall off and why does Liverpool only now get a glimmer of the credit and love it deserves?

To find out, we’ve got to go all the way back to 1984. Circa ‘84, Frankie were riding high. Their debut single Relax had just been deliciously banned, and they were about to score a simultaneous number one and number two when its bombastic sequel, Two Tribes, dragged Relax back up for a second ‘coming’.

For fledgling record label ZTT, Frankie were the golden goose, and for label owner and soon-to-be-superproducer Trevor Horn things were only ever on the up.

Horn had learnt his trade under the cosh of '70s producer Biddu and playing second fiddle (bass, to be exact) in a string of mildly successful bands. Not least his own Buggles, whose Video Killed the Radio Star wound up soundtracking the entire MTV era.

A fiercely enthusiastic proponent of new technology Horn had – part by right-time, right-place chance, part by virtue of his talent – found himself as the figurehead of a new way to make music. And as head of his own ZTT label alongside the talents of engineer Gary Langan, Fairlight operator JJ Jeczalik and keyboard player and arranger Anne Dudley, he’d found ready and willing compatriots.

Horn’s early-adopter suspicions – sharpened through his ‘fake band’ Buggles exercise – that recording studio technology was about to explode had been proved 100% right. And so, by 1984, with first-mover advantage, he’d sidestepped the naysayers, proved the old guard wrong and won the war.

However, that war wasn’t without its casualties.

Step up Frankie Goes To Hollywood. While Horn had ‘plucked them from obscurity’ following their lucky break appearance on The Tube and hits had ensued, post-Pleasuredome comedown, things weren’t as fluffy and fun as they seemed on the surface.

The Frankie we loved were a screen-hogging cultural behemoth able to top the charts non-stop for nine weeks, hold two singles in the top five and take a pricey double album to number one for their debut.

In reality, however, they were a mismatched, rag-tag, five piece funk/pop/rock/whatever gaggle of semi-friends who had inadvertently strapped themselves to a rollercoaster.

While having hits was ‘great’, and seeing the world from a first-class window was certainly an experience, the small matter of not receiving any credit or – worse – any money, had, by 1985, begun to rankle.

“We were denigrated for the fact that it was machines on the records, whereas New Order made Blue Monday and were hailed as the best thing since sliced bread,” lead vocalist and frontman Holly Johnson moaned to The Times. Famously, Horn and team had feverishly worked non-stop for days on tracks for Frankie’s debut without the band in attendance because they were forced to return to Liverpool once a week en masse in order to sign on and secure their unemployment allowance.

Johnson recalled to Q: “I went to my bank, the NatWest, and I put my gold disc down and said ‘This is my collateral, now will you give me a 500 quid overdraft?’ And he said ‘Let me show this to somebody’ and he came back, and he wouldn’t let me have it.”

You’d be forgiven for thinking that with Horn as producer, studio owner, record company and band confidante, the route from cash register to the band’s back pocket would be more direct than usual. However, thanks to the unique way in which Horn’s empires were structured, the opposite was actually true.

Money for nothing

It worked a little like this:

Fledgling label ZTT (owned by Horn and his wife) was financially propped up by Island Records. And, as soon as ZTT’s first single broke – Frankie’s Relax (let’s not count experimental 12”-only EP Into Battle With The Art of Noise) – both parties were coining it in.

And flush with Frankie cash, ZTT would pay for Sarm studio time (also owned by Horn and his wife) so that Horn could make more Frankie hits. Horn could have his pick of new technology and duly spent hundreds of thousands on Fairlights and – later, and essential for Pleasuredome’s completion – a Synclavier hard disc system. Suitably tooled-up, as one of the world’s top recording studios, Sarm was – in return – able to charge ZTT a mint for recording time. And round and round the money went.

Meanwhile, as per every recording contract, a label ‘gives’ money to an artist in the form of an advance. This money is a) to keep them sweet and put some food on the table and b) cover their recording expenses, put their videos on TV and designer clothes on their backs. And Frankie were, of course, on the receiving end of such a deal. Never forget that on paper Frankie were a huge financial gamble, all leather and spunk and little else, and so ZTT were very much putting their money where Frankie’s mouth was.

The aim was, of course, to have a spectacular hit and if that hit happened the incoming mountain of money would pay off any and all bills and everyone would be a winner. Most specifically the band who, finally free from the debt mountain their contract had saddled them with, would finally get their share of the profits.

But work at Sarm’s coalface, cranking out the hits that would make everyone rich, was more laborious than usual. Instead of quickfiring singles at the chart and rinsing the band for a fast buck, Horn and his ZTT had other ideas.

Free from record company pressure (Horn WAS the record company) he would painstakingly spend days fine-tuning and experimenting. Free from shackles, Horn was hellbent on pop perfection, all the while earning a fortune on a tab that would only ever be picked up by the band.

Surely a ZTT bean-counter must have been chomping at the bit for new product? Watching hundreds of thousands disappearing into a studio with only a ‘it’ll be ready when it’s ready’ promise of salable material in return doesn’t sound like a great business plan. But when the label owner, studio owner, producer and band ringmaster are the same person, things can get a little muddied.

Frankie’s impending financial dire straits were clear from the off. There had been a lengthy seven months in the studio between the release of their debut single Relax and its follow-up, Two Tribes. And with a 24 October 1983 release for Relax and a 29 October 1984 release date for the band’s debut album, the band had already unwittingly been saddled with an entire year of recording costs.

So how much were Frankie in hock? Estimates place that bill at around £760,000. Further speculation suggests that Horn ran up another £80,000 in costs for mixing alone, bringing that total to £840,000. And given the amount of second and THIRD 12” singles of each release, it's clear that Horn and ZTT LOVED a remix…

But never forget that the magic worked. Welcome to the Pleasuredome – Frankie’s overblown debut album – was a huge success. It sold a quarter of a million copies in its first week alone in the UK, reached number one and enjoyed similar success all across Europe.

And this was a double album. At a time when single (hit) albums would retail for £4.99 in the UK, ZTT were able to charge upwards of £8.99 for Frankie’s double-helping – a figure that more than paid for that gatefold sleeve and extra vinyl (but which in actuality only contained 13 songs, including one instrumental and four cover versions).

And thus debts were cleared, and the band got paid. However, by this point, much of the damage was done.

It’s safe to say that Frankie hadn’t particularly enjoyed their rocket ship to stardom. Not being allowed to play on their own records, working non-stop on endless promotional duties, being publicly perceived as Trevor Horn’s puppets AND watching their share of the profits dangled on the end of an ever lengthening piece of string had, sadly, rather taken the shine off their success. And it’s this atmosphere into which – by late 1985 – thoughts of a Pleasuredome sequel were tentatively being launched. But this was a band that had scored three number-one singles and a number two. Plus a number one debut (double) album. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, pretty much everything.

Banned in Britain

Come late 1985, thanks to the state of UK taxation (with the band potentially losing 60% of their hard-fought Pleasuredome earnings) Frankie had decamped to Borris House in County Carlow in Ireland, as many UK pop stars did. The band would hang out with a similarly exiled Def Leppard and Spandau Ballet, learning from (and drinking with) pop’s pros. Besides, time away from the limelight would be an excellent opportunity for the band to come up with a worthy successor to their (filler-laden) debut.

However, forcing the band into seclusion together would only exacerbate divisions that – during a year on the promo path and a UK and American live tour – had already begun to open.

Behind the scenes, vocalist Johnson was growing rather tired of a band finding its feet and determined to prove its worth. ‘The Lads’ as they were known – drummer Peter ‘Ped’ Gill, guitarist Brian ‘Nasher’ Nash and bassist Mark O’Toole – had, thanks to their live appearances, grown in musical stature and were – second time around – determined to play on their records.

Johnson, meanwhile, had no such qualms with Horn’s grip and felt that ‘he’ was the true voice of Frankie anyway. “You’re hearing the sound of my voice and the melodies I wrote and the lyrics that I wrote – and that’s what most people listen to when they hear a record. Relax might have amazing production values, but it’s really the sound of the vocal that makes it exciting,” Johnson told The Times. Meanwhile, co-vocalist Paul Rutherford would skillfully dance the fine line between the two camps.

In short, Johnson had decided that the rest of the band and their producer were to be tolerated rather than collaborated with. “In Ireland our days of playing or jamming together were gone,” writes Nash in his Nasher Says Relax autobiography. “Holly didn’t have the patience to hang about while we kicked around arrangements and we didn’t have the patience to listen to him warbling and complaining that everything was “too loud”.”

Nevertheless, working on a four-track in the ballroom downstairs and passing tapes to an aloof Johnson upstairs, music did begin to happen. “Rage Hard was written there. Ped had been influenced by the drum feel from Ratt’s Lay It Down which was on heavy rotation during our time in America. We were suckers for a bit of metal, however cheesy it might be,” Nash explains. “Is Anybody Out There? was also written during this period… But those were the only ones that ended up included on the Liverpool album.”

Certainly, Ireland had made Frankie ‘a band’ rather than a studio experiment, but a band insistent on “developing” and “finding a new sound” for “a record that would have to be as good – if not better – than our debut”. And all the while they were falling apart from the inside.

“The elephant in the room was the fact that only Holly, Paul and Mark were actually on the records. Not putting them on the record was, I freely admit, a mistake on my part,” Horn admits in his Adventures in Modern Recording. “With a little bit more effort I could have figured out how to feature them and not doing so was a lapse of bedside manner on my part.”

Horn had spent all of 1984 under the cosh, crafting pure gold from raw musical iron. And now, at the end of 1985, with the band getting busy in County Carlow, with an increasing sense of dread, Horn realised that soon he would have to do it all again.

Or not.

Faced with a band whose passion for and confidence in Horn’s skills and business methods were tangibly on the wane, and seeing a year-long slog snaking ahead, Horn – perhaps with his successful reputation, record company and studio under his belt and with little else to prove – simply, unbelievably, instead, chose to pass.

Horn would not be producing Frankie’s follow-up. End of. And with Horn effectively the boss of everything, there was nothing that anyone – fans, band, manager – could do about it.

Wanted: Producer

But with Horn off the table, who would (could?) take his place? The answer was right under Horn’s nose. Stephen Lipson had been appointed to replace Gary Langan after Langan had departed to produce ABC’s second album (another sequel which Horn had mysteriously passed up). In a short time Lipson had proved his worth, going on to entirely produce Propaganda’s debut album for ZTT following Horn’s working and reworking of their Dr Mabuse debut single, as Horn himself became too embroiled with Frankie.

It’s Lipson that laboured with Sarm’s new Synclavier on the late stages of Two Tribes and Pleasuredome after it had sat unloved and misunderstood at the studio for weeks. Having mastered its intricacies, he would go on to construct (and deconstruct) Grace Jones’ classic Slave To The Rhythm single and something-out-of-nothing LP entirely within it. While it’s Horn’s name in capitals on the sleeve, it’s Lipson’s lower-case ‘Assisted By’ credit that follows immediately after.

So the more Horn squinted at the Frankie problem, the more simply having Lipson produce the Pleasuredome sequel looked increasingly like a formality. Sure, not stepping into the driving seat and crafting another Frankie classic might disappoint fans (and would perhaps deny the world another '80s classic), but at the end of the day he would still get paid via ZTT and Sarm exactly as before.

Besides – by perhaps over-indulging his ZTT uberlord title a little – Horn could dip in and ‘fiddle’ as much or as little as he liked. He could be ‘Executive Producer’ instead – dodge the hard stuff and still get the credit. This wasn’t a questionable about-face. This was an undeniable ‘win-win ’.

So perhaps Liverpool was doomed from the off. “We all knew it wouldn’t be as good,” admits a typically weary Lipson on the 80sography podcast. “It was a poisoned chalice. Nobody wanted to do it. I did it because the boys were happy with me. It was never going to be like the first album. It couldn’t be.”

Thus, it’s Lipson, not Horn who locked horns with a newly invigorated and educated Frankie at Amsterdam’s Wisseloord Studios in November 1985. He shipped over his Synclavier and they began building an album that had to keep everyone, from the band, to their fans, to their label, to Horn, happy.

“They’d write the backing tracks [the lads] and he’d figure what to do [Johnson]. It was very disjointed,” Lipson admits. Nevertheless, Lipson put the hours in, working alongside the increasingly studio-savvy drummer Peter Gill to craft backing tracks from fragmented recordings while Nash and O’Toole busied themselves drinking, phoning transatlantic sex lines and making countless model aircraft, purchased from a nearby shop.

“We donated our plastic masterpieces to the studio, and they hung the planes above the bar. I wonder if they’re still there?” muses Nash.

Gill, on the other hand, got busy with different hardware. "I've got an old Roland TR-808 drum machine which has a set of trigger outputs and I use these with either a Dynacord Percuter or a Roland DDR30,” Gill explained to Sound On Sound. “Once I've got a nice little groove happening along with the track we've already recorded, I use an SRC Friendchip synchroniser to lock the two together so that I can add a few electronic drum sounds to the basic three-piece foundation of guitar, bass and drums already recorded. I also use a Roland Octapad and assign the outputs to play samples on the Emulator.”

Free from tax exile, Lipson would sneak back to Sarm in the UK sporadically to employ the talents of keyboard players Peter Vettese and Pleasuredome mainstay Andy Richards to build upon the band's Wisseloord recordings under Horn’s watchful eye. Slowly but surely, the album that would become Liverpool began to take shape.

Johnson however, remained elusive and aloof throughout. And despite the band being totally at ease with Lipson at the controls, Johnson had other ideas.

“Holly was not happy with the sound of the tracks and thought they were too “heavy rock” and we were having too much influence in the direction of the music,” writes Nash. “Despite this he would never make suggestions as to how it should sound… On the other hand we would have probably ignored him anyway…

“Holly wondered why the producer wasn’t there… Trevor had told Holly that he would be producing the second album. The rest of us had been told that Steve Lipson was producing. Steve had been told that he was the producer…” Chinese whispers threatened to derail the entire project.

“Holly was – to put it politely – a little negative about the whole process,” explains Lipson. “He used to say to me “I need two days' notice if you want me to sing”. It was all just difficult. He wouldn’t participate. He wouldn’t be there with everyone. He had a new boyfriend, and they were loved up and good luck to him, but he made the album really hard for me. I was only trying to get it good. I felt like the enemy and I could never understand why.”

Confronted (and ever so slightly ambushed) by a band desperate to heal the rift, things were about to get even worse. “We just wanted answers,” Nash writes. “Like it or not, our futures were intertwined and we wanted to know what was going to happen down the line. Holly lost his rag – maybe he thought the best form of defence was attack – and he started shouting and told us to get out. We left. The crack had just got a little bit wider.”

So wide that – perhaps being a little stir crazy thanks to their Amsterdam exile – the next day the band decided that they needed a new vocalist. But who should they call? Simple: Simon Le Bon.

“The Power Station was doing its own thing and although the remaining members of Duran [Duran] had formed Arcadia there didn’t seem to be any firm plan about their collective future,” thought Nash, and soon O’Toole had tracked Le Bon down to an apartment in Paris.

“Do you fancy being the singer in Frankie Goes To Hollywood?” O’Toole probed. “I would be the perfect singer for Frankie Goes To Hollywood,” Le Bon responded, before explaining that “being the gentleman he was” he could not leave his fellow band members at such a time. “Simon’s loyalty lay with his mates. He said he was flattered, but declined our offer,” Nash writes.

And minutes later, a call to old friend Pete Wylie of Wah! drew a similar negative. “We got blanked twice in one night. We must be shite!” reasoned Nash.

Band on the run

However, the Frankie show had to go on and taking a break for their own sanity, the band collectively decamped to their next tax hideyhole on the island of Jersey. There, the band wrote Watching The Wildlife and laid down the grooves for Lunar Bay and For Heaven’s Sake.

But the tensions within the band were only getting worse. So much so that when The Lads and Paul decided to install themselves on Jersey, Johnson chose to live on Guernsey instead.

“The songwriting was laboured, bordering on the farcical. We had deteriorated into two camps writing on two separate islands off the coast of France,” admitted Nash. “We would prepare backing tracks and post them to Guernsey. We would not get to hear Holly’s input until we returned to Wisseloord weeks later.”

It’s a miracle therefore that, back at Wisseloord, Lipson had pieced together the band’s fragments and come up with eight coherent tracks – mercifully just enough for an album. Finally everyone’s nightmare was over, and a release would be a formality.

Everyone, however, was to be proved wrong.

Throughout Liverpool’s recording, Horn had been little more than a watchful eye. Voicing opinions on which of the band’s demos should make the cut and which should remain in the studio and ensuring that Lipson treated his investment with care. Now, with all the hard and painful work done, back in London, it was Horn’s cue to get busy. And that meant spending more of the band’s money.

Wisseloord had cost the band £300,000 already but in order to complete the task of putting together what would become Liverpool, Horn required another Sony 24-track digital recorder. Having two meant that he could move huge swathes of music between them, bouncing, extending and appending without any loss of quality. The price of such power? A total hire charge of £100,000. At the end of the day, poring over the bills, the band discovered that it would have been cheaper if he’d simply bought one.

Similarly, eight AMS digital delays were hired at a cost of £40 each a day. “How many do you need?” reasoned Nash. Meanwhile, a huge Marshall stack sat in the studio, hired in, but completely unused for the entire project. But the bitterest pill? The band had innocently borrowed Horn’s Roland TR-808 for a couple of days. Months later, examining an invoice, they saw that they’d been charged for it. Ouch.

The total bill for Liverpool would – just like Pleasuredome before it – come in at £800,000. This meant that, with the band earning around 80p from every album sale, they would have to sell over a million copies before any of them earned a penny.

It had better be good then. However… It wasn’t.

“Towards the end there was panic, because it wasn’t as good,” admits Lipson. “It was chaos. It was all hands on deck at this point. We knew that we didn’t have a smash like Relax or Two Tribes. It was patently obvious to me. And then they sort of pinned their hopes on Warriors of the Wasteland… But it was inevitable.”

And there was no going back. The show must go on, and Frankie’s long overdue comeback needed a suitably grandiose launch. Step up the Montreux Golden Rose Festival of May 1986.

The Montreux festival of pop excess had, by 1986, become an '80s institution. Featuring live (aka mimed) performances by the world’s biggest rock and pop acts and broadcast to a huge trans-European audience, where better to re-launch an all-new Frankie? Thus, versions of Rage Hard and Warriors of the Wasteland were rushed into service and on Saturday 10 May 1986 Europe’s Frankiephiles settled in to watch the band’s long-overdue return with their first new material since Pleasuredome 19 months earlier.

But while fans lapped up Frankie’s return, their new, more serious, ‘rockier’ sound was an unexpected party crash. Set opener Rage Hard, in its Montreux mix form, featured an extended (boring?) drum intro and so anyone expecting Relax-style dancefloor fireworks was immediately disappointed. Likewise, the early Warriors of the Wasteland traded Two Tribes’ machine-gun bassline and drum machine in favour of ‘real music’ on ‘real instruments’. The whole performance came across as ‘Def Leppard Lite’ for Frankie fans whose tastes had been finely tuned by the band's technology-fuelled excess previously.

More remarkable than the music would be the Lads’ decision – following a drunken afternoon watching Liverpool beating Everton 3-1 in the FA Cup Final – to smash up their gear at the end of their performance. Their exploits would win them some pitying tabloid coverage as they laid waste not only to the ruse that they had performed live, but also to a one-off, hand-made Levinson bass guitar, lent to O’Toole for the gig. “You f__king asshole, that was a $1,500 bass! I’ll sue you, motherfucker,” Levinson moaned as O’Toole took three attempts to crack its neck across the kick drum.

Nevertheless, with the cat now officially out of the bag, Rage Hard and Warriors single releases (and an opportunity to start earning back what they owed ZTT) would surely be a formality? But Trevor Horn, once again, had other ideas.

Back to the drawing board

Instead of trading on the Montreux hype, Rage Hard would endure months more of Horn tinkering and wouldn’t surface in stores until 25 August 1986. This meant that fans had waited 22 months for new Frankie material. Worse, in the absence of a single release, the Frankie faithful had watched their VHS recordings of the Montreux performance on endless loop for three and a half months. Even they were bored of Rage Hard by the time it was released.

Lipson and Horn did have one surprise up their sleeves, however. Rage Hard’s Young Person’s Guide To The 12” mix would go some way to explaining and making up for the delay. A pun on Benjamin Britten’s educational Young Person’s Guide To The Orchestra, in which a narrator introduces the various elements of the orchestra, Horn’s 12-minutes-plus remix of Rage Hard does likewise, with a sexy female voiceover introducing elements such as “the perky percussion”, “the sequencer” and “the godlike bass guitar” as Rage Hard (in barely recognisable form) ebbs and flows beneath them.

Originally, actress Joanna Lumley provided the voiceover from a script written by wordsmith and ZTT's antagonist-in-residence Paul Morely, and while Horn, Lipson and the band thought her performance was excellent, Lumley, subsequently thought otherwise. Having second thoughts about the sexual references she’d committed to tape she prudishly prevented them from using the recording. Instead, comedian Pamela Stephenson was commissioned to replace Lumley and lent the track her best newsreader voice.

While the mix would reward the Frankie faithful (and came in a beautiful cardboard collector's box giving fans somewhere to put all of Rage Hard’s many mixes and formats), the 7” moved only slightly from the Montreux mix months earlier. “I don’t think there were major differences between the two,” complained Nash, “apart from one costing more money than the other.” Teamed with the delay to the track's release – with rabid fans literally unable to buy it following its Montreux debut – Frankie’s big comeback only debuted at number six in the UK.

Sure, it would go to number one in Germany and reach as high as four in the UK (seven in the Netherlands, 12 in Austria, 19 in Sweden and 32 in France) but following the band’s hard work on breaking America with Pleasuredome promo, its inability to hit any kind of Billboard chart in the big money market, came as a huge disappointment.

But with lead single duly deployed, there was nothing for it but to reveal the real fruit of their labours. Liverpool, the band’s sequel to their ground-breaking debut, was released in the UK on 20 October 1986, a date almost perfectly mirroring Pleasuredome’s release two years earlier.

And, from day one, things did not go well.

While Q magazine liked the album (Q itself had only just launched and were perhaps afraid of heaping ire on such a monster so early in their tenure) everyone else wasn’t quite so sure. James Brown called it “a predictable piece of rock junk” in Sounds while David Quanitck asked “What do you do when you've made a completely excessive double album which made history as highly moderate filler?” in NME.

Liverpool was impressive, certainly, but ‘good’? Arguably and demonstrably not. Common consensus suggested that by and large, Liverpool was the band being someone else. A new Frankie that, whilst being perhaps a more true, ‘real’ Frankie, wasn’t the Frankie that everyone in the mid-80s signed up for.

The infectious, trashy glamour of singles such as Relax and Two Tribes was gone. Instead of more hedonistic dance-pop brilliance, fans were served tense, self-conscious stiff rock posturing. Perhaps, above all else, Frankie simply weren’t fun any more. Serious in being taken seriously, they’d allowed their annoyance at their perception to break the fourth wall and be visible right there on the front of the box. And like a knock on the door during lovemaking, with the band’s finger pointed at them to comply, fans proved unable to keep up their enthusiasm.

It’s unsurprising, therefore, that chart-wise Liverpool never matched its predecessor. While the album entered the chart at number five, it would spend only a single week in the top UK 10. And while it would go on to achieve Gold status in the UK, Pleasuredome’s triple Platinum rating cemented Liverpool’s standing as forever a flop.

And following Rage Hard and Liverpool’s moist squibs, it was only ever a case of diminishing returns for the rest of Liverpool’s singles. Warriors of the Wasteland (released 10 November 1986, three weeks after the Liverpool album and a full six months after its Montreux debut) only reached number 19 in the UK. While Watching The Wildlife, the third and final single release from Liverpool (and Frankie’s last ever release) only reached number 28 despite a blizzard of remixes across a cassette single and THREE different ‘fan-pleasing’ 12”s.

Special mention to Liverpool’s last stab, Wildlife’s Die Letzten Tage Der Menschheit mix (“The Last Days of Mankind”) which sets the otherwise perky and cheerful track to a stern teutonic backdrop over which the actor John Hurt dishes out doom-laden warnings about 1986’s ensuing AIDS crisis.

Johnson had wanted to call the album From The Diamond Mine To The Factory, a line from his Warriors lyric that spelt out the band’s journey, but – predictably – the rest of the band disagreed. Instead, Paul Morley suggested simply Liverpool, which met with reluctant approval. “In hindsight I would have picked Holly’s title because it was at least connected to the content of the album,” Nash would later admit.

And the final word on Liverpool? It’s perhaps best summed up by Johnson’s final words, emitted as its last track, Is Anybody Out There? – very much Liverpool’s Power of Love – melts into delicious, overblown reverb mush. At the end of it all, Johnson reflects: “I’m looking for something and I don’t know what it is.”

Buddy. You’re not the only one.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: Recording studios tend to be acoustically perfect, atmospherically or sonically sealed, and quiet environments for getting the best recorded take. They also tend to be non-moving and building-based. So why would you consider sticking one on a bus? Or in a Nando's restaurant? Or on a 100-year old boat on the Thames? Madness this way surely lies!

From wheels to fried chicken, here are some of the wackiest and imperfect places to record music.

1. Timbaland's Bus

The idea of setting up a recording studio on a bus is weird, obviously, especially if you are considering setting it up on one of those public transport-style busses complete with a driver and 1950s-garbed ticket collector.

It's perhaps not so weird if you have the kind of cash to splash as Timbaland obviously did back in 2010 when he decided to convert a bus (actually a luxury touring style coach, if we're honest) at a cost of $1.3million dollars.

He ended up with a fully-fledged, SSL-based pro studio that just happened to have an engine and some wheels underneath.

The studio was fitted out with some of the best gear of the time, including an SSL Matrix desk, a 24-in/24-out interface, and seven SSL XLogic X-Rack preamp, EQ and compressor modules.

Monitors came by way of Genelec and KRK, and there was even a gold-plated Neumann microphone on board. Of course there was.

The studio had all of the other luxuries you might imagine, with multi-coloured strip lighting, gadgets and big TVs galore. It was actually one of the coolest vehicles you could possibly imagine, but we are talking about Timbaland here, so what did you expect?

The MMG (Mosley Music Group, Timbaland’s label) bus first hit the streets (literally) back in 2010, although it's not known whether it's still a-rocking, a-rolling and a-recording these days, but its SSL Matrix desk was reportedly sold in 2021.

We can only imagine that the yearly MOT was not only complicated but expensive, so it's probably unlikely that this is a bus you can still hitch a ride and record on these days, but here's a video tour of the vehicle from 2010 anyway.

2. LMS

Timbaland wasn't the first music maker to think that sticking wheels on a studio was a good idea. Previous to his bus, several mobile studios were trundling around the UK, used more obviously to record live events, but some so well spec'd that they became 'proper' recording venues in their own right.

Ronnie Lane's Mobile Studio (LMS) was the Small Faces bassist and songwriter's mobile studio. It was created in 1972 using an America Airstream trailers most often seen camped in by very rich people at music festivals. Or used for the supplying the kebabs and chips at the self same events.

The curved structure of the trailer apparently helped reduce standing waves, making the vehicle excellent for recording bass, handy considering Lane's vocation.

Producer/engineer Ron Nevison kitted out the mobile with a Helios desk, a Studer A80 8-track recorder (later upgraded to 16 tracks) and various bespoke pieces of outboard gear.

LMS was used to record Lane's Anymore for Anymore (1974) and One for the Road (1976) albums, but later attracted other (very) high profile musicians including Bob Marley, Marc Bolan, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, Rory Gallagher and The Who.

Lane subsequently sold the studio to Teddy Roffey the owner of Escape Studios in Kent in 1982. The studio was apparently overhauled in 2009 while owned by a company called LMS Vinyl, but now appears to be owned by Mark St John who is a collector of music memorabilia among other things, and can be seen with the studio in the background of this 2022 video.

You can also find our more information courtesy of The Music Locker here.

Or get the full LMS history here.

3. Mobile RAK

In 1974, TV talent finder Mickie Most was also getting in on the mobile studio action. His mobile RAK studio existed before he created his stationary, building-based RAK studios, a beautiful facility based near Regent's Park in London, which is still doing business and winning awards to this day.

The mobile studio was mostly used by RAK along with TV clients including the BBC and Thames Television. However, as it was fitted out with an API desk, a couple of 3M multitrackers and decent outboard including, limiters, compressors, and an echo plate reverb, it eventually attracted artists into its fully air-conditioned environment including Hot Chocolate and Donovan, with the studio operated and engineered by Doug Hopkins and Tim Summerhayes.

RAK Mobile's most notable recording, though, was one of the biggest tracks of the 1970s, Mull of Kintyre by Wings. Summerhayes was an assistant engineer on the recording, alongside Geoff Emerick explaining on Facebook that “we took the mobile to the farm a few days before the sessions and spent some time preparing the control room and recording room. We'd unload the equipment and carry them in a wheelbarrow to an improvised control room supervised by Geoff.”

But as important as that particular mobile recording studio was in the history of music, it didn't get a mention in the finished song. But our next entry most certainly did…

4. RMS

Yes, as famous as LMS and RAK's mobiles certainly were, they don't get the lyrical shout out quite like the Rolling Stones Mobile Recording Studio does, so this takes our 'top recording studio with wheels' award.

Rolling Stones Mobile Recording Studio, or RSM, was created in 1968 and so was the first mobile studio of its kind. It was essentially designed to be a wheely version of the Stones' favourite studio, Olympic, so featured top end gear like a 3M M79 tape machine (itself costing half a million dollars in today's money), and a custom built Helios desk.

The Stones recorded 1971's Sticky Fingers and 1972's Exile On Main St in the truck, but also let it out to other acts including Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Bob Marley, The Who and Black Sabbath.

Deep Purple are the notable names here, as they immortalised the studio on the iconic Smoke on the Water, which includes the lines 'to make records with a mobile' and 'The Rolling truck Stones thing just outside'.

Beat that RAK and LMS!

5. Churches

Next up, there are a surprising number of recording studios located in churches around the world, and why not, when you consider the inspiring atmosphere, the wonderful – if possibly over-the-top – acoustics and the fact that most are empty a lot of the time bar Sundays. Might as well stick some mics up and get some atmosphere recorded, right?

Famous ex recording studio-based churches include Blackwing Studios in London, which was part of a church known as All Hallows. This was a studio created by engineering genius Eric Radcliffe and became the location in which many seminal Mute Records albums were recorded. These included not only Depeche Mode's debut, Speak & Spell, but – and because it was based on the first floor of the building – the aptly-named Upstairs at Eric's debut long player from Yazoo.

The studio building is still there, as is the church garden, but it closed for recording business in 2001. Rumours suggest it might be being turned into flats - grrr.

Currently you can hire hire several holy (or ex holy) spaces to record in across the globe should you wish, including the south Wales-based StudiOwz (based in a converted chapel), The Nave in Leeds or, among many in the States, The Church studios in Palm Springs and The Church Studio in Tulsa.

However, to our minds, the holiest of holy studios – and also rather aptly called The Church Studio – is in Crouch End, London. It was converted, opened and owned by Dave Stewart of The Eurythmics in 1984 and was subsequently sold to David Grey, then Paul Epworth, who owns it today.

Check out Annie Lennox being interviewed in the studio here. She plays the organ, sings in it and everything…

Producer Paul Epworth brought the studio up to speed in 2013, adding a 72-channel vintage EMI/Neve console and eventually recording artists including Adele at the facility.

Other artists who have recorded there include Blur, Pet Shop Boys, The Kills and Bombay Bicycle Club.

Find out more here.

6. Boats

Believe it or not, along with wheeled-based transport, boats have also been considered and actually used as mobile options for recording studios.

Before he turned his attention to the initially much more practical (but actually not as it ended up) location of Montserrat for a recording studio, George Martin considered a 160-foot boat to fit a studio out in. His thinking was that it would be a lovely isolated studio, probably away from all of those pesky Beatles fans who were already covering the walls of Abbey Road with hearts at the time.

Common sense prevailed and Martin opted for what seemed like a safer, quieter and certainly warmer bet of the island of Montserrat for his next studio venture. Unfortunately, maybe that boat would have been a better option as two god-like forces of nature in the forms of a hurricane and volcano would eventually close his studio, albeit after he'd produced some iconic recordings there.

One person not to spot the disadvantages of boat-based recording was Pink Floyd's David Gilmour. In 1986, he bought a 1912 houseboat - although it was more 'block of flats' boat, to be honest - called the Astoria. Gilmour and Nick Mason recorded Floyd’s A Momentary Lapse of Reason there. Future Gilmour solo albums like On an Island and Rattle That Lock were also recorded on the boat.

“I got it on a mad whim really,” Gilmour says on Pink Floyd's YouTube channel. “Eventually the idea came that we could make a recording studio out of it. When you've spent your life in recording studios where there are darkened windowless rooms, to be in a place like that [the boat] where it's all glass, all windows and you've got the beautiful river flowing outside… It still is a magical place to work.”

The boat has been recently refitted and is still used by Gilmour – you can find out more in this video.

7. Nando's

Finally, you won't believe our last 'out there' recording location… It's none other than a Nandos restaurant. The famous restaurant chain is famous for its spicy chicken-based and good value dishes (yes, we want a discount!) but perhaps not for its musical output. That might well change thanks to the studio based in the basement of its Soho branch.

“All the best ideas start over PERi-PERi (or so we heard),” the chain said in 2018 when they opened the studio. “That’s why we’ve brought together two of our favourite things – chicken and tunes – for our first ever restaurant recording studio.”

We're not sure we quite understand the connection they're making there, but we like chicken and tunes too, so we're going with it.

Apparently the studio has been quite the success. It's free – but you don't get a sharing platter, which would be good – to the point where bookings seem to have ceased. We love the idea, though, and look forward to inevitable copycat ventures like McDonald's Music, Toby Carvery's Tunes and, of course, Burger King's Bangers.

What is it?

Phil X might hate them. Your parent’s favourite band probably derides them. Someone playing in a rock ‘n’ roll tribute group down the pub will scoff when you mention them. But there is no denying that in-ear monitors are a crucial part of live sound monitoring – and there is a reason some of the biggest artists on the planet rely on them.

The cold hard fact is, they offer a much more comprehensive and personal monitoring experience when playing live in comparison to wedge monitors. For bands that rely on tracks or busy mixes, wedges simply aren’t up to task – which is where in-ear monitors (IEMs) step in.

As someone who made the permanent jump from wedges to IEMs, I am something of a convert: it took a while to get used to, but nothing beats the freedom of being able to get exactly what you want from your live mix directly to your ears.

But in-ear monitoring comes at a price, and requires some degree of financial investment to get right. There’s no shortage of entry-level options on the market. I fell for some cheapo ones when I first started, and they were really quite bad. They didn’t fit right, felt weird in the ears, sounded flat… you get the picture. It pays to get a pair that will see you through your first steps and stick with you until you’re ready for the step up.

That’s where the Sony IER-M500s come in – a set of decently priced in-ears designed specifically for live sound, with a few extra features to boot. As a guitarist in a band that relies on a rather busy live mix, with lots of instruments and tracks to juggle, I was interested to see how these would fare…

Specs

• Launch price: $119 | £99 | €119
• Type: In-ear monitors
• Origin: Vietnam
• Driver: Single 0.2" / 5mm dynamic
• Connectivity: MMCX
• Frequency range: 5Hz to 40KHz
• Max SPL: 103 dB
• Impedance: 6 Ohms
• Options: Red & Blue, Clear, Black (as reviewed)
• Case: Yes
• Contact: Sony

Build quality

Build quality rating: ★★★★☆

At £99, these aren’t going to feel or function like your premium IEM options, but I have to say straight out of the box I like what I see.

These don’t feel as brittle or as plasticky as some other entry level IEMs around the same price point – they feel quite bulky, if anything – and though it opts for a plain plastic cable as opposed to the twisted or braided wires often seen, it doesn’t do anything to let down the overall look and feel.

Because of that choice, these have plenty of flex and movability, and I have no problem hooking these up to my monitor pack and getting them into place. I can twist, shake, move, contort… the IER-M500s do a good job of staying with me. You can, of course, change the cable if needed. It has an MMCX connection.

I also like the black plastic ‘ear hanger’ reinforcements on the loop. Some cheap in-ear monitors I’ve tried have awfully placed guides that dig into the ear and feel really uncomfortable. Many also have the tendency to make the IEM stick out at awkward angles and not actually fit on the profile of your ear. I have no such problem with these, thanks to the way they’ve been put together.

That said, are these too snug? I can imagine they’d leave a mark if you were to wear them for a prolonged set. After about 30 minutes of having them in, the fit fatigue starts to set in. This makes trying the different sizing options even important, and I'll get to that next.

The case they arrive in also feels slightly more upscale than a set of £99 in-ear monitors, with a decent shell for protection and some internal netting for keeping your accessories in place.

Usability

Usability rating: ★★★★★

As far as giving you everything you need to plug in and play, I am impressed with the options that Sony has provided here. It shouldn't be a hard thing to get right, sure, but the AV giant has thought about quite a lot for such an affordable set.

There are your usual options for earbud size and shapes, as well as a bunch of ear guards for ensuring a snug fit in your ear and improving noise isolation. Here, you get a slightly-more-generous-than-standard four pairs of earbud tips, which can be easily and quickly secured to the headphones.

These are made out of a thinner polyurethane wall, apparently for clearer audio and increased wearability. Is that the case? Not sure, but I did have one case where the earbud remained in my ear after I took the IEM out. A firm push and a twist made sure that didn’t happen again.

As a nice bonus, you get five ear guard options, which help fill the IER-M500 in your ear. Not only does it make for a more secure fit, it should also have a positive impact on overall sound and performance, because it fills the space better and creates a better environment to prevent noise bleed. The way they fill the ear cavity out gives the more up-market vibe of custom-moulded IEMs at a fraction of the price. I like it.

This is no one-size-fits-all IEM. Sony has really thought about form and fit here, which I like. It gives you the chance to experiment and play around with guard/earbud combos to find the pairing that best suits your ear shape. A nice bonus for such an affordable kit.

All of that comes packaged in that aforementioned semi-hard case. I probably wouldn’t trust it at the bottom of my gig bag or pedalboard case, but it keeps everything together where you want it.

As for function, each headphone is clearly marked with blue or red accents to show which is left and right. The 360 connector allows for the earbuds to rotate for a more snug and versatile fit.

There really is nothing to complain about. It’s even got that must-have spacer ring to ‘bunch’ the cables behind the neck, but with the added benefit of a clip to secure it to the neckline of your top for extra security.

Sounds

Sounds rating: ★★★★☆

Again, I’m pleasantly surprised by the quality of these. They lack the clarity and nuance that you might need for more lively live mixes, but there’s enough presence to keep the key frequency areas well accounted for.

In the enclosed headphone you get a single 5mm dynamic driver which performs well and can largely handle what I run through it. In my live mix, I need a load of tracks, a click, plenty of bass, and some of the kit to keep me rooted. It’s quite a lot to juggle, but I broadly have no issues keeping track of what’s going on.

Naturally, there are some sound shortcomings. Busier songs in my set with layered synths and strings can feel a bit woofy and dense. It can be sometimes hard to discern what’s actually going on beyond the blanket sound. But I still get the important things I need cutting through no problem – my click and guitar.

In fact, from a guitar player’s perspective, I also like how it translates my sound to my ears. Overall these are darker sounding, but there’s still a fair amount of high-end and plenty of midrange that means it doesn’t over saturate or bog my tone down with too much mud.

Hooking them straight up to a Quad Cortex mini for on-the-fly playing, they’re not as well-rounded as my over-ear studio monitors, but keep my tone intact in my ears

All in all, it is an incalculable improvement on my first IEMs, and for a set that cost less than £100 it’s hard to find any major flaws. It won’t be perfect for hectic mixes and complex setups – or those looking for a more sophisticated monitoring experience – but it will do a darn good job. Likewise, those who are just getting started in the world of IEMs will be well catered for.

Verdict

If the Sony IER-M500s are your first step into the world of in-ear monitoring, you’re in for a smooth ride. You really couldn’t ask for an easier segue into playing with in-ears. Fit and form is taken care of through its generous accessory provisions, and though you might feel them over prolonged periods of playing, they are by and large very comfortable.

They won’t set your mix alight, nor will they be able to handle ultra-professional setups that will require more complex and premium alternatives. But at £99, no one is expecting it to. I wish these were my first in-ear monitors. It would have made my first steps a lot easier.

Music Radar verdict: About as good as you could get from an entry-level set of in-ear monitors, Sony has really delivered here. The fit and form of these are snug and secure, and the added noise isolation pads are a great touch that offer a more premium feel. They might bow under more complex mixes, but for more manageable setups their darker sound will not let you down.

Also try

Hands-on videos

Sony

RECORDING WEEK 2026: While it might sound like something of a cliché, Erol Alkan is an artist for whom ‘the music’ always seems to come first.

Between his seminal mid-noughties clubnights Trash and Durrr, his production credits for the likes of Late Of The Pier, Mystery Jets and Klaxons, his numerous DJ accolades and his countless remixes and collaborations, he has had plenty of opportunities for self-promotion over the years. Yet Alkan’s is a career built not on his own ego, but on using every outlet available to share, nurture and promote new music.

He’s also one of that rare breed of musicians whose talents aren’t confined by genre, with a career touching upon indie, electro, house, techno and beyond, with seemingly little regard for trends or fashions, even when he’s caught up in the middle of them.

2013 saw Alkan setting up his first purpose-built studio space, The Phantasy Sound, a North London hub for himself and the artists on his Phantasy record label. This played a major role in birthing a pair of stunning, yet very different albums: the lo-fi pop of Connan Mockasin’s Caramel and the warped electronic experiments of Daniel Avery’s Drone Logic.

It also resulted in Alkan’s first proper solo release, some 20 years into his career, in the form of the intricately-produced, club-focused Illumination EP.

A few years back, we headed up to North London to meet Alkan and take a nose around his studio. We republish the complete tour and interview in full below to mark MusicRadar's Recording Week 2026.

We started with Erol's DAW of choice…

“I use Pro Tools when I record bands, especially if I’m tracking drums, but Logic when it comes to using MIDI or anything like that.

“I tend to use the native plugins within Logic as I think they’re fine. To be honest with you, I haven’t found a stereo width plugin better than Logic’s one. EQ wise, they’re pretty good transparent EQs which seem to do exactly what you need an EQ to do. I tend to find that, if you’re not getting what you want out of a sound at that stage, maybe the EQ isn’t the main problem - maybe it’s another aspect of it? So I tend to use all of them in a pretty simple way, rather than expecting miracles from plugins.

“I don’t use any particularly esoteric plug-ins. I’ll focus more on what’s going in; that’s about 90% of it for me.”

That said, pride of place in the top slot of the rack is Alkan's own homemade compressor. “The Mustapha SSL-4000. It’s basically just an SSL clone that I’ve built with a Neve width module.

"If you whack it all to the far right you lose all the signal and you can check out your clocking as well. If your clocking is a bit dodgy, and it sounds all MP3-ish and digital, then that’ll tell you.”

Likewise Alkan has nothing but love for Pioneer's Rekordbox software.

“Ever since rekordbox came along, it’s meant that I can pool all my music together and organise it in a way I understand.

“The great thing is that you can come up with your own system of working. I do feel a bit guilty about being able to turn up somewhere with a pair of headphones and a USB key, when you see bands with trucks full of gear and a crew of 30 people to play the same stage, but that’s the way DJing has gone. I still believe that DJing in its greatest form is just as creative and exciting as what bands can do. It’s just a great system, though.

“I’m curious as to what the next thing is going to be. I know that you can do a lot of things with mobile phones now, but I don’t trust them!"

For crucial listening Alkan leans on those old favourites – a pair of Yamaha NS10 monitors. “I just have them because they sound so bad. As they say with NS10s - if it sounds good on them, then it’ll sound good anywhere," he explains.

“I’m a big fan of the Effectron delays from the ’80s. They’re great, unpredictable delays. I like to send stuff to them and have it very, very low in the mix.”

And while the Effectrons are best described as 'quirky' the next essential in Alkan's studio is only ever regarded as a classic: A Roland TB-303 bassline.

“This is a recent purchase and something I’ve been wanting for a while. I’m in love with it - not just for the fact that it’s a 303, but also because it’s got cool things like CV out, so you can actually write a pattern inside of it and send that to other synths.”

Likewise another new addition to the studio is this Korg Mono/Poly dating from 1981. “So far I’ve just been messing around with it," Alkan says.

Something that regularly gets a workout in Alkan's studio however, is his trusty Roland SH-1.

“It tends to do bass like no other synth I have. I’ve a trick that I do with it, that I don’t want to reveal, but there’s a workaround if you experiment with the patching capabilities. You can get some pretty amazing, deep, cranium-quaking bass from it!”

And who else is going to team all of the above with a Formanta Polivoks?…

“I’m fascinated by Russian synths, in the sense that they were built to try and mimic what Moog was doing at the time. They kind of didn’t get it right, but they came up with something quite different.”

RECORDING WEEK 2026: It doesn't really matter whether you play a musical instrument or want to improve your golf swing, the old adage that practice makes perfect contains a lot of truth. What tends to be less recognised is that the same applies to home recording and production techniques.

We can't make up for 10,000 hours of practice, but we can certainly set off in the right direction, with some top home recording hacks that we regard as mantras for the home studio user.

1. Make sure you mic your instruments properly

Let's work on the assumption that you have a home studio set-up, and you want to record an acoustic instrument - or maybe an instrument that requires amplification such as an electric guitar or bass. You may have popped a microphone up in front of the instrument, but when you return to your control environment, to assess your monitoring, it doesn't sound very good compared to its real sound in the room.

If this is the case, it would be tempting to reach for the EQ to tweak out the problem frequencies. Worse still, you might be tempted to apply a liberal amount of reverb in an attempt to add character the signal.

But, why apply a sticking plaster to a fundamental recording wound, when rectifying the source of the problem will save so much time…

All engineers would agree that the starting point for improving your recorded sound begins by putting the microphone in the right place. Moving a microphone toward an instrument, or close mic'ing, captures the detail close up, but if you get too close, the signal will introduce lower frequencies, thanks to a phenomenon known as ‘proximity effect.’ Moving the mic away from the instrument, might improve the sound overall, but may lead to a greater amount of room reverberation, which might be unwanted.

The name of the game is finding a happy medium, that balances the instrument against the acoustic of the room.

However, you also need to think about which part of the instrument is generating the nicest sound. It might seem like an odd thing to do, but placing your ears at various locations around the instrument should give you a fairly good idea where it sounds sweetest. It’s often best to aim for the sound hole on an acoustic guitar or violin and not the fingerboard.

2. Record - and save - everything!

The moment the microphone is live, hit the record button!

History has taught us a number of things when it comes to recording practice, with some of the best takes ever committed to audio being the first attempts at playing or singing a song. Even if the microphone isn't quite in the right location (see previous rule), you will still have a record of the performance to refer to. It also means that you have a reference point, so that as you continue your microphone placement explorations, you can make direct comparisons to the original sound.

Now that we work fully in the digital domain, you don't need to delete anything. Just keep on taking the takes, until you feel you have what you need. You never know, the first take might be (and often is) the one.

3. Make guests relaxed

If you have enlisted a friend or colleague to record for you the chances are they might be a little bit apprehensive about performing in front of you. Performance anxiety can exhibit various traits, one of the most significant being a tendency to rush while playing.

It's always important to listen to a playback with objective ears. Does the last take really sit perfectly in time with the other elements of the track, specifically drums and percussion? The application of a small amount of track delay (where you delay the track by a few ticks) will likely be all that is required, in order to make any anxious recording moments sound more relaxed.

As the recording session continues, you may find that your player becomes more comfortable, meaning that you might have to reduce the amount of delay applied, by chopping takes into sections. If they're in a chilled headspace, they'll be able to deliver the goods much more efficiently.

4. Pop shields aren't optional

If you are dealing with vocalists and vocal recording, be sure to have a pop shield on hand.

Many microphones advertise that they have an inbuilt pop shield, designed to reduce the effect of plosive consonants (such as ‘B’ and ‘P’) where a generated sharp blast of wind will hit the microphone diaphragm, creating a popping sound.

With the best will in the world, microphone advertising does not always live up to its reputation, with almost all examples offering little protection against a pop explosion! The answer is to use a pop shield, which can be clipped in front of the microphone, and more usefully prevent pops. Pops are an unwanted element that can completely ruin a take, so always have one to hand when a vocalist walks in to record.

5. Sort your room reflections before you start

Some rooms are better suited to home recording than others. Any room which is filled with soft furnishings (such as a lounge or bedroom) is likely to perform better than a room that is equipped with four bare walls.

This has everything to do with the way that sound waves behave. Much like a bouncing ball, sound waves rebound from hard surfaces, with the wave bouncing back at you. Introducing soft furnishings or curtains to your live recording environment, will help to absorb the sound waves, limiting their onward reflection and travel significantly..

If you find that your instrumental or vocal recording sounds a bit ‘roomy’, try moving your musician so that they have their back to a pair of curtains. The microphone will then be facing the pair of curtains too, limiting the amount of exposure from sonic reflection. This works best with a microphone using a cardioid polar pattern, which captures the audio from the front of the mic only, and not the rear.

A top home recording tip, if you’re on a budget and can't afford proper acoustic treatment, is to hang a duvet behind the performer. Duvets and sleeping bags are ideal for preventing sonic reflection if your room isn’t deadening the acoustics sufficiently.

Try to stay away from flat surfaces and windows, as these will cause you the most problems.

Of course, it's not just about the walls, the floor and the ceiling can play an important part here too. If you have carpet on your floor, it should help, but try to avoid rooms with floor tiles or wood, unless you want to put down a rug underneath the performer and microphone.

Low ceilings can also be problematic. If you think about it, the microphone and musician’s sound may be closer to the ceiling, than the closest wall, and as we don't tend to decorate ceilings with soft furnishings, it could cause all manner of issues.

Pick a room with a higher ceiling, or if you have access to a room with a heightened skylight, place the performer directly underneath it. This can be particularly effective for instruments such as drum kits. In the professional domain, many drum rooms have very high ceilings to nullify this problem.

6. Be nice

We all know what it's like to feel under pressure, and one surefire way of exasperating the situation is to be too harsh on or quick-tempered with your recording artist.

Us creatives can be a sensitive bunch, so even displays of minor irritation can get at people. But, referring back to our earlier point about musicians and vocalists delivering the goods more efficiently when they're relaxed, in our mind there's no better way to bring out the best in someone than being warm, patient, encouraging and just… well, nice to them. Praise their musical performances, even if they flubbed a note or two. Gently encourage them to go further on the next take, but don't accentuate the negative.

Always feed back in a constructive and positive way. Grumbling or, worst of all, shouting, will not have the desired effect.

Being nice, preferably by way of a conversation in the live room (not over headphones) will always elicit a better performance, and that means a better result for your project.

As one highly respected musician once said to us, “Play well - be nice!” We think that it's possibly not only the best mantra for home recording, but for life in general!

RECORDING WEEK 2026: Touring rock musician turned film-score composer, Tyler Bates found his music-to-picture footing in the dark with 2004's Dawn of the Dead, then carried on with Rob Zombie's The Devil's Rejects and the Halloween films, where John Carpenter's iconic theme was refashioned into something grittier.

Notable credits include television’s The Exorcist, its notorious demonic dread stretched across ten episodes; a mountainous hybrid score for John Wick: Chapter 4; and a longstanding association with director Ti West on the slasher trilogy: X, Pearl and MaXXXine. His latest collaboration with West, the Johnny Depp-starring Ebenezer, is due out in November.

Beneath his experimental studio craft, however, sits a conviction to build sound around an emotional gesture or single vocal timbre. Always serving the scene, Bates believes learning starts with listening, a habit that never stops for a composer who first became enraptured by sound when layering up recordings on cassette tape as a boy.

For Recording Week 2026, we caught up with Bates to learn more about his route into film, his approach to recording technology and fascinating tales about working with William Friedkin, the legendary director of the original Exorcist movie…

MusicRadar: You began layering sound on cassette recorders as a kid. What were you trying to achieve with that setup before you had any sort of formal recording gear?

Tyler Bates: “It was clearly ignorance and experimentation. As I was composing my first music, I wanted to hear multiple parts and realised that I could play live into a cassette recorder while dumping tracks from another one simultaneously. Of course, the recordings were pretty muddy, but it was an opportunity to hear a multitrack of an idea, which was very inspiring and really set me on course to becoming a songwriter.

“I delved deeply into electric guitar after starting my musical journey on alto sax and was intrigued by sonority, song arrangements and developing song ideas that were more than me just strumming or hitting a guitar riff and yelling over the top of it. I began this period of experimentation out of pure curiosity and passion for sound and music.”

MR: Was there a specific moment when you had to make a decision between pursuing rock stardom or a soundtrack composer?

TB: “When I moved back to Los Angeles in the early ‘90s, I'd already been asked to do some cues for a movie because they had no money. I told them I didn't know anything about it, but I’d give it a shot if they really wanted me to, so the people working on the film shared their perspective with me, which is how I began learning about the craft and the purpose of music for film.

“At the same time, I was developing my band Pet, which signed to Atlantic Records, but I had to pay rent, right? People kept asking me to do scores, which kept me housed and gave me the opportunity to continue to make music for both, but before I knew it, I'd done 15 movies, and my 15th film was a jazz/bebop score that Blue Note ended up releasing.”

MR: What movie was your first big break?

TB: “Get Carter with Stallone and Michael Caine. It flopped terribly, but was such an incredible experience because it was among my first working with orchestras and hybrid scores, which set me on course for a lot of what happened afterwards.

“I had my lows - I was still painting houses between some of these projects until Tom Kapinos asked me to do Californication, which brought a true rock element back into my work scoring for film. At the same time, I was just starting on 300 and those experiences completely opened my mind to having a cinematic rock vision for music.”

MR: One of your transformative soundtracks was Dawn of the Dead. Was it a dream to soundtrack a film that was indirectly part of the George A. Romero canon?

TB: “To this day, I have to tell you I had such a good experience on that movie. I was up against a number of composers who had repertoires that were probably more appropriate because I hadn't had a tremendous amount of orchestral experience or any creepy music in my repertoire, but Zack Snyder believed I was the right person for the job.

“Once I was hired on Dawn of the Dead, I didn't have much time to do the movie and it was a massive challenge for me. It was right before Christmas 2003 and I was able to score a couple reels over the holiday break. They put the music into a test screening of the same cut they’d previously tested and the movie scored 25 points higher. They didn’t change one note about the score, and although I recognise my mistakes, I think the concept and tone were really distinct.”

MR: Does working on a score like Dawn of the Dead, or The Exorcist TV show, require a very different suite of tools to your ordinary movie?

TB: “If you look at most horror films, the horror exists inside of a drama, so if there's a really good dramatic story, there's a chance that the movie will be considered seriously and last the test of time. The Exorcist is really a drama - it just happened to scare the hell out of people. I've certainly learned a lot about that because I scored William Friedkin's final film, which was an extraordinary experience on so many levels.”

MR: Presumably, that was Killer Joe?

TB: “Yes, and I was hired under auspicious circumstances to work on Killer Joe. Billy had already hired someone who did a score for the movie in defiance of the producers, who then approached me at a party and asked if I’d be open to it. I asked them if Friedkin was amenable to it, so Billy came over to my studio and - I don't know if you've read his book or watched any interviews with him, but he was a very intense and highly intelligent but salty character.

“He came into the studio, sat on my sofa and said, ‘Tyler, I don't know why the f**k you're spending your time with me on my little f****g movie when you do all these big blockbusters’. I said, ‘Look Billy, the producers approached me and if you're open to seeing if we can do something that might suit the movie better, then I'm good, man.’”

MR: Having already done the score for The Exorcist TV show, you must have discussed the making of the original The Exorcist with William

TB: “In our conversation that day, I asked him about The Exorcist, and he told me the story about how he threw out Bernard Herrmann's score. He didn't want an organ score, but Herrmann didn't listen and sent the movie back with an organ score in it. That wasn’t going to work, so Billy fired him. I'm like, ‘Okay, so perhaps the greatest film composer of all time just got fired!’

“So then he hires his good friend Lalo Schifrin and tells him he wants a chamber orchestra, but when Billy showed up to the Warner Bros. sessions, there were 80 players and 5 percussionists. He said, ‘I don't want this crap in my movie’, so after a day and a half of recording Billy stopped the sessions and fired his good friend Lalo. At that point, Warner called Billy back into the studio and said, ‘Look, we'd really like you to use the music that we just paid Lalo to score and we're out of money, so either use that or look in the Warner Bros. library.’

“So Billy picked up the music reels, unspooled them in the parking lot right outside the studio and said, ‘Nobody's going to use that music.’ He was basically down to whatever he could find in the library and then happened upon Mike Oldfield's instructional album on the sonority of bells, which had the composition Tubular Bells.

“When Billy heard that, he said ‘That’s it!’ It’s crazy that a record that no one should have ever known about became a massive seller because Billy put it in the most successful horror movie in history. The Exorcist made $400 million in 1973 based on a $3 ticket price.”

MR: I understand Pro Tools is your hub for scoring, but you also lean on Logic and Ableton. How do you decide which platform a given musical idea belongs in?

TB: “I started on a PC because they were cheaper at the time, and Macs weren't fully developed until the end of the ‘90s. I went from Cubase to Digital Performer to Logic, but eventually realised that after they'd been playing back from Tascam DA-88s, all the dub stages had moved to Pro Tools and to deliver a score that was compatible, I needed to be on the same platform.

“For people just coming into movie scoring it’s way more cost-effective to work in Cubase or Logic. Ableton is fantastic for developing a passage or loop, and you can do things with effects that you can’t do elsewhere, especially when affecting a stereo sound. I basically use Logic as a sample playback platform for all of the bespoke sounds that I've made in the last 20 years.”

MR: We understand that you work quite closely with Wolfgang Mathis on creating sound design libraries?

TB: “He's still my dear friend and collaborator, but now lives in Canada. We used to set up multiple modular rigs in my studio, have our nerd jams, record stuff live, take the good moments of them and develop pads and pulses.

“I was always on a quest to have sounds to work with that nobody else had and would implement these conceptual ideas, but sometimes the clock would run out on me before I was able to manifest them as I’d envisioned. Sometimes it worked, like on the score for The Devil's Rejects, but that's a noise score really and it took a lot of tweaking to get that to land appropriately for the film.

“I do like to keep things interesting, because every time I experiment I learn more about the potential of sound synthesis and Wolfie really introduced me to thinking about the potential of a sound. It may start off as a bongo or some kind of bell or voice, then through experimenting with various synthesisers or modular synths, I learned the various permutations of sound and what the possibilities are. Now it’s part of my calculus when I'm thinking about what's appropriate for a TV show, movie or game.

“Sometimes that’s going to leave people scratching their heads, so as much as I love to experiment I have to make sure that the people I’m creating a score for can identify with it. They have to understand what it is, what it does to the picture and how to relate to it psychologically and emotionally. If they don't feel it right away, it's not a successful idea.”

MR: What will you focus on to nail those core psychological and emotional elements?

TB: “When I collaborate with different artists, especially singers, I'm thinking about the story they have to tell. Sometimes that’s intimated in the way they express themselves as much as it might be lyrically - or it might be encrypted, but it's important to understand how to help a person tell their story.

“With rock music, the riffs come when we need them and I never have had a shortage of riffs because I don't place all the weight on them. I place it on the storytelling, the song structure and how to best serve and frame a singer's voice.

“That could mean finding the right key for them to sing in to discover where their voice resonates best, but when I'm scoring on film, the actors are my singers. The timbre of their voice impacts my selections for various instruments and sounds because I don't want to compete with them; I want to make sure that the music complements the important aspects or frequencies of their voice.

“If the actor’s a baritone, I want to make sure that I clear the way for their voice to really resonate because that's going to empower their character and their dialogue the most. The whole thing is very much like a dance.”

MR: Looking at your studio - out of everything available, what do you like about using the Moog Muse?

TB: “It's very warm and sounds really good, but I've actually started working on this new TV show and have gotten back into using my Access Virus. It's kind of like a rekindled romance because I got away from this thing for 15 or 20 years, but even though it's an old synth, you can’t tell because of how I EQ and process it. If I run it through an overdrive pedal or delay, it takes on another life.

“But the Moog Muse has been great for really low tones. They're so rich and deep, and so many beautiful harmonics can emerge, even from a drone. The Dave Smith Evolver is another great one. If you want to do something weird or create some really crunchy pulses, that's an amazing instrument – and it’s favourably priced too.”

MR: You’ve mentioned that John Wick: Chapter 4 was the Mount Kilimanjaro of hybrid scores. What made that project a bigger technical challenge than anything else you previously worked on?

TB: “For anyone attuned to the properties of sound, the John Wick films have quiet dialogue, yelling and gunshots – and there’s a lot of Foley in John Wick 4, including car crashes and all that stuff. We also applied some orchestra, which didn't feel natural to the preceding three films, but the scope of it was so broad that we needed to engage an orchestra for some of it.

“At the same time, we still had all of these non-orchestral idioms that have been applied through the entire franchise that needed to be present – like all the crunchy synth pulses and atmospheres, and the hybrid rock/electronic orchestral score had to dance around all these frequencies. Believe me, gunshots always win, dialogue always wins, and in the case of John Wick 4, the cars win, so you have to factor in all that production sound.

“Mark Stoeckinger is a brilliant sound designer and a great collaborator - his sound design is so dense and compressed that there's no way I can beat it, so I had to be more like water in a stream. By being aware of what's going on in the sound package, you can negotiate a little bit by saying, I don't think you need all of those low synths in your sound package, but I’ll stay out of the way of your tyre screeches, crashes and engine revving.

“Mark and I would work on that and make sure that when they get to the final dub, all the required sound is represented by the two of us. It used to be, you're the composer, here's the picture, now write the music. Now the picture is moving even after we deliver the final score, so the whole time you're working on a movie like John Wick 4, it's literally like the tailor fitting the pants on the running man.”

MR: How do you mix a project when the compositions are continually changing?

TB: “When you’re working with pure orchestra, all those instruments are naturally harmonically balanced, but when you're using a ton of hardware synths, soft synths and playing guitars, mandolins, electric bass and drums, you've got so much going on. It's fun, but it's a nightmare to mix because you don't have much time.

“When we're delivering a score to a dub stage, it's all in stems and there’s some additional frequency management that takes place. They place the music into its appropriate context, depending on whether the sound is an enclosed space, a wide open space or a cavern.

“We have to factor all that in so that it's not only appropriate, but gives the mixers some latitude. If I slather a big reverb on everything, they’ll have way less latitude to get creative with how they place the music in the overall mix, so I want to give them options and make it a joy to work with as much as possible so people can actually hear the music in the movie.

“It's not like mixing a record. You have 25 minutes, and there might be 160 tracks of audio in a queue, so you've just got to do your best and rush through it, but sometimes we'll circle back around to the music when we do the soundtrack so it sounds a little bit more refined.”

MR: Once a film is released, can you totally relate to the score you made?

TB: “What you hear in the film is not necessarily the entirety of a composition. When I went to the premiere of John Wick 4, the music had definitely been thrown around to the point where cues that Joel J. Richard and I had done separately were intermingled and we didn't recognise a lot of our own work.

“We hear ourselves in it, but we're like, ‘I didn't do that’. That can be frustrating if you're emotional about the work, so I pour that into my songwriting where I know that what we're writing and recording in my studio is going to be on the final product. It's incumbent upon me to do that type of work so that I don't develop a bad attitude or become jaded about the fact that film is an entirely different process to what it was 20 years ago.”

MR: Do you have a bucket list of movies you want to work on?

TB: “I don't look at it that way. It’s an extreme privilege to work in this industry, because there are very few of us who have viable careers. I'm working a lot, so I prefer to just work on whatever I agree to do and not fantasise about the next thing.

“It would be fun to do a really interesting horror film because, creatively, you get away with murder and introduce concepts that would be inappropriate for any other style of movie, except for maybe an action movie. Having said that, doing a character drama would be cool!”

For more information on Tyler Bates, visit his official site.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: We recording technology geeks are totally spoiled today. We have so much power and so much access to tools and materials, even inside the most humble of laptops (or even tablets), that we could be forgiven for thinking that life was always like this. But it very much wasn’t…

As any professional who has been dabbling with studios since the early 90s will tell you, there was a time when if you needed a specific effect, you had to buy that specific effect. And we mean physically buy it.

Ask any guitarist about this, as most purists will continue to fly-the-flag for a conventional analog pedal-board with a handful of effects, and each distinct pedal providing its own tone colour or specific effect. Of course, there are people who now use digital effects, and many superbly reputable companies also employ digital technology in analog boxes to create classic sounds.

There are also those guitarists who swear by their multi-effects pedals, and some who even venture out with a laptop, for the ultimate in flexible heavy-effect lifting. It's easy to see the appeal - turn up to a gig with a single device, and you have all the sonic colouration you need.

But just like guitarists, there are plenty of studio evangelists who continue to swear by traditional outboard effects - whether totally analogue in operation, or digital.

So we have to ponder the question - why? If digital copies and clones are now so exacting, just why do some people continue to plump for the original vintage devices?

Unlike the guitarist’s domain, studio effects in hardware have always traditionally conformed to the 19” rack mount form-factor. As the measurement suggests, devices would be 19 inches wide, with a vertical measurement described as ‘U’ for Rack Units.

1U would be 1.75” height (that’s 44.45mm in new money) with devices available as 2,. 3U or more.

This gave rise to the studio rack; a studio system, a little bit like an exposed cage, that you could physically screw your effects into. The more devices you have, the larger the rack or racks that you would need, hence some studios would utilise space from floor to ceiling, often with multiple racks to accommodate all of the equipment.

In professional environments, all of this rack-mounted kit would be hardwired to a patch bay, making it accessible via the plugging in of a patch cable, to any channel on a mixing desk.

This physical process was (and still is in some instances) very rewarding, as the clunk of the patch cable would satisfyingly engage the desired effect unit.

It was also prone to failure, with the need to keep contact cleaner to hand so any dirty connection points could be quickly fixed. No such failures in the plugin world of course… save the odd just incompatibility issue.

Over the last 30 years, those of us that had rack equipment have streamlined our set-ups, but there are many examples of devices that we still love. For us, they’re irreplaceable.

The most common of all, is generically described as the voice channel compressor. Given that many of us tend to only use a single microphone at a time, at least in a home recording environment, the addition of such a unit can be beneficial on a number of levels.

As the name suggests a voice channel compressor does indeed contain a compressor circuit, which is ideal for tracking single instruments and vocals (particularly loud signals) and can take the sweat out of getting a good take.

Moreover, the tactile component of the physical hardware can be great for quickly changing settings on-the-fly, which makes it perfect for acoustic and studio recording. Be sure to check out a list of our favourites and current retail prices here.

Voice channel compressors also tend to offer other components, such as better microphone preamplifiers, various forms of EQ, and in some instances, degrees of saturation and tone colour, which can either be applied manually, or form an intrinsic part of the devices make-up.

Many of the more expensive and elaborate voice channels include vacuum tube circuitry, which provides a beautifully warm and organic component to the signal, without even trying.

The same can be said for other technologies, where the electrical signal may pass through transformers or transistors. Bottom line, degrees of impurity enter the signal, and with our 'digital heads’ on, we will be thinking that we should do everything we can to eliminate it.

The problem is, our ears and our brain quite like it, so why would you want to clean up a signal that sounds so lovely?

Setting up a voice channel alongside an existing home-rig is very easy. Instead of plugging your microphone in to your audio interface, you merely plug it into the voice channel first, and take the output from the voice channel into your audio interface as a line output/input.

Some devices offer a digital output, in which case run your digital signal (optical or coax) into your interface instead.

At the performance level, you will also notice that unlike working in the DAW, hardware devices have a near zero processing buffer, so you won’t have to compensate for latency.

If you have a device such as a small mixer, you can use this for monitoring purposes for that true zero-latency experience.

It's also worth noting that despite the ‘voice’ channel moniker, there is nothing to stop you putting a guitar, bass or synth through the same device, and you will probably find that all examples will benefit from the tone of an outboard unit.

Just imagine how beefy that synth bass will sound…

The next logical extension to 'going hardware', is to look at what other tempting treats you can find in the outboard effect arena. Many plugin effects draw inspiration from hardware counterparts, with some choosing to appear as clones on screen, even adopting the same colour scheme.

Legendary compressors, such as the Teletronix LA-2A or the Universal Audio 1176 can still be purchased from secondhand or new, although integrating your signal fully, may require additional expenditure.

If you have one of the larger audio interfaces that are available, with multiple inputs and outputs, it is possible to easily route signals out of your unit (using outputs 3-4), towards units such as a compressor, and back into a pair of inputs. You can do the same thing with other forms of effect too.

One category that is definitely worth exploring is the realm of reverb.

Many reverberation boxes from the late 80s and early 90s were digital. Their sound has fallen out of favour, but in the right hands and with the right creative intent, you can do some seriously clever things at the press of a couple of buttons.

Devices such as the Lexicon PCM series were highly applauded back in the day, and still have much to offer for relatively little outlay on the second hand market.

But if you want to go the whole hog, nothing is as satisfying as the physical size and grandeur of spring and plate reverbs.

Devices such as the AKG BX-15/20 spring reverbs, or the legendary EMT-140, are an investment in physical space as much as finances, but for good reason. If you find yourself working with acoustic samples in your DAW, the addition of genuine analog reverb can really bring your samples to life.

Here at MusicRadar, we have to admit that we’re self-confessed outboard fanatics.

We love the sound of some of the old units, even the ones that have arguably been improved when re-birthed as a plugin.

It's the tactile form and the incomparable - and genuine - warming effect it has on our audio signals, that really endears us to the technology.

Best of all, many of the old outboard units are now available at very sensible prices, meaning that you can cheaply buy things to try out. And, if it doesn't work out for you, you can likely sell it for what you paid for it.

What is it?

Eve Audio has a solid reputation for high-quality studio monitors. Typically equipped with AMT (air motion transformer) tweeters, options include the highly-regarded flagship series, the Eve Audio SC2070. Its latest range, EXO, sticks with the AMT design and aims to offer monitors equally well suited to stereo and multi-channel environments. On the review bench we have the EXO 24.

EXO 24 is a 2-way ported monitor with a rear-positioned slotted port and onboard Class D amplification. With a 4” LF driver and Eve’s latest Precision AirMotion (PAMT) tweeter, it’s the smallest design in the EXO range and, at just over 25cm high, looks pretty compact. That said, at 4.3kg, it also feels pretty robust.

The new PAMT tweeter sits in a new advanced waveguide designed to produce an ultra-wide sweet spot and better stereo imaging. Meanwhile, the LF unit, also a new design, makes use of a lightweight coated aluminium diaphragm with a resonance-damped dust cap. The enclosure is a low diffraction design with rounded edges, and there are no front-mounted controls, although the backlit logo doubles as a power and status indicator.

Rear panel connections include balanced (XLR) and unbalanced (RCA) analogue inputs (though no ¼” jacks), S/PDIF digital input and output (RCA) and Ethernet (RJ45). In terms of settings, these are digitally controlled and accessed via the rear-positioned mini OLED display and smart knob. Options include volume, EQ (Smart Filters), input connector, operating level and input delay (up to 18ms), in addition to system settings. These aspects are also accessible from Eve Audio’s Ethernet-based software control package, although this wasn’t ready in time for our testing. Finally, on the underside are M6 threaded mounting points, so you can use a wide range of third-party brackets and hangers.

Performance

The EXO 24 has a slick and quite understated design, with the grey aluminium cone, gold folded AMT diaphragm and backlit logo adding visual accents. The large tweeter waveguide dominates the upper section of the baffle.

The mini OLED screen provides access to four EQ room correction options. Band 1 is either a low shelf at 300Hz (up to +3dB) or an adjustable 24dB/octave low-cut filter (61Hz to 106Hz). Band 2 is a desk correction filter set at 650Hz (+3/-5dB). Band 3 is a bell-shaped EQ at 3.5kHz (+3/-5dB). Band 4 is a high shelf at 5kHz (+3/-5dB). Collectively, these provide plenty of options, and the display delivers good visual feedback as you make the changes. Even so, we found the process of adjusting them a bit fiddly, and this aspect will be greatly improved once the control software is available.

From a sonic perspective, initial impressions are good. The top end is open and engaging and lower frequencies are delivered with plenty of punch. Understandably, the size of the enclosure influences things and much like other speakers this size, the low mids feel slightly lacking. We were able to correct this to some degree using the desk correction filter and low shelf, and overall we think the delivery is very good for a speaker of this size. The mid-range in particular provides plenty of detail and is ideal for mixing. Meanwhile, the horizontal sweet spot is quite broad. Finally, the low end is reasonably flat to about 65Hz and then tails off gently. The quoted free field response is -3dB at 54Hz.

Verdict

Smaller speakers can easily come up short, but the EXO 24 delivers impressive scale for a speaker of this size. Couple this with a smooth, detailed top end and good stereo imaging, and you have a very capable offering.

Hands-on demos

EVE Audio

Alternatives

Specifications

RECORDING WEEK 2026: In-the-box music production is undoubtedly incredible. With endless track counts, plugins covering all manner of instruments and effects and instant recall, modern producers are blessed with the kinds of conveniences that musicians just a few decades ago could only dream of.

One old-school technique, however, that has somewhat fallen out of favour is reamping, the act of running clean a signal out of your DAW and into some speakers, capturing the broadcast audio, and bringing it back into your session.

Guitarists know all about this of course, but the technique can also work a treat on synthesizers and drum machines too.

But why go through all the bother of piping an already captured signal into a speaker, mic’ing it and re-recording it? Bringing a sound into a room, even a small one, can add new life to a recording or performance. Human beings never hear sounds in a vacuum, and yet we record synths, drum machines and other electronic sounds as if we did. You’re going to throw a reverb on them anyway, so why not give them some actual, real-world room treatment?

Distortion is another big benefit from taking things out of box. Famed keyboardist Jan Hammer played his Moog Minimoog through a Marshall stack to achieve a beautiful balance of gain and harmonic distortion. This also allowed him to play around with feedback, something that most keyboardists had never even considered at the time.

Reamping also gives you leave to experiment. Speakers bring all sorts of new sound design possibilities into the equation. Remember: this isn’t about pristine sound but rather creating atmosphere.

Bounce out a keyboard solo, send it to your phone and record its speakers from the other side of the bathroom. That tinny take may be just what the breakdown needs.

Here then, are three different ways to achieve a reamped sound.

1. Reamping with speakers

The most traditional way to reamp synthesizers and drum machines is by piping a pre-recorded section through speakers, capturing that take with a microphone, and then layering it underneath the original.

This is the technique that engineer Gareth Jones pioneered in his work with Depeche Mode on their three breakthrough albums Construction Time Again, Some Great Reward and Black Celebration.

Recorded at Hansa Tonstudio in then East Berlin (the same studio where David Bowie famously recorded “Heroes”), Jones and co-producer Daniel Miller took advantage of the studio’s cavernous interior to positively inflate the output of the group’s synthesizers and samplers into stadium-sized sounds.

By placing a hired PA system in the middle of the three-story-high Studio 2, as well as pressing other rooms into echo chamber-like duty, Jones was able to deliver an album that sounded absolutely huge – because it was, literally.

They didn’t just have a PA system either. Guitar amps dialled into various levels of distortion imparted a patina of grit and filth that you could never get just by plugging into the mixer and hoping for the best.

“With this album (Deadbeat), I was really into electronic drum beats that were recorded in a more organic way,” Kevin Parker of Tame Impala explained on the Tape Notes Podcast “I was really obsessed with putting things through guitar amps and achieving this distorted, blown out drum sound … as a way to give it this sonic personality.”

Another artist known to re-amp is Overmono, who have a space in their studio set up for just this purpose. You can hear this in action on their new album, Pure Devotion. As explained on the same podcast, they recorded a Roland TR-1000 drum machine through both a Marshall stack and an old announcement speaker for a train station. They then brought these two recordings together to create a sound that would be impossible any other way: “You've got the Marshall on the left and the train speaker on the right. (It) gives this really wide stereo image that also feels slightly unusual or unnatural. It gave everything this really nice big sense of space.”

Don’t forget to leave some of the original, dry sound in there as well for clarity. Think of it like parallel compression, except that you’re combining the clean signal with the re-amped one. “We've got a bit of the dry in there as well with the kick,” said Overmono about their reamping techniques on the track Barum.

When studio bods talk about reamping, it’s usually in reference to a single take, but there’s nothing stopping you from recording the monitors for the mixdown. Electronic musician James Holden used a whole array of speakers of various sizes and quality in the final stages of his album, Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities.

“Electronic music exists in this flat, digital, virtual space behind the speakers,” James told us, “It's not like when you listen to an amazing recording of a jazz band on a great hi-fi, and you can hear that goes there, the bass is at the back, the drums are over in that corner… you can hear the room around you. But in electronic music, the only room you hear in it is very often your own. It's all just pushed to the front of the speakers. It’s nice to flip that idea around. The whole thing has this real sense of space, a sense that something happened in a room and I recorded it, rather than some guy with a mouse, which is a different feeling when you listen to it.”

We should also point out that you don’t need some elaborate speaker setup or towering Marshall stack to effectively reamp.

Jan Hammer may have rocked out in front of a big old rock ’n’ roll tower of speakers live, but in the studio his secret weapon was reportedly a Pignose 7-100 portable amp. Instrument retailers are full of inexpensive practice amps just waiting for you to pipe your synth tracks through.

2. Silent reamping

Not all of us have access to a massive space to pile up speakers in. Nor do we have neighbours that will happily ignore the kind of volume necessary to power them. If this sounds like you, you can still take advantage of the hardware thanks to the concept of silent reamping, where you run a signal hot through a tube amp and then back into your DAW without ever hitting a speaker.

Those of you with a little electrical knowledge are probably getting worried at this point, because all of that cranked up amp energy has to go somewhere. Usually it would go to the cabinet (the speaker). Instead, it goes to a piece of hardware like Warm Audio’s Reamper.

Designed to be the centre of your reamping system, it can take both instrument (guitar) and line level (from your DAW or synthesizer) signals and make them play nice with an amp.

It then brings the hot amp signal back and soaks up the extra juice, so you get the full power of an amplifier without having to annoy the people next door. It will also pad the line level on the way in so it doesn’t hit the amp too hot. Where’s the speaker and room in this situation? That has to happen in your DAW with an impulse response (IR) of a speaker and microphone. Not ideal, but neither is the police knocking on your door with a complaint from an irate neighbour.

If you’d rather avoid the amplifier altogether, a speaker emulator like Universal Audio’s OX Stomp can do the trick. This line-level effects pedal puts the speaker, cab, mic and room tones from the popular OX Amp Top Box into pedal form, plus other effects like 1176 compression, plate reverb, EQ, and stereo delay.

3. Reamping plugin alternatives

If you don’t have the space or budget to experiment with hardware, there are lots of plugins that can add a bit of amplifier saturation and room-derived presence to your tracks. You probably have some in your DAW already.

Klevgrand’s aptly named Reamp is an audio gear modeller with algorithms that recreate what happens when audio passes through hardware. It’s got two guitar-style tube amps, two tube preamps, and cassette and reel-to-reel settings. The separate drive and post knobs let you dial in the amount of saturation across four frequency bands, and there’s a mix knob for instant parallel processing.

Lifeline Expanse from Excite Audio is a multi-effect with a special focus on reamping. You can choose the emulated speaker type from devices like phones and laptops, plus medium-size guitar cabinets and large studio monitors, along with control over microphone placement and tone adjustment. Throw in tape emulation, bit-crushing, delay and reverb and you have a one-stop shop for reamping.

If you don’t play guitar and don’t hang out with anyone who does, you may have not heard of neural amp modelling. Unlike circuit or DSP modelling, which approximate the behaviour of amps, cabinets and microphones, neural modelling is the result of a neural network being trained on recordings of guitars blasting through hardware. This can result in highly accurate digital recreations of gear.

There are plenty of options for experimenting with neural amp modelling, such as Neural DSP’s Quad Cortex and Tonex from IK Multimedia, both of which are also available in hardware formats.

If you’re curious but aren’t ready to part with your cash just yet, TONE3000 is a freeware alternative that is causing big waves on the guitar scene right now.

It allows you to combine NAM (Neural Amp Modeler) captures and impulse responses and works as a plugin and standalone app. There’s an entire library of user-uploaded models, including real-world spaces for adding air and even experimental captures like a vibrating steel bowl and the output stage of a vintage Moog Minimoog.

Of course, there’s nothing stopping you from combining elements from all three of these techniques: amp and microphone, silent reamping, and plugins. Once the audio is in your DAW, go nuts. And most of all, have fun. Modern music making can be too results-focused. Slow down, enjoy the process, and make lots of noise. Just try not to annoy those neighbours too much!

RECORDING WEEK 2026: Imagine for a moment that you’re the radically inventive, off-the-wall troubadour Beck at the turn of a new millennium.

You’ve won countless plaudits and a devoted audience by being one of the most creatively audacious genre-fusers of the era. With a penchant for melding hip-hop with lo-fi rock, your wry artistic persona is driven by a playful wit. From Loser to Devil’s Haircut, Odelay to Midnite Vultures, it’s a post-modern posture thats strongly jibes with Gen X.

After seven albums (four of which were on a major label) of flavoursome stylistic smushing, everyone is keen to see what fresh aural adventures you’ll embark upon as a new century dawned.

But, instead of recording and album of upbeat, primary colours, your first album of the new century rebukes everything that the world previously thought they knew about you.

Gone was the slacker-coded irony. Gone were the weird, filtered sonics and excavated-from-a-record-shop samples.

In came wistful acoustic guitar, emotive strings, lyrics from the heart and an overarching sense of resignation and self-reflection.

This was a sea change in more ways than one.

Yes, Sea Change, Beck’s cherished eighth album, could easily have been the debut release of an entirely different artist. Some still hail it as Beck’s strongest song collection to date (it certainly triggered a side-strand of his career, which continued with the bucolic Morning Phase over a decade later).

It’s also a record that’s frequently held up for its exquisite recording quality and sonic fidelity, with a sparkling production ably helmed by producer Nigel Godrich, a producer most famous for his work with Radiohead.

Beck’s pull toward penning the album’s tranche of contemplative songs was triggered by the dissolution of his relationship with longtime girlfriend Leigh Limon in 2000.

By all accounts, the final nail in the coffin of their slowly fading partnership was the discovery that she had been cheating on him.

After a bitter split, Beck’s feelings of rejection, resentment and heartbreak were met with no small amount of soul searching, and a pinch of self-loathing. The wind had very much been knocked out Beck Hansen’s proverbial sails.

Clearly, mustering the energy to take on ‘the enchanting wizard of rhythm’ mantle once again was going to be a tall order. But, in time-worn, singer/songwriter tradition, the then-30 year-old musician was compelled to document how he felt.

Before we take a closer look at Sea Change’s recording story, we must first briefly look at this array of songs themselves, and the themes that would come to permeate the record.

From its serene, stately opener The Golden Age to wonky, slide guitar-laden epilogue, Side of the Road, Beck traversed a ragged psychological terrain questing for resolution. A journey of emotional penance.

There’s the hard mirror stare of the ‘living lies’ in Guess I’m Doing Fine, and there’s the sheer exhaustion of the dramatic Lonesome Tears - a crucial song which lurched dynamically from its beaten-down verse into quite the most passionately-charged chorus of the record. It led to a climax that ascended ever upward via a soul-touching swell of of strings.

Then of course, there’s key track (and the most well-known cut on Sea Change) Lost Cause.

Now a Beck staple, this gem found Hansen looking back to the dying days of his ailing relationship, bottling the feelings of surrender he felt as it neared its terminal phase.

Lyrically, Beck framed himself in the context of a solider, fighting a battle he knew deep down that he was doomed to not survive. As the highlighted lyrics below allude to.

Your sorry eyes, they cut through bone
Make it hard to leave you alone
Leave you here wearing your wounds
Waving your guns at somebody new

I'm tired of fightin'
I'm tired of fightin'
Fighting for a lost cause

Weapons, and destruction, often recur throughout Sea Change, another reference comes on the more existential Round the Bend, which depicted a pulled-back view of life rocketing by at uncontrollable speed; ‘faster than a bullet from an empty gun'. Meanwhile, album highlight Paper Tiger situated the fragile titular construct being torn apart by ‘idle hands’.

It’s not all violence and acrimony, though. The sumptuous Sunday Sun painted the protagonist at the ‘acceptance’ stage of his grief.

There's no other ending
Sunday sun
Yesterdays are ending

It’s clear, then, even from a cursory analysis of this set of songs, that this was the work of a wholly different facet of Beck’s persona. The mischievous master of ceremonies who once impishly proclaimed ‘I’ve got two turntables and a microphone’ had left the stage.

For Beck though, this candid honesty wasn't in any way a reproachment of his prior incarnations. “I’ve always challenged the idea that serious material is more indicative of who a person is,” Beck told Time following the record’s release. “I don’t think the laughing side of a human being is any less them than the side where they’re depressed.”

Beck realised that in his creative outpouring, he had the germ of an album that could resonate beyond the specifics of his own personal life, and communicate on a universal level.

Yet his material for this more stripped-back album would stand quite markedly aside from anything else in his kaleidoscopic canon.

“I just wanted the record to be simple and clean,” Beck told Time. “I wanted economy in the lyrics, and I wanted the songwriting to be very, very straightforward.”

Although the majority of Sea Change’s songs were written in quite brisk fashion, Beck’s desire to build the new album would take a frustrating two years to realise.

Eventually, with Mutations' (Beck’s country-infused 1998 record) producer Nigel Godrich again signed up to helm the album, the much-delayed recording sessions began at Ocean Way Studios in Hollywood, California on March 6th 2002.

“I think we originally wanted to do this record a year and a half ago, but it took a while for people to line-up,” Beck told Record Collector in 2002.

Godrich was struck by how Hansen had matured as a songwriter over the intervening years, and was impressed by the timbre of his voice.

“Before we recorded [Sea Change] we listened to Mutations, and his voice sounded like Mickey Mouse” Nigel recalled in an interview with Time, “His range has dropped. Now when he opens his mouth, a canyonesque vibration comes out. It’s quite remarkable. He has amazing tone.”

Sea Change’s central theme of heartbreak was an easy one for Godrich to zone in to. After all, he himself had just been through his own breakup.

“The producer, Nigel Godrich, had just broken up with his girlfriend [as well],” Beck told The Guardian. “So he was really devastated and heartbroken, too, and we were making the record together in that sense.”

While the album would retain the 'simple and pure' philosophy in terms of song construction, Godrich and Beck chose to augment the arrangement with both live band and luscious strings.

The live band largely consisted of the same players who’d worked on the more multi-hued precursor, Mutations. On bass was Beck’s longtime bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen. Synth, keys (and clavinet) was handled by Roger Joseph Manning Jr. while providing some of the icy lead guitar lines was another Beck mainstay; bluesy licks-man Smokey Hormel.

On drums for the first half ot the three-week recording sessions was Joey Waronker (now currently serving as Oasis' drummer). Unfortunately, Joey had to leave the sessions half-way through, and James Gadson stepped up to the stool to fill in.

Key to the album’s widescreen soundscape were those dazzling string arrangements. These were overseen by Beck’s father - noted composer and conductor David Campbell - working in tandem with his son to wring out the underlying emotion and elevate the compositions onto a cinematic plane. It was a musical universe not a million miles from the imperious heights of Scott Walker and Serge Gainsbourg.

“He’d have a rough sketch out, some chords and some melodies,” Beck told Record Collector. “I think the idea with the orchestra was that we really wanted to feature the orchestra and not just use it to augment a pop song. Really use it dramatically, not just as padding. Use it for all its worth.”

Aping the same brisk approach that they’d adopted during the Mutations' sessions, Beck and Godrich agreed to try and track a song a day - omitting the demo stage entirely.

However it soon became better to aim for a two-day recording timeframe for each song, to guarantee that the intricacies of the arrangements were captured as organically as possible without needing to spend too long overdubbing.

Despite this slight adjustment to plans, Godrich soon clicked into an easy working relationship with Hansen. “Everything with him is that simple,” Godrich told Time. “Because unlike most people, he always seems to know exactly what he wants to do.”

Recording the album at an iconic studio like Ocean Way allowed Beck and Godrich to harness some typically top-notch, iconic recording gear, to capture instruments with authentic analogue clarity, warmth and punch.

Beck’s most prominent acoustic guitar was a Martin HD-28, the recording of which was entirely the job of one Neumann U 47 FET microphone, owned by the studio’s well-travelled owner Allen Sides. Beck’s close-mic’d vocal was captured via both a AKG C12 and a Telefunken ELA-M 251 E.

The recorded signal was ran directly into Ocean Way Studio B’s impressive Dalcon console. This customised classic console had been purpose designed way back in 1970 by engineer Dallas Jorden for the studio's owner, Bill Putnam, and had been used on some of the most celebrated records of the pop age. Still in play in 2002, this remarkable feat of analogue desk design was key to the depth of Sea Change's sound.

Hailed by some as one of the most impressive desks on the planet, the Dalcon’s simple analogue circuitry prioritised pristine transparency yet its three internal amplifier stages could still be felt within the harmonic fidelity of the output audio.

A rack of API 550A EQ modules could be routed to any channel. These were frequently deployed by Godrich (in conjunction with the desk’s own EQ capabilities) to bring out just the right balance of treble and bass in both acoustics and vocals.

Godrich tended to ride the Dalcon’s faders live, approaching his role more akin to an instrumental player, reacting and adjusting instinctively to what he was hearing.

The Dalcon was so beloved by Nigel that he’d eventually buy it himself from the studio in 2011 (the desk currently resides in London’s Strongroom Studios.)

Compression was left to the reliable studio mainstays of the Universal Audio 1176 and Teletronix LA-2A. This pair of rack-mounted icons made every facet of the frequency range sing, and infused their authentic harmonic distortion and midrange presence onto the tape-recorded takes, emphasising the organic nature of the album.

Providing much of the record’s haunting ambience were Ocean Way’s classic reverb chambers and plates. These had been custom built by original studio founder Bill Putnam, and used by the hallowed likes of Frank Sinatra and the Beach Boys to provide a classic smooth decay.

You only have to listen to Sea Change's very first track to hear their spacious presence on the vocal of the transcendent The Golden Age.

Beyond the authentic Ocean Way kit, there was another ingredient in the Sea Change recording arsenal which was presented to Nigel Godrich by Allen Sides as a gift.

As Justin Meldal-Johnsen recalled in an insightful forum thread on Gearspace, “[It was] this very bizarre three-knob digital reverb from the early '80's that Allen Sides gave Nigel as a gift. Awesome tone. Combining that with a chamber or plate reminds me of some of the sounds you can get with a Publison Infernal Machine.”

Speaking of Johnsen, in that same forum conversation, he revealed that his chosen bass setup for Sea Change rotated a Guild Starfire and an American Standard Fender Precision bass. Johnsen plugged these into an Ampeg B-15R reissue amp, with his output captured via a Neumann U 47.

“No DI was used on this record,” Justin shared on Gearspace. “We tried and abandoned it before we cut the first song. [Bass] compression was a [Universal Audio] 1176, and API 550A for some EQ. Sometimes pick, sometimes fingers, I alternate between song sections.”

To keep things crisp, the drums were largely recorded dry and often set-up within Ocean Way’s small vocal ISO booths to guarantee an ultra-clear sound, before being blended with the studio’s aforementioned reverb chambers. Some of the more spacious sounding tracks (such as the dreamy Sunday Sun) were captured within bigger rooms in the studio.

To maintain a retro-leaning vibe, Waronker and Gadson’s respective kits were equipped with vintage snares. In particular was Gadson’s 1970’s Pearl snares, all routed into the Dalcon. This resulting impactful snare sound was tailored by Godrich to suit the song in question.

Sea Change’s drum sound has latterly been cited by some as a solid yardstick for comparison tests, you only have to listen to the tightly-tuned snare of Paper Tiger, the intimate Lost Cause and the more full-blooded rock punch of Little One to understand why it's been held up as such a benchmark.

Although live instrumentation was the order of the day, there was still space for some surprising digital colouration. While some surrounding sonic shading was provided by the likes of a heavily-treated Wurlitzer, other regions of the soundstage were often peppered by a soft synth that came bundled with an early version of Pro Tools, performed on a small Yamaha MIDI controller.

Being so rooted in authentic analogue production, the record was suitably tracked in tape, layering an authentic, un-processed dynamic range and depth across the spectrum, as well as imparting a dreamlike, classic ‘Hollywood’ sound on the strings.

Ocean Way’s Ampex 24-track tape machines were deployed for this purpose, while further overdubs and mixing was completed in Pro Tools.

The resulting record wasn’t just a bountiful set of some of Beck’s finest ever songs. It was an audiophile’s dream.

Though eschewing many of the more showy production quirks of previous reords, Beck (and Godrich) crafted an album of immense sonic quality in record time.

Across its 12-song narrative, Beck managed to alchemise a personal low into a towering artistic accomplishment - and revealed an endearing new facet of himself.

Sea Change, released on September 24th 2002, remains a special record for a lot of people. An engaging journal of struggle, the death of love and personal penitence, it was an album that a massive array of listeners could find comfort and catharsis.

Now healed, Beck but would re-don his quirky experimentalist hat for 2005’s Dust Brothers’ reunion Guero. But Hansen would venture back to this more intimate plane with Sea Change’s spiritual successor Morning Phase in 2014. An album recorded once again at Ocean Way (now owned by EastWest) with the same team, albeit without Godrich.

“I don’t talk too much about my personal life,” Beck told the Guardian. “You’ll get a thousand times more of me from my music than anything I could say in an interview.”

RECORDING WEEK 2026: “I feel like all of the records that have become special to me are born out of great friendships,” says producer, songwriter and mixer, Oli Barton-Wood.

This year, Oli bagged the Music Producers’ Guild’s (MPG) Breakthrough Producer of the Year for 2026. Noted for his ability to blend technical know-how with buzzing creative energy, Oli has worked with Ezra Collective, Luvcat, The Zawose Queens and many more.

Regardless of genre, the emotional rapport he establishes with his collaborators is equally as crucial as his studio expertise.

“It’s important to me when working with an artist that we have a connection, not just being their technical person but being part of their support network, building a relationship and understanding each other - it really informs every creative decision made.”

The MPG win came earlier in the year but Oli was unable to attend the event at London’s Troxy due to being on a trip to Vietnam. It was only when his phone started lighting up with calls and messages that he realised he’d been victorious.

“I never thought I’d win the MPG, which is why I booked the trip. I’d had this really busy year making Luvcat’s Vicious Delicious record and needed a break,” Oli explains. “I was asleep in the jungle when the awards happened and got all these calls at four in the morning.”

Does winning bring on new pressures and expectations? “I’m trying not to think about it too much,” he laughs. “I’m just trying to make good music and keep up with the projects I have going on. And pleasingly, most of my jobs come from people who have heard records I’ve worked on that they like.”

Oli’s studio ambitions first stemmed from playing in bands as a teenager, then he acquiring recording software so he could refine his own playing. He started out capturing the sound of his own emerging group before word spread of his affinity for the producer’s chair. Before long he began to work with others.

“I was putting every single penny I could gather into trying to build up my collection of gear, picking up microphones from Poundland, and using Audacity on my barely working PC,” OIi says.

“Initially this was for my own band but before I knew it, I’d started recording with other local bands in my parents' spare room. I guess I had a bit of entrepreneurial spirit and I feel very fortunate to have caught the bug early on.”

Producer Jim Abbiss was also a key early influence for Oli. Having been behind favourite records from Bombay Bicycle Club and the Arctic Monkeys, Oli chose to follow in Jim’s footsteps and study the Music and Sound Recording (Tonmeister) degree at the University of Surrey.

“I was really excited to have got on the course, then when I was finishing my degree, Jim was the judge for the final year of portfolio recordings and he chose mine,” says Oli. “I managed to have a slightly nervous conversation with him after the formalities, we stayed in touch and a few years later he asked me to come and work with him on an album with Tom Odell.”

The record was Tom’s second, Wrong Crowd, and saw Oli heading to Rockfield Studios in Monmouth in Wales.

“The stars just aligned,” says Oli. “It was my first major label gig, so we worked in Wales, then we went to Abbey Road, then RAK, it was a full circle moment and something I’d dreamed of when I was younger.”

These days, Oli mixes out of The Premises Studios in Hackney with an additional writing space in Peckham. But when he was starting to navigate the industry, alongside engineering, he’d been striving to build his production portfolio. A pivotal moment was working with Mellah (artist Liam Ramsden).

“I’d worked with Liam's band Black Manila and always loved his artist project,” says Oli. “We were experimenting with his solo work when he signed a small deal with Lucky Number. Off the back of that, he signed with Columbia and we worked on a couple of EPs together. He’s one of my absolute favourite musicians.”

Ever since, Oli has dedicated himself to building up an ongoing portfolio of projects with his time split between mixing, producing and songwriting sessions.

“Ultimately, I’m there to help in whatever capacity an artist needs me, which requires me to be flexible and keeps the work exciting,” he says. “I don’t think there’s any set way into the industry now. I came through the studio assistant path, but a lot of today’s young producers are just so insanely quick and talented on Logic or Ableton, they are making hits in their bedrooms in a few hours!

“I come from a technical background so I’m a producer that gets really involved in the sound sculpting element. I think having lots of strings to your bow in the studio is important, particularly as music tech gets more accessible and budgets fluctuate too.”

When Mellah signed a deal, Oli also secured a music publishing deal with Domino and the pair invested in building their own studio. Their Peckham base includes their main writing room and features plenty of music toys, drum kit and Oli’s mic collection too.

“I do plenty of writing there but I like to record in other spaces where the budget allows,” Oli says of his studio preferences. “If I’m working on a band record, I try to go to a studio to get a bigger drum sound and better separation, I prefer recording live as much as possible. My favourite studios in London are RAK, The Premises and Baltic, but working in residential studios is always great too, you’re able to totally zone in and tap out of normal life routines.”

Oli’s musical CV is one bursting with exciting records, artists and studio projects although the role he takes on differs depending on the artist’s needs. He worked with Nilufer Yanya as a co-writer and producer on her Miss Universe debut album from 2019 while also mixing Maisha, a band signed to Brownswood, and their 2020 record, Open the Gates.

Elsewhere, Oli produced and mixed Luvcat’s highly acclaimed Vicious Delicious album from 2025 while also working with Los Bitchos, Laura Misch and Jordan Rakei among many others.

“Ezra Collective are always a fun band to work with,” Oli says. “A lot of the work we’ve done has been at Livingstone in North London, they're amazing, often frenetic long days, chopping up parts, looping sounds and piecing songs together.”

God Gave Me Feet for Dancing is one of the group’s most popular moments taken from their 2024 album, Dance, No One’s Watching. Oli was asked to work on the session while packing down the Lemon Lounge stage at We Out Here Festival, a sound system project he helps run.

“I was working at Lemon Lounge when I took this call and they asked me to get to the studio within a few hours,” he says. “They were supposed to be collaborating with some huge American hip-hop artists, so I went straight to Livingstone. The collaboration didn’t materialise so the band ended up jamming, and we worked on the track that became God Gave Me Feet for Dancing. Those kinds of sessions are always my favourites due to the high levels of energy and musicianship.”

Another big project was Porridge Radio’s debut album Every Bad. A record that was Mercury Prize nominated in 2020.

“The basis of the tracks had been recorded with someone else,” says Oli. “I got hold of the files with the singer Dana [Margolin] and we set about injecting life into them. That was a really fun process, bringing in new character in the mix process and helping them realise their vision for it. To get the Mercury nod was amazing too.”

The music of The Zawose Queens is an ongoing project for Oli, a Tanzanian musical duo he discovered while in East Africa providing music production workshops as part of a British Council-backed initiative.

“I spent some time there as a kid and always had this affinity with Tanzanian music,” OIi says. “I went with fellow UK producer Tom Excell and while we visited, we connected with Pendo Zawose and her niece Leah Zawose from the Wagogo tribe.

“We started putting a record together with them. It turns out Pendo's father, Dr. Hukwe Zawose, had been signed to Real World, Peter Gabriel’s label. The Real World team were really keen to continue working with the family, we connected them with a booking agent and for the last four years they’ve been touring extensively throughout Europe - we’ve almost finished a second record with them which I can’t wait for people to hear.”

Alongside studio work and Lemon Lounge, Oli is also busying himself developing a new studio complex in South London. In collaboration with Mallah, the pair are looking for a property where they can run a number of production and rehearsal rooms with a recording studio.

“This doesn’t really exist in South London,” he says. “North of the river, there are all these great places that can offer this kind of community as well as functional music space. We want to build an educational side into it too and create learning opportunities for kids who want to pursue production or those young adults who might not be able to afford to work in traditional studios.

“Our aim is to support the next generation and give back too. I’ve just started mentoring as part of Fraser T Smith’s ‘Future Producer Academy’ as well as past work with BRIT School and Abbey Road Equalise. It’s something I’m really passionate about and can't wait to work on a similar project at our own studio.”

Find out more about Oli's work over at his official website.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: You've spruced up your computer and acquired the software to record with (your DAW, in other words), and you've even bought a microphone. You’re well on your way to being the next big thing in music for sure. And so, you settle down to do a great afternoon’s recording, and only then do you realise that you're missing one or two things…

The problem with creativity, at least for most of us mere mortals, is that when it strikes, you need to be prepared.

This is why so many professionals organise their studios so that they can access everything they need without any hassle - often described as their ‘workflow’. That might mean having a hardware synthesizer plugged in and ready to go, a guitar or bass amplifier mic'ed up, or just a permanently live microphone, waiting to capture all of your ideas as they come.

Let's start with an easy one shall we, there's that invaluable piece of 21st century equipment, the smartphone. Yes, that device that most of us carry around - and are typically glaring at - permanently is an ideal idea-catcher.

Your smartphone (whether iPhone or Android) has the capacity to capture your ideas quickly and easily. In days gone by, we might have used a dictaphone (essentially a micro-tape recorder) to grab ideas on the fly, and turn them into music or a lyric.

But, thanks to smartphones, you can do the same thing with an app, and better still, devices such as iPhones can upload into a cloud-based ecosystem, meaning that you can drop your ideas into cloud storage, for immediate access from a device such as computer or tablet/iPad.

So, it’s ideal for capturing ideas if they tend to strike you when you are out and about! It's less useful if ideas come to you in the bath - as a rule, phones don’t like water - you have been warned!

1. An Audio Interface

In an attempt to keep costs down for your home recording venture, you may be tempted to purchase a USB microphone. These microphones plug directly into a USB port on a computer and will do a fine job of capturing your live audio.

While software will allow degrees of control, you may prefer the option of an external audio interface. This is a box that plugs into your computer, allowing conventional microphones (which use XLR cables) to be used. There are far more XLR-based microphones available than USB, so it also widens your purchasing options.

It also means that you have a physical box-o-tricks with controls on it, and a couple of these controls can be invaluable in a live recording environment.

Firstly, you will have a pot (potentiometer) which will allow you to immediately increase or decrease the gain (volume) of your microphone. Better still, there will normally be a headphone output, with a dedicated pot to control volume.

By and large, you will find that audio interfaces are more flexible, and given that they have a dedicated task to fulfil, they often sound better than USB microphones. Of course, this does depend on the microphone you are using.

Read our guide to the best audio interfaces here.

2. Headphones

If you have a pair of speakers (aka, studio monitors) in your recording rig it is incredibly tempting to just play and record out of them. But, depending on the volume of your speakers, and the sensitivity of your microphone, you might encounter something known as ‘spill’. This is where unintended audio is captured by the microphone, with the same issue being encountered should you record multiple acoustic musicians, simultaneously.

There are ways to navigate this problem - mainly by shielding the microphone from the speaker emitted audio, but the tried and tested fix involves using a pair of headphones. This also means that, as a musician, it affords you the opportunity of locking-in to the track to a far greater extent.

The best option, by far, is a pair of headphones which are described as closed-back, and fit over the entirety of your ears, preventing sound leakage.

Being closed-back (and not open-back), they should limit unintended noise. The path of least resistance, with a cable going to your computer or audio interface, will also work best.

You can explore wireless/Bluetooth headphones, but these often employ a small delay, which means that you will be singing to a track which is a few milliseconds late! Hence, your recorded audio will be a tad behind the beat. Similarly, earbud headphones are not normally the best option, but they can be made to work with a little perseverance.

A very common headphone option in professional studios, is the Beyerdynamic DT-770 Pro. Their reliability is well known, while being fully enclosed and comfortable to wear, especially for long periods of recording.

Read our round-up of the best studio headphones here.

3. Extending Reach

Most headphones with a cable, particularly the DT-770 Pro, come equipped with a generous cable length, but depending on your recording set up you might need to go a bit further. It’s only then that you realise that you need a headphone extension.

A simple male to female affair should do the job, but if you find yourself recording with other people, think about getting a headphones splitter or distribution box instead.

More elaborate options include headphone amplifiers, which allow independent distribution and control of a number of headphones simultaneously. This can be exceptionally useful if your vocalist wants the headphones quieter than the guitarist who is rocking out for England at high volume!

4. Microphone Stands

It might sound obvious, but for every microphone that you wish to use for recording simultaneously, you will need a microphone stand. These come in many shapes and sizes, but for recording purposes a stand with a boom arm will allow you to place the microphone exactly where you want it. This might also mean that unintended knocks to the stand can be avoided.

All microphone stands are not the same though! Think about the weight of your microphone, and buy a stand that will suitably support it. Metal stands will offer greater stability, with companies such as K&M and Hercules offering plenty of different designs, to suit your recording setup.

Read our round-up of the best mic stands here.

5. Pop Shield

If you are recording vocals regularly, you may encounter the phenomenon known as ‘popping’. This is when a singer or vocalist uses plosives in their lyrics - ‘B’s and ‘P’s create a sharp blast of wind, which will hit a microphone, and create a disernable pop in volume.

One way to limit this effect, is to move the vocalist away from the microphone, but that doesn't always solve the problem. What you will need, is a pop shield.

In days of old, many people made their own pop shields from a wire coat hanger and an old pair of tights. Understandably, you may not wish to inflict such a makeshift contraption on your friends, so thankfully you can purchase pop shields for relatively little expenditure. It will make a difference, and it will certainly look more pro than a wire coat hanger…

6. A Music Stand

Whether you are a fully-fledged professional who can read music or not, the addition to your home recording set up of a music stand will immediately prove useful for efficient recording sessions.

You can put lyrics in front of you, an iPad/tablet with chords written on it, or even a guitar tuner, so you don't have to keep picking it up or even locating it.

Like all things in this world, you can spend a little and a lot. Cheap metal music stands, which fold out, start from around £10, but if you intend to use regularly for items such as an iPad, you might prefer something heavier and more robust.

A further consideration is that you might be working with somebody who wants to turn the lights down while recording. If you are using an iPad, they should be able to see what they are doing, but if they are reading from a piece of paper, the addition of a music stand light will be indispensable.

Read our round-up of the best music stands here.

7. Remote Access

Talking of placing iPads on music stands, many commercial DAWs provide the option for integration with associated or third-party apps, which can turn your phone or tablet into a remote for your DAW.

This means that you don't have to be close to your computer, allowing you to think more about acoustics and vibe than physically pressing buttons. Having a music stand that can comfortably accommodate this, and the continual pressing of the screen, is another potentially important consideration.

8. A Stereo Bar

If you are fortunate enough to have a stereo pair of microphones in your armoury, you will obviously need more than one microphone stand - or will you?

A cheap alternative to buying a second mic stand, is the purchase of a stereo bar, which will allow two microphones to be mounted simultaneously using a single microphone stand.

You can purchase stereo bars in various sizes and widths, but a common example (such as Rode's Stereo Bar - pictured) places the microphones fairly close together, for configurations such as a coincident pair. In recording this way, instruments such as acoustic guitars can sound very spacious!

Referring to our previous point about microphone weights, ensure that your microphone stand can accommodate the weight of two mics without falling over!

9. Acoustic Shielding

In choosing the ideal room to record in, domestic living environments such as a lounge, with its abundant wealth of soft furnishings, can provide a useful and dampened acoustic environment to work within. But what if your living partner is watching Love Island while you want to record in the same room? Arguments may ensue…

Less forgiving rooms for recording within tend to be those which have hard surfaces such as bare walls or windows. You can adopt a DIY approach, of draping sleeping bags or duvets in appropriate places to help absorb sonic reflection, or you can purchase acoustic screens, which will allow you to create a sort of mobile recording booth.

Established players in acoustics, such as GIK Acoustics and Clearsonics, have just the solution for you! Panels which open up to form a V-shape, which can be placed around a microphone, as well as around a performer. They will prevent first reflections, and in almost all cases tighten up a signal beneficially.

It's the little things that count!

There is so much to think about when recording at home so getting ahead of the little niggles can alleviate so much faff. Even having electrical or gaffer tape on hand may just get you out of a quick hole.

Above all, being prepared for your recording endeavours will mean that you can get on with the thing you really want to be doing - making great music at home!

RECORDING WEEK 2026: For a variety of reasons, the 1980s often get a bad rap. Unfettered capitalism shifted the western axis from good to greed, and pop music began to mirror this newfound faith in consumerism - and our collective fixation with the life-enhancing benefits of modern technology.

Old certainties were being supplanted by a vision of just what tomorrow might look like - with science and innovation leading the way towards a glorious tomorrow for households throughout the western world.

Someone who’d long been dreaming of a techno-utopian future however, was Thomas Dolby. A man who came to a epitomise the synthesist-pop artist of the early 80s, Dolby spent his formative years listening to bands like Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk - but the prohibitive cost of synthesizers meant that he was forced to head to the West End of London in order to play expensive synths in shops, often getting booted out a closing time!

Growing up in South West London he could often be found hanging around the Electronic Music Studios - also known as EMS - who produced legendary synthesizers such as the VCS3.

By chance, he found a discarded circuit board for a synth in a skip at the back of their studio, and, being inquisitive and fairly industrious, took the circuit board home. Before long, Dolby had built his own synth.

And so, the perception of Dolby as something of a synth-scientist started to become more like art imitating life. He worked as a programmer and keyboard player for the band Foreigner (the intro of Waiting for a Girl Like You, specifically) and supplied keyboards for an early 7-piece lineup of the Thompson Twins, before they became a trio.

Monetising his passion allowed him to afford the creation of his first album, and what a debut it was!

The Golden Age of Wireless is regarded as a classic, despite the fact that at the time, Dolby was a relative unknown, and the album didn't do terribly well. The skeptical record company told him that they needed a hit, or his prospects were looking bleak…

Dolby had become increasingly aware however, of the increasing importance of music video. In his head, he imagined the visuals for a prospective short film. Albeit one that needed a particularly compelling track to soundtrack it…

“I was very keen to try out my talent as a music video director. I was always a big fan of silent movies: Chaplin and Keaton and Lloyd and so on. And I saw music videos as really a silent movie with a soundtrack,” Dolby told Songfacts.

“I managed to persuade my record company to let me take a shot at writing and directing [a video]”

His label were intrigued, however they wanted to hear the song that the video was actually for… “I said, ‘Oh, well, I'll bring it on Monday morning.’ Then I went home and wrote the song,” Dolby told Forbes. “So it was definitely spurred by the enticing idea of writing and directing my own video.”

Created over the space of this single weekend, She Blinded Me With Science was born. Dolby harnessed his carefully assembled instrumental rig to maintain the sound-set from the first album. Given EMI's retrospective desire to integrate the single, that was clearly a good move.

Dolby was a huge advocate for the PPG Wave and associated computer. Offering wavetable synthesis, the Wave also provided basic sequencing and sampling, which proved invaluable for the song. He even nicknamed the wave computer ‘Henry’.

The drum track was generated from both the PPG and a Simmons drum module. The iconic offbeat cowbell was played by the PPG, which was also used to sample the snare sound, which was detuned before being incorporated into the track. The other drum sounds, particularly the highly distinctive toms, were supplied by the Simmons module.

Regrettably, the Wave Computer that had done so much of the heavy lifting on the first album had a terrible accident. It ended up falling down a lift shaft, and with that, Henry regrettably met a less than auspicious end.

Consequently, Dolby nicknamed his newly acquired Fairlight CMI Henry the 2nd! Of course!

He was only able to afford said Fairlight thanks to an advance from his record company, with which he also bought a flat. According to Dolby, the Fairlight was more expensive than the flat.

Long-time friend and bass player Matthew Seligman (also previously with The Thompson Twins) played the bass part on Science using Dolby’s Moog Source synthesizer. Rather than simply DI’ing the signal, it was played through a bass amp in the studio which was mic’d.

The magic created between the metronomically sequenced drum parts, and the organically played bass part is just perfect. There are subtle moments of improvisation in the bass, while it sits just behind the timing of the drums.

The iconic lead lines and jazz-influenced synth chords were all played by Dolby on his Roland Jupiter-4. He would later own a Jupiter-8, but the identifiable saw brass perfectly shores up the verse and chorus sections in both an accompanying and lead sense.

Drawing upon his experience of playing with bands, both live and in the studio, Thomas Dolby never seems to overplay on his songs. Everything has a place, with space being an important element, often letting musical moments of interest peep through, from a vocal to a synth sound.

What's quite surprising about this song is that it doesn't have a vocal heavy chorus. In many respects, this is the genius of the song - because it just continually references the song’s name. One element which really hammers this home is the continual interjection of the word “Science!”

Back in the early 80s, a scientist called Dr. Magnus Pyke, was quite a celebrity. He could often be seen in the role of an eccentric scientist on many television programmes. Hence, he was quite a household name in the UK.

Thomas Dolby discovered that it was possible to hire the good doctor by the hour, so he bravely booked him to come to his studio and deliver a few choice lines, as well as earmarking him to appear in the soon-to-be iconic music video.

Apart from the word “Science!” , in various stylised proclamations, he also delivered the line “Good heavens, Miss Sakamoto, you're beautiful!”

Of course, by today's standards, this feels slightly inappropriate, but it came from a position of love and respect, and cheeky a nod to the wife of legendary artist and composer Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was a good friend of Dolby's.

One particularly interesting moment of the production stems from the interjecting vocal line in each verse, which feels quite ‘eastern’ in musical style and delivery. This was supplied by session vocalist Miriam Stockley - apart from being a superb singer, her versatility was fairly renowned in the industry, making her an ideal person to sing the line which is also doubled by violinist Simon House.

But as fantastic as the song was, its real purpose was to back Dolby's vivid video vision. Based around the concept of Dolby being a patient on the psychiatrist's couch, the video depicts him being questioned by Dr. Magnus Pyke in the extraordinary setting of Holme House - an enormous Georgian mansion located near Regent’s Park, in London.

All of this played into a narrative that became quite successful for Thomas Dolby. The notion of him being something of a whacky professor or inventor, surrounded by synthesizers and wire-trailing studio equipment, became the overriding perception of him during this part of his early career.

As a single, She Blinded Me With Science sadly failed to trouble the UK charts, topping out at number 56.

However, in America, it went all the way to number #5, due largely to the widespread rotation of the video, which was a mainstay on the freshly-launched music channel MTV.

“If you had a video that was a little bit original, then it definitely causes some waves,” Dolby reflected in an interview with The Electricity Club. “And I think in my case, they were talking in the States about the new ‘British Invasion’ and synthpop so everyone was casting around looking for what this thing was. There was a guy with a catchy song and a very specific image and it was the antithesis of the mullet rock ‘n’ roll of the late 70s. So I think that’s why it really caught on. It was perceived as being very English and quirky. Whereas in the UK, there’s quirky Englishness around you all the time… Magnus Pyke was always on TV so there was nothing so extraordinary about seeing or hearing him!”

With a hit to his name finally, Dolby’s record company EMI re-released the album, frustratingly losing the superb track The Wreck of the Fairchild in favour of the new Science single, along with its accompanying B-side, One of Our Submarines. Great as this was for invigorating sales, it seemed to unbalance the conceptually-structured album.

But, Dolby would go on to prove his artistic breadth across albums such as The Flat Earth and Aliens Ate My Buick. His command of studio technology, coupled with an exceptionally sound musical background, meant that while he was possibly denied the exceptional success that he deserved, his albums were critically acclaimed.

“Obviously I was very pleased with Science,” Dolby told Billboard in 1984. “But, something about it also turned me off. I thought it was my most frivolous song, that it wasn't me. I'm more serious, more intense than that.”

With his finger ever on the technological pulse, Thomas even went on to supply the software that was used in early Nokia mobile phones that allowed them to play polyphonic ringtones.

For Dolby, science and innovation continue to excite, and open new creative doors…

"I think over the years, starting with electronic music but then going on to MTV videos, to production, to working with computers and the internet, web, ringtones, filmmaking, writing novels, teaching at university… Each new field I've gone into I’m really out of control and that's what sparks me,” Thomas told us last year.

"I sort of go into atrophy if I find myself working in an area where I do have control and I know what I'm doing. I get bored and uninspired quite quickly.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: If there's one thing that we can say about recording - and the technology that we use to do it - it's that everyone will have an opinion on how good something is, particularly when it comes to sound quality and colouration.

These debates can go nuclear once you enter the domain of microphones. A bewildering array of modern microphones now make relatively high-quality recording more affordable - see here for our comprehensive buying guide to these - however some might say these cheaper offerings pale when placed alongside the actual vintage models they’re based on - the ones that helped to shape the recording industry.

But is it really worth spending thousands on a vintage model? Nothing is more likely to sharpen the focus on this point than the associated price tags, and what happens if you want to record in stereo, or record multiple instruments simultaneously? That could really ramp up the price.

So, assuming money is in limitless supply, we've drawn up a list of some of the most expensive and coveted microphones currently available, in both the new and secondhand markets that you should definitely grab for your studio.

1. Neumann U47 (vintage Tube version)
Price: From £/$15000+

Without doubt, the brand which is most heavily associated with quality microphones is Neumann. It has quite the historical catalogue as well as many fine, modern examples which are based upon vintage designs.

The one microphone in their catalogue that sits head and shoulders above the others is the highly prized U47. Specifically, the original tube model, which was produced between 1947 and 1963. It's the benchmark for all large diaphragm condensers that followed.

It should not be confused with the current U47, which is a solid state FET design. It’s still good (very good in fact) but it's not the original vintage model.

The U47 quickly became the industry standard for ever-present detailing on vocals, coupled with a thick and creamy texture which benefited from harmonic saturation. Many recording artists regarded the U47 as the go-to, with a star-studded roster of aficionados which included Frank Sinatra, The Beatles and David Bowie.

A number of companies offer cheaper cloned imitations, but in reality, nothing will ever compare to a good condition vintage model, if you can find one! They are rare beasts, with a price tag that reflects the demand.

2. Telefunken ELA M 251 (vintage)
Price: From £/$15000+

This much coveted Telefunken legend was introduced in the 1950s, and the scarcity of the ELA M 251 is heightened further by the fact that only 3.000 microphones were made.

Known for their lush tone, making them ideal for detailed vocals, they were particularly popular during many Motown recordings, as well as when harnessed by amazing vocalists such as Ella Fitzgerald.

Their dual-diaphragm capsule design still makes them incredibly popular, even in cloned versions from companies such as Warm Audio (the WA-251) and Flea Microphones (the ELA M 251) .

3. Neumann U67 condenser microphone (vintage & reissued)
Price: from £8000+

The U67 was a follow-up to the legendary U47, first appearing in 1960. Considered particularly good for vocal recording, it was one of the first mics that could convincingly act as a general purpose all round microphone, thanks to its exceptionally balanced tone.

It has remained consistently popular over the years with the likes of Bob Dylan being a known user, all the way through to Jack White and The Weeknd.

Production of the original vintage models ceased in 1971, but Neumann currently offers a re-issued model, which it reports is sonically identical to the original. Cheaper clones are also available from companies such as Warm Audio (the WA-67).

4. AKG C12 condenser microphone (vintage & reissued)
Price: from £12000+

This tube-based microphone from AKG was first produced in Austria in 1953 with production terminating in 1963.

Approximately 2,500 microphones were produced, making the vintage models highly collectible. Sporting a beautifully crafted brass capsule, with gold coating, the original was another classy all-rounder, and was used at Abbey Road Studios to record Paul McCartney's bass, among many other recordings.

AKG currently produces its own reissue, branded the C12 VR. Even in this newer format, it still costs several thousand pounds to purchase. The saving grace is that it's less than half the price of a vintage model, even if you can find one!

5. Neumann U87 condenser microphone (vintage & reissued)
Price: £8000+

Arguably, the most ubiquitous microphone of them all, and the third entry in our list from the Neumann stable. The U87 is another example of a classic vintage microphone, which falls into the category of large diaphragm model.

It is particularly clear and crisp, making it an ideal all-rounder for general purpose recording. It has always been popular for vocal work however.

The current model, the Neumann U87 Ai, is a useful performer, but many engineers report that it's a little bit lacklustre when compared to the revered original or even other microphones at a similar price bracket or less. A number of clones are available, at a fraction of the price of a new model.

6. Sony C-37A tube condenser (vintage)
Price: from £3000+

One of the rarer microphones in our list, the Sony C-37A is an exceptional performer for recording acoustic instrumentation, as well as vocals.

Produced in the early 1950s, you can hear its performance alongside jazz artists, such as Miles Davis. Part of the reason for its popularity in the jazz setting, was its particularly warm low end, thanks to a slightly different design to its U47 and C12 peers.

Employing a cathode-follower configuration, powered by a 6AU6 vacuum tube. Vintage models are like hen’s teeth, but clones are available from companies such as Mojave (the MA-37) and Tonelux (the JC37), albeit with healthy price tags.

7. Schoeps CMC 6/MK4
Price: £1200+ per mic (New)

Schoeps is one of those companies that once you know, you know! It is held in particularly high regard within the classical and broadcast communities, where the company’s microphones perform particularly well in a number of settings, which include close and distant miking.

Their modular design invites flexibility in use, with the ability to swap capsules meaning that you can choose different capsules to suit your purpose.

One of its most popular configurations is the CMC 6 amplifier body, coupled with the MK4 cardioid capsule. The products invite experimentation, with ultimate flexibility.

8. AKG C414 XLS (New)
Price: £800+

This highly identifiable perennial classic has undergone many revisions over the years, but still remains a popular choice for many recording settings, ranging from acoustic guitar and upright piano through to vocals.

Their inbuilt versatility makes the 414 a perfect studio microphone, offering polar patterns from cardioid, through to figure-of-eight and omni.

Vintage models maintain high price tags, and often supply a little more colour, but the newer models are very effective. AKG also offers a matched pair in a stylish case, albeit at a premium price point.

9. Reslo RB Ribbon microphone (vintage)
Price: £200+

The first Ribbon microphone in our list comes from ribbon specialists Reslo. The RB has become known as the 'Beatles Mic as it was famously used by the band in early live performances at Liverpool’s iconic Cavern Club.

Their identifiable rectangular design was a common sight in broadcasting too, where they were even used on television panel and game shows. They can be picked up from all the usual auction sites, at relatively modest prices.

Bear in mind that the affordable price is a reflection on their performance. They sound okay, but it's likely to be more of a talking point than an actual useful modern microphone, although it definitely has its sound and place, depending on your production style and instrumentation.

10. STC/Coles 4038 - ‘Waffle Iron’ Ribbon microphone (vintage and new)
Price: £800+

The STC 4038 is another ribbon microphone, often known as the Waffle Iron, thanks to its perforated brass design. STC (Standard Telephone & Cables) initially produced the microphone, but later licensed production to Coles Electroacoustics, a company which was founded by former STC engineers.

The 4038 offers a distinctive and unique British sound, which is exceptionally smooth in high-end frequencies, with an uncanny ability to roll-off harsh transients. It has a reduced frequency response, when compared to large diaphragm condensers, operational between 30Hz and 15kHz.

We can't lie, it's a particular favourite here at MR. Brilliant for upper strings, brass and horns, and superb in a stereo configuration on pianos, or even as overheads on a drum kit. You will need a hefty mic stand though, because they are very heavy!

Still very much in production today, the design has not really changed, hence vintage models sit side-by-side with modern versions.

Honorary mentions
It seems strange when discussing the ultimate microphones that you might consider for your dream studio, not to mention a company that is entirely synonymous with microphone technology. Shure has provided some of the best microphones - particularly for the stage - over the last 50 years.

The ubiquitous SM57 and SM58 are comparatively cheap when compared to our dream list, but that doesn't make them any less desirable, and that's why we must give them a shout out!

The 57, is a brilliant microphone for rock recording; guitar cabinets, snare drums, even horns, all sound stylish thanks to the 57, and the 58 offers very similar performance. Its robust build lends itself to live vocal performance. Just ask Annie Lennox; she held a 58 in order to record the Eurythmics classic Sweet Dreams.

But it's not all about the 57 and 58! The SM7(B) has become known as more of a broadcast or podcasting microphone, but in a previous life, it proved to be exceptionally popular with certain performers.

Michael Jackson was known for his love of the microphone, and many of his vocal performances were captured using the SM7.

The Neumann KM84 (vintage and new) is another legendary microphone from Neumann, in a small diaphragm cardioid condenser design. Particularly popular as drum kit overhead microphones, they are just as at home on acoustic instrumentation, particularly acoustic guitars and classical piano.

Finally, Royer has secured a fantastic reputation since its initial appearance on the recording scene back in 1997. The company’s first microphone, the R-121, immediately became a classic in the eyes of many recording engineers, being a beautiful ribbon design, but with modern attributes that made it ideal for commercial recording.

Final Selection
Ultimately, there is something for all budgets in the recording world, and how a microphone may perform is dependent upon the instrumentation you intend to record - and the environment you are recording in.

Whether you are using a humble SM57 or a vintage U47, always be sure to listen - and put the microphone in the right place - before you do any tinkering at the mixing desk or computer.

Although having unlimited funds for recording gear is not something we think we’ll ever be really able to procure, it’s still always possible to get a great sound, with a little bit of perseverance and musical intent!

A decade ago this year, Blink-182’s seventh studio album California marked the creative and commercial rehabilitation of the pop-punk trio after a lengthy period of turbulence.

Although famed for their beloved 1999 mega-hit Enema of the State (and its slew of nostalgia-inducing hits, including All The Small Things and What’s My Age Again?) and 2001’s gloriously unhinged Take Off Your Pants and Jacket (The one with First Date and The Rock Show) the remainder of the 2000s found alternative tastes shift from their brand of summery pop-punk towards the more make-up-daubed, emo-tinged fare.

However, 2003’s darker self-titled fifth offering is often regarded as the band’s best work, featuring the more gothically-informed I Miss You and Feeling This.

The hailed record was the final one to be made with their trusted and beloved producer Jerry Finn, who tragically died of a brain haemorrhage in 2008.

It took a while for the band - Mark Hoppus, Travis Barker and Tom DeLonge to reconvene and self-produce 2011’s Neighbourhoods, but by that point, Blink struggled to be heard in the early 2010s musical landscape. Despite some strong moments, it failed to achieve its expected commercial objectives.

However, with 2016’s chart-topping California - produced by Goldfinger guitarist John Feldmann and replacing an exhausted Tom DeLonge with Alkaline Trio’s Matt Skiba - a restructured Blink hit their stride.

Skiba would remain in the band for California’s follow-up, Nine in 2019, before DeLonge returned to the fold for good with 2023’s One More Time…

Back in 2016, following the release of California, we spoke to its producer, John Feldmann in a lengthy interview. We were keen to know how the then-freshly reconfigured band had managed to create such a vibrant record.

“One of [Blink’s] long-standing members left the band and there was a bunch of question marks for them as far as what their career looked like,” Feldmann remembered. “They tried doing stuff on their own and it was coming out a bit like patchwork.”

We asked John how he rode the line of capturing this newly bolstered band - but not having it sound too much like an Alkaline Trio record;

“That’s the biggest challenge I had: not making it sound like an Alkaline Trio record and not making it sound like a Blink covers record,” John said.

“Basically, trying to make Matt be who he is, capture his essence as the guy who grew up in Chicago and had a different upbringing to anyone else in the band, but not trying to force him into the role of Tom.”

In terms of the record’s driving sound, Feldmann put it all down to the instruments - and how the band play them;

“To me, the essential Blink sounds are the band’s instruments. Travis has a total custom kit that’s been built from scratch using some vintage parts and some modern parts that him and his tech Daniel built from the ground up. Besides being the best drummer that’s ever lived, his passion for the instrument is key to his sound.

“All of Mark’s basses are custom-built Fenders made to his specifications. Jerry Finn actually suggested re-routing Mark’s pickups to flip them because of the way Mark plays – he has this really interesting downstroke. I haven’t seen anyone play that way; that sound where you almost hear the roundness of the strings, you hear that grinding sound of the pick hitting the strings, it’s because the bass has been re-wired that way. Skiba used custom Jazzmasters and Jaguars.”

In terms of his favourite then-new songs on the record, John pointed to Built This Pool; “Mark already had that song written, but knowing they were willing to embrace the humour that all Blink fans love so much - and that kinda went missing for a little while - I knew that we were going to be able to make the record that Blink fans wanted.”

He also particularly loved the band's LA tribute, the aptly titled Los Angeles.

“Los Angeles was a really important song for me. There’s so much synergy that’s happened between [me and Blink]. I was born in San Diego and lived there almost half my life. Mark spent most of his time in San Diego. When he sings that chorus it gives me goosebumps.

“For all intents and purposes, Blink are a San Diego-based band, and now we’re all living in Los Angeles. It’s the heaviest song on the album and it was great to be able to capture this heartfelt song about the city we love and embrace as home.

“It also showcases Skiba’s voice, that rasp and grit when he sings high. When he sings that chorus it gives me goosebumps. That was the first song we mixed and when I heard the mix I was in my car. I took a picture of goosebumps on my arm and sent it to Mark and was like, ‘Dude, we’ve made it man.’”

Read our full 2016 interview with John Feldmann here.

What is it?

Back in 1985, Rupert Neve had left Neve Electronics to set up Focusrite and was asked to design a mic preamp and EQ for the console at AIR Studios Montserrat. The result was the now-legendary ISA 110. The Focusrite ISA C8X audio interface, with its two ISA preamps, is essentially the same circuit that’s featured on some huge records.

The ISA 110 was a feature of the Focusrite Studio Console Ocean Way Studio A, with artists like Beck, Hole, Stereophonics, John Mayer, No Doubt, and more all tracking there. It’s often praised for its clarity, rather than the more coloured sound of Neve or API preamps. Word on the street is that where one of the former flatters your sources, the ISA reveals them.

The standout feature of the ISA is the switchable impedance. You can move from low at 800Ω, ISA 110 at 1.4kΩ, medium at 2.4kΩ, and high at 7kΩ. In plain English, it means that at higher settings you should get a flatter, brighter response, while lower settings bring out more of the low-mid resonance. It should also be handy for ribbon mic users, allowing you to brighten them up and get more level without cranking the input gain.

You get two of these ISA preamps to play with, instrument inputs on the front and mic inputs on the back of the unit. These both feature a fully analogue, variable soft-clip saturation circuit. An inductor-based high-frequency lift is also available on the ISA channels, modelled on the ISA 430 MkII’s air mode. The high-pass filter is also only available on the ISA channels, fixed at 75 Hz.

The manual doesn’t name the remaining six preamps, but the specs match the Focusrite Scarlett 4th Gen exactly. These also feature an all-analogue high-shelf circuit, but the distortion on these is DSP rather than analogue. The remaining six inputs are also on the back of the unit, and each of the eight inputs has a dedicated line input alongside it. There are also two send and return paths, again only available on the two ISA inputs.

There are two XLR outputs on the back, again each with a dedicated line output. The remaining 10 outputs are all line. Two headphone outputs are on the front of the unit, each with a dedicated volume control and mute button. Returning to the back of the unit, you’ve also got MIDI In/Out, optical in and out, S/PDIF in and out, and word clock in and out. The unit connects to your laptop or PC via USB-C.

Each channel features Focusrite’s auto gain functionality, regardless of whether it’s an ISA channel or not, which can be accessed from the front panel or via the Focusrite Control 2 software. It’s got a built-in monitor controller with three switchable groups, dim, mute, mono, and talkback via an internal mic. The app offers preset recall and remote control via the mobile app. It also works standalone, keeping its settings when you disconnect it.

Performance

In my home studio, I set up the ISA C8X by routing outputs 1 and 2 to my studio monitors, plugging the USB-C into my MacBook Pro, and selecting the interface in my sound settings. My laptop recognises it instantly, and I’m able to play back a track from the latest Young Knives record without any further setup.

The front panel glows a very nice sunset yellow, contrasting nicely with the blue chassis and making everything very easy to read. There are physical controls for everything, whether that’s setting the input type, impedance, selecting the insert path, engaging phantom power and low cut, as well as adding the 430 high shelf, and engaging the analogue saturation circuit via the console button.

It’s great for those who prefer to get hands-on, and most things are clearly marked enough that a semi-experienced engineer could get by without having to reach for the manual. That said, I did have to double-check what ‘430’ and ‘console’ do. I’ve also yet to meet an engineer who uses auto gain, so I’m unsure why companies persist in adding these, particularly to a high-end unit like this.

The ISA preamps feature two gain knobs, with a stepped knob going up in multiples of ten and a fine knob going in 1dB increments. It’s a nice touch, especially if you note down on the track comments what your setting is going in. Each ISA preamp has a dedicated button to switch between them, and all the settings have their own panel to show what’s engaged and what isn’t on each channel.

Moving to the ‘standard’ Focusrite preamps section, it’s a similar story, but there’s no ‘430’, ‘console’, or impedance settings here, with the first two replaced by simple ‘Air’ and ‘Drive’ buttons. Each channel has its own panel denoting what’s engaged, and its own metering. Interestingly, the meters start off blue at the lower levels before transitioning into that sunset yellow as they get past -12dB. They look like the gas flames on an old cooker.

Navigating into Pro Tools, my next check is to see whether it’s recognised here. I switch my playback engine in my project and Tools picks it up straight away, resulting in instant playback without any additional software required. I’m a big fan of using software on smaller interfaces with limited controls, but here, where there’s a button for everything, I’m happy to carry on without it.

What I do, though, is download the Focusrite Control 2 app on my laptop and my phone, so I can remotely control the unit without having to return to it physically. This is a nifty feature if you frequently record on your own, preventing you from having to move back and forth between your recording and mixing spaces if you’re lucky enough to have separate ones.

For my testing, I hook up two C414 condenser mics to the ISA inputs, position them in a Blumlein configuration, and break out my acoustic guitar. Positioned a couple of feet away, I play the same song, a DADGAD drone of mine with various settings engaged on the inputs. That means I do some with the console saturation enabled, some with the 430 air setting on, as well as all of the different impedance settings that are available.

Upon listening back, the differences in the takes aren’t what I’d call huge. They’re certainly there, and going from the low impedance setting to the high impedance setting, there’s a noticeable change in the brightness of the take. The C414 is already quite a bright microphone, and adding the high impedance into the chain makes the acoustic border on brittle versus the warmer low impedance setting.

The saturation is less noticeable on my takes. There’s definite natural compression I can just about detect, but with my signal peaking around -12dB, it’s more subtle smoothness than noticeable character. It sounds great though, and I can see on the waveform that it’s massively smoothing off the peaks versus the takes without the console saturation engaged.

Cranking the input gain up and moving closer to my mics, I start to get noticeable drive as the signal hits more into -6dB territory. The acoustic strummed hard causes breakup that makes it sound like I’ve got a distortion plugin on it. Again, the sound here is less characterful and more smooth breakup, but if you wanted to add some drive to your louder sounds on the way in, you can do that here.

Once I get to mixing my takes, I can see that the low cut has done its job. It’s gentler than I expected, so I can bring some of the low end back if I like. The overall sound of the take is pretty good though, and after taming a few of the naturally annoying frequencies acoustic guitars tend to make, I’m left with a very polished-sounding result indeed. Having the ability to process sources on the way in is the real power of the C8X, and it means you don’t have to buy any additional preamps if you’re tight on budget.

Verdict

After spending a good amount of time with the Focusrite ISA C8X, I’m overall very impressed with it. For those looking to upgrade from a desktop audio interface to something a little more pro, it’s got a lot going for it. The ISA preamps sound fantastic, and having all the functionality both on the front of the unit and within the companion software means it’ll please both kinds of users.

Using it is honestly an absolute breeze, with everything clearly labelled on the front panel. Add in the ability to use it remotely via your smartphone, and you’ve got something that will be just as at home in the home studio as it is in a dedicated one. The ability to add 16 more inputs via ADAT means you can have 24 dedicated channels (at 44.1/48kHz) should you wish.

The one thing I did find annoying is the halo-style LEDs on the hardware knobs. It’s hard to be accurate with these, and the ones for the headphone outputs don’t stay lit, so it’s easy to blow your own head off if you’ve got the volume cranked and forgot to put it back. They also default to showing the master output volume when playing back, giving you even less visibility on what they’re set to. Of course, you can set this via software more accurately, but I prefer the segmented style LEDs that give you a more definitive view of what the volume is doing.

MusicRadar verdict: If you want to step up from a desktop interface to something with more functionality, the Focusrite ISA C8X is well worth the asking price. The ISA preamps deliver superb quality recorded tones, and have plenty of extra analogue features like a high shelf and saturation circuit that can really enhance the sound of your sources. Hands-on control and app control work really well, and apart from the annoying headphone LED rings, it’s really clear what’s going on just from looking at the front panel.

Hands on videos

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Freshly launched this week, the Sweetwater Studio & Recording sale is delivering up to 50% off hardware and up to 85% off software. Whether you want to add some analogue colour to your mixes or bulk up your mic locker, there’s some great gear on offer.

There are some proper industry heavyweights represented in the sale, with Universal Audio, Warm Audio, Shure, Rupert Neve Designs, and PreSonus all getting discounts. There’s no official end date listed at the time of writing, so it’s well worth having a rummage before the best stock disappears.

I’ve had a look through the sale in its entirety to see what’s available, and straight away I had my head turned by a nice $50 saving on the Solid State Logic SSL 2+ MKII. I reviewed it when it came out; here’s a quote from me on it:

“It’s honestly hard to find fault with the SSL 2+ MKII. It’s perfectly suited to the vast majority of home recording tasks, very usable thanks to the plethora of knobs and buttons, and delivers superb sound quality. Its real strength for me is the second in that list, though: with all the controls in reach and not hidden behind menus or companion apps, it’s super easy to get up and recording quickly.”

You can find out more in my full Solid State Logic SSL 2+ MKII review.

For an upgrade to your monitoring, the Adam Audio A7Vs have a $120 reduction per speaker. DSP-based fine-tuning means you can change their output to match your space, and the X-ART ribbon tweeters deliver a really clear high-end response. The large size means that the low-end response on these is really good as well.

Finally, no mic locker is complete without a Beyerdynamic M160 double ribbon microphone. It’s got a huge $150 discount in the sale, and it’s great for recording in untreated rooms. It’ll tame harsh cymbals, work great on a loud guitar cab, and can be pointed at a lot of different sources you’ll encounter in the studio.

What is it?

Go:Mixer Studio is a desktop and tripod-mountable digital mixer with an integrated 12-in / 6-out USB audio interface, recording up to 24-bit / 192kHz. It joins Roland’s growing range of Go: badged portable products, which includes keyboards, pianos and mixers.

Go:Mixer Studio is designed for both standalone use and via USB, and is supported by both desktop and smartphone software apps: Go:Mixer Editor desktop (Mac OS and Windows), Go:Mixer Cam (iOS) and Camcorder for Go:Mixer (Android). The unit can be powered directly via the main USB-C interface connector, but you also have an additional USB-C power connector, which is helpful for mobile device use or if you want to use it as a standalone mixer. The box includes a regular 1.5m USB-C to USB-C cable but no further adapters, so factor that in if you want to use it with USB-A or Lightning-equipped devices.

The Go:Mixer Studio has a good selection of physical connectors on the back and side panels. On the back you get two XLR mic/line inputs with individually selectable 48V phantom power, two ¼” jack line outputs, MIDI in and out on 3.5mm mini jacks (breakout cables not included) and two USB-C ports (power and USB).

On the left is a dedicated instrument impedance input ¼” jack and also two headphone connectors, ¼” and 3.5mm mini jack, which you can use simultaneously. The headphone mini jack is also the TRRS type, providing access to the headset mic on combined devices. Finally, on the right there are two ¼” line inputs and a 3.5mm TRRS-style auxiliary connection for stereo input and mono output with suitably equipped devices.

The top panel combines physical controls with a colour display. The top three knobs are continuous rotaries with push-button action. Below these are two dedicated output levels for Phones and Line Out. Rounding things off are menu and navigation buttons.

Performance

Go:Mixer Studio is designed to be straightforward to use. You’ll find the screen system is easy to navigate, with parameters aligned with the three rotaries, while deeper options are accessed via the push button. In addition to the basics such as gain and phantom power, there is excellent functionality across the inputs, including 3-band EQ, compression and reverb as well as input stereo linking, pan and mute. There’s also independent control over input assignment to headphones and the line outputs.

Further options include independent level settings for the headphones, routing of the auxiliary input (line out or headphones) and source select for the USB audio outputs (direct, pre-fader, and post-fader). In typical mixer fashion, this last setting lets you control the recording level with the input gain and the fader (in this case, the corresponding rotary controller), or use only the analogue input gain, which you’ll find in the channel parameters. Overall, we found setting up inputs, setting levels and adding processing very simple. That said, there are some limitations to the processing options at higher sampling rates (96kHz and 192khz), where you’ll find the compressor and reverb become unavailable on some inputs.

If you choose to use the Go:Mixer in tandem with the desktop Editor app, all these options become even easier, with each channel’s Setup page providing quick editing and excellent visual feedback. There’s also a full mixer page for analogue inputs, USB inputs and analogue outputs. If you’re using the mobile app, options are more limited in terms of control, as the app is designed primarily as a video and audio recorder. However, there is control of input fader levels and the app also records the Go:Mixer Studio audio in a multitrack manner to individual tracks. Formats are limited to 48kHz WAV or AAC (64 to 320kbps), but you can export the recorded tracks as individual audio files, which is very handy.

Verdict

Go:Mixer Studio is a highly flexible compact mixer and USB interface that’s perfect for desktop recording and live performance. Even fader fans will find the screen based system easy to navigate, and the onboard effects provide the icing on the cake.

Hands-on demos

RolandChannel

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In 2019, a technician found himself in an unusual situation. While working on the restoration of an original Buchla Model 100 modular synthesizer, he realized that he was, in fact, getting high. The nine-hour trip was the result of trying to remove a crystalline substance from the interior of one of the modules – later testing revealed it to be LSD.

No one is quite sure how the acid got inside the synth, but at some point, a previous owner clearly dabbled in both modular synthesis and psychedelic drugs, a concrete example of how music-making and psychoactive substances have historically gone hand in hand. But are there tangible benefits to this beyond just having a good time in the studio? A growing body of research says yes.

We tend to think of psychedelic music as beginning in the 1960s, as exemplified by songs like The Beatles’ I Am the Walrus, but humans have been ingesting psychedelic drugs and listening to music for, well, ever. “Music and psychedelics have been intertwined throughout the existence of Homo sapiens, from the early shamanic rituals of the Americas and Africa to the modern use of psychedelic-assisted therapy,” says the study Psychedelia: The interplay of music and psychedelics.

Of course, listening to music while under the influence of psychedelics is not restricted to religious or therapeutic settings, as ‘60s concerts by The Grateful Dead (whose sound engineer, Owsley Stanley, was also known for his home-brewed and particularly potent LSD) and modern rave scenes will attest to.

“Music has been thought to be of great importance when taking psychedelics both within traditional settings and within more modern contexts such as raves – where masses ‘trip out’ not only from the mind-altering substances they consume but also from the techno music they are surrounded by,” say the authors of the study.

There’s no doubt that listening to music under the influence can have a powerful effect on the mind, but are there also benefits to creating music in a psychedelic state?

If you’ve noticed a renewed interest in psychedelics in recent years, particularly among the scientific community, you’re not wrong. In the year 2000, researchers at Johns Hopkins University received approval to begin testing psychedelics on human subjects. Since then, Johns Hopkins’ Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research has published more than 60 peer-reviewed articles – and that’s just the one location.

One area of study that is yielding fascinating results is the role that psychedelics can play in improving creativity. According to an article in Association for Psychological Science, studies have offered intriguing clues about the relationship between the two. “The psychedelic experience feels very creative by nature, in that it can provoke novel ideas and insights, intense emotional experiences, and hallucinations that can make the world feel brand new and full of possibilities,” the article says.

In another study, researchers found that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) impacted creative thinking in unexpected ways, resulting in ‘pattern break’, which was reflected in things like novelty and surprise, and increased symbolic thinking.

Another study found that ingesting ayahuasca, a tea containing the powerful hallucinogen DMT, enhances divergent thinking, a thought process that can generate many unique ideas from a single starting point. This is supported by another study that showed that past psychedelic drug users exhibit better divergent thinking skills than non-users.

Psilocybin’s effects on cognition and creativity, a review study conducted in 2022, discovered that while large doses of magic mushrooms tended to impair cognitive performance and creativity, microdoses tended toward creative enhancement. “When it was a macrodose, which is a very large dose, cognitive functions and creativity were impaired,” Baeleigh VanderZwaag of the study explains.

“When it was a microdose, a dose considered to be sub-hallucinogenic, there were generally more positive effects on creative enhancement.” This suggests that microdoses could be useful when engaging in direct, creative work.

When asked if psychedelic substances like psilocybin could help with music production, Baeleigh answers, “There have been some new and emerging studies since we published our paper that are expanding to different levels of creativity.

"Creativity is actually a complex construct and I imagine music production taps into multiple aspects of it. That being said, some of the studies in our review did show improvements to some facets of creativity so it’s possible it might translate to creativity in the context of music-making.“

Musician and producer Pete Kember has been mining a psychedelic vein in his music for the entirety of his career. A founding member of trance rock band Spacemen 3, he’s since pioneered a kind of modular synthesizer psychedelia, and produced and collaborated with likeminded artists such as Panda Bear and MGMT.

For Pete, there are clear benefits to working with psychedelics when making music. “I think they can make quantum leaps possible and open the possibilities,” he says. “Look at I Am the Walrus. They can inspire a lot with sound effects too. The distortions of perception to your auditory input can be very inspiring.”

Psychedelics have played a part in Pete’s music-making since the beginning. “Of course,” he answers when asked if working with psychedelics aided in the development of his creativity. “It was what I was looking to incorporate from very early on. I try to make music that incorporates shifts of consciousness, and that only came from the use of drugs.”

When asked his psychedelic of choice, he responds, “I don’t do it so much these days, but DMT was always my go-to for evaluating. It gives a different perspective that is useful to have. Anything that changes your perception is useful in that role.”

Though Pete relied on psychoactive substances to enhance the creative dimension of the process, he says he would never partake before taking on tasks such as mixing and mastering. “I would never use [drugs] in those situations,” he stresses. “Using them in mixdown or mastering would be too misleading. They rearrange your auditory cortex too much for those critical points in the music.”

One artist who doesn’t shy away from psychedelics – even during technical work – is Andrei Olenev. As Iterate, the electronic artist produces a heady spin on bass music, one that is deeply psychedelic by design. “All of my music, and much of my life, has been linked to psychedelics,” he explains. “Psychedelics led me to wanting to make music. All of my creative endeavors are done in a psychedelic way.”

Much as Baeleigh suggested, Andrei likes to work on music while microdosing either LSD or psilocybin. “I generally take amounts that are somewhere in between a microdose and a standard hit,” he says. “The dosage depends on what I'm hoping to get from it. A sub-threshold microdose can be great in general for focus, clarity of mind and creativity.”

There are times, however, when he prefers to up the dosage, as he feels it helps him get into the zone. “It sounds a bit cliche,” he says, “but I really feel like it helps induce a flow state. I can, for example, be at a point with a track where I have several elements in place, and I'm not really sure of the direction to go.

"Getting into a psychedelic state can make the whole thing fall into place. The idea is there, I'm tapped into it, and I'm putting it all together.”

Unlike Pete, Andrei finds mixing and mastering can benefit from psychedelic assistance. “It can be interesting with psychedelics because they amplify your senses,” he explains. “You might be more sensitive to something like harsh frequencies. I don't think it would be good to always mix on psychedelics, but much like people test their tracks in different listening environments, working on a mix while in a semi-psychedelic state can be good. Especially if the music you are making will be played at psychedelic festivals, or heard by people at home on psychedelics.”

While psychedelics may have the potential to enhance creativity, there's always the possibility that things could go in the other direction. Unsurprisingly, the amount that's ingested is a decisive factor. In the same way that your performance will be adversely affected the more alcohol you consume, the more of a drug that you take can prevent any constructive work from getting done, or even impair your abilities entirely.

Baeleigh VanderZwaag’s study found that when it comes to mushrooms, the potential lies in the amount of the dose. “Given psilocybin’s hallucinogenic nature,” the study says, “it is unsurprising that macrodoses produced primarily negative acute effects on cognitive performance and creativity.” Interestingly, it was the microdoses that appeared to yield creative benefits.

Furthermore, researchers from Essex University studying the impact of drugs and alcohol on artistic creativity found that, overall, getting high doesn’t make you more creative.

“What we hear about in the media is people who successfully enhance their creativity using drugs, but you don’t hear about the examples where someone took drugs and passed out and therefore their creativity was lower,” the University of Essex's Dr Paul Hanel told The Guardian. “It doesn’t do anything for creativity. People don’t benefit from it – it just has no effect at all.

Regardless of their effects on creativity, psychedelics should always be approached with caution. For example, psychedelic therapists recommend always tripping with someone sober to talk you down in case things take a bad turn. This might not always be possible for a studio session.

When it comes to its use in the studio, Pete Kember advises taking any interactions with drugs seriously. “Psychedelic drugs should be respected and only used after some research,” he says. “And with a support network, period.”

He also recommends entering from the shallow end of the psychotropic pool: “Start with milder psychedelics and inform yourself as to the basic protocols of using.” He also mentions the importance of set and setting in the experience, your mindset (set) and the place where you do it (setting). If you are anxious or in a space where you aren’t completely comfortable, things can go awry – not something you want in a working musical environment.

Andrei cautions to start with small doses. “If someone is not experienced with psychedelics, I would definitely not take more than a microdose in the studio,” he says. “If you get very high, it's hard to work on music at a computer.”

He also highlights personal mindset as something to remain aware of. “For some people there could be risks, especially with large doses,” he cautions. “People with a personal or family history of mental illness should be very cautious with psychedelics, if not avoid them altogether.”

When asked if there are any dangers to working under the influence of mushrooms in the studio, Baeleigh VanderZwaag responds: “At this point, the research with psilocybin suggests that it is relatively safe for healthy populations.

"More recent research continues to suggest that psilocybin is well-tolerated, but there are certain medical conditions and psychiatric histories that are excluded in the research study. It’s always best to discuss with a healthcare provider to determine if it will be safe for any individual person.”

Finally, Pete cautions against thinking of psychedelics as something you can rely on for an instant boost of creativity. “I don’t believe that it’s instant inspiration,” he stresses. “You have to respect it deeply. It inspires different things in different people, as you might expect. It’s a vast and varied experience, and what it inspires should be too.”

Note that this article is intended for information purposes only. MusicRadar in no way condones any dangerous or illegal activity and this should not be misconstrued as such.

Arturia has updated its top-end desktop audio interface, Audiofuse Studio, launching a Rev 2 edition with ‘optimised’ preamps and an upgraded Bluetooth module.

Among the crowded audio interface market, Audiofuse Studio stands out for the breadth of its flexibility, offering a wide array of I/O capabilities that aim to cater for any and all studio needs. It features a total of 18 inputs, eight of which are analogue inputs on the device itself, the rest provided by digital I/O.

Of those analogue inputs, four are combo mic/line/instrument inputs along the front edge, each equipped with a DiscretePRO preamp. Those preamps have, according to Arturia, been upgraded for the Rev 2 model, now offering more headroom and extended gain range (-129dBu EIN, 119dB dynamic range, to be precise about it).

The remaining analogue line inputs sit along the device’s rear panel. Inputs 5 and 6 can also be switched to make use of an integrated phono/RIAA preamp, allowing for connection of a vinyl turntable,

On the output side, the Audiofuse Studio has four line outputs and two aux reamping outputs. There are also two independently controlled headphone outputs with integrated talkback and direct monitoring.

Beyond its analogue connections, the interface packs several digital connectivity options. This includes eight channels of ADAT inputs and outputs, along with S/PDIF input/output or Word Clock input/output/thru.

The device has a primary USB-C port for connection to a host computer, plus three additional USB 2 ports that allow it to act as a USB hub. There are also 3.5mm MIDI input and output ports.

Audiofuse Studio can also stream audio via its integrated Bluetooth module. This is another area the Arturia has upgraded for Rev 2. The module now supports AAC, aptX along with aptX HD and aptX Low Latency.

AudioFuse can be configured and controlled using the associated Audiofuse Control Center software, which can be instantly accessed by pressing the Arturia logo on the hardware. Alongside the launch of the Rev 2 interface, Audiofuse Control Center has been updated to version 2.5, which is free for all Audiofuse users and introduces features including preset import and export.

With its abundance of connectivity and customisation options, Audiofuse Studio remains one of the most versatile interfaces you’ll find at this price point. Its usefulness is enhanced further still by a generous bundle of Arturia plugins, including Analog Lab Intro and a selection of preamps, compressors, delays, reverbs and modulation effects drawn from the brand’s excellent FX Collection bundle.

Audiofuse Studio Rev 2 is out now, priced at £849/999€/$1,199 USD. Head to the Arturia site for more information.

The Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps is one of the best-loved songs on the White Album and generally considered to be George Harrison’s first real masterpiece as a songwriter.

It’s one of those songs that maybe you get burned out on from overexposure on classic rock radio, but then if you leave it alone for a while and come back to it, you find more intriguing details the more closely you listen. Here’s the 2009 remaster.

George recorded a demo of the song with acoustic guitar and some overdubbed harmonium. It was released on the Beatles' Anthology 3. It’s more wistful than dramatic without all the production. George’s original lyrics are a little different too.

The lead guitar on the White Album version was famously played by an uncredited Eric Clapton, amid a tense studio atmosphere.

George Harrison recalled how Clapton's contribution came about in the The Beatles Anthology: "We tried to record [While My Guitar Gently Weeps], but Paul and John were so used to just cranking out their tunes that it was very difficult at times to get serious and record one of mine," he said.

"I was driving into London with Eric Clapton, and I said, ‘What are you doing today? Why don’t you come to the studio and play on this song for me?’ He said, ‘Oh, no – I can’t do that. Nobody’s ever played on a Beatles’ record and the others wouldn’t like it.’ I said, ‘Look, it’s my song and I’d like you to play on it.’

"So he came in. I said, ‘Eric’s going to play on this one,’ and it was good because that then made everyone act better. Paul got on the piano and played a nice intro and they all took it more seriously."

The song itself is about the band’s internal friction after their trip to India, which Harrison experienced as a profound spiritual experience, and which the rest of the Beatles experienced as… a trip to India. This tension is memorably parodied in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which, if you haven’t seen it, don’t deprive yourself.

At the time he wrote While My Guitar Gently Weeps, George had been reading the I Ching, and was enthusiastic about the idea that everything is meaningfully connected, that there are no coincidences.

So he decided to write a song by opening a book and using the first words he saw, which were “gently weeps.” When I was a kid, I didn’t know about all the intra-Beatles conflict, and thought that George was singing about the state of the world generally. I was probably partially correct; the song works well either way.

Like most Beatles songs, While My Guitar Gently Weeps is not complicated, but it is nevertheless is full of musical intrigue. Here are the chords to the intro:

| Am | Am/G | Am/F# | F |

| Am | G | D | E |

The verses begin the same way as the intro, but the second time through the phrase, the chords are a little different.

| Am | Am/G | Am/F# | F |

| Am | G | D | E |

| Am | Am/G | Am/F# | F |

| Am | G | C | E |

The intro and verses begin with a common musical trope called lament bass, a bassline that walks slowly downward from the tonic to the fifth. European canonical composers used lament bass constantly. For example, here’s Dido’s Lament by Henry Purcell (1689):

You have heard enough lament bass in classical contexts that when it appears in a rock song, it gives a sense of old-world tragic grandeur. Pre-rock Anglo-American popular music is full of lament bass too. Check out My Funny Valentine by Rodgers and Hart (1937), performed here by Chet Baker:

The Beatles loved lament bass, and used it in several of their songs, including Michelle, Dear Prudence, Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and Magical Mystery Tour.

In the verses to While My Guitar Gently Weeps, the lament bass runs under the opening two bars, “I look at you all, see the love there that’s sleeping.” In the next two bars, on the lines “while my guitar gently weeps”, the chords move through Am, G, D and E.

This short progression feels like a miniature adventure, because the D chord does not belong to the key of A minor like everything you else have heard until this point. You would naively expect a Dm chord there, which contains the note F. The D chord’s active ingredient is the note F-sharp, the source of the chord’s surprising brightness. (There is also an F-sharp in the lament bass part, but because it’s part of a descent, it doesn’t have that same feeling of temporary uplift.)

The second time through the verse form, George sings “while my guitar gently weeps” in a different melody, over a slightly different chord progression: Am, G, C and E. The C chord sticks out for a different reason than the D chord did the first time.

C is part of the key of A minor, but it’s also the basis of its own key, C major. The G chord is shared between A minor and C major, and it makes a nice logical pivot between the two. You have heard this particular A-minor-to-C-major change uncountably many times. I’ll talk about why it works so well in a minute.

After your brief brief visit to the sunny land of C major, the verse ends on another E, which mentally prepares you to return to Am at the top of the form. But no, the song goes into a new section on the line “I don't know why nobody told you.” Most people call this the bridge, though it’s placed where a normal song would have its chorus. Whatever you want to call this section, it’s not in A minor like the verse; it’s in A major instead. This is a much more dramatic shift than the brief visit to C major a minute ago. To understand why, you need to know some music theory.

Picture the white keys on the piano keyboard. They play seven notes, repeated in octaves: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. If you play these notes over a droning or repeated A, you get the A natural minor scale. But if you play them over a droning or repeated C, you get the C major scale. The scales consist of the same notes in the same order, but changing the starting note changes the notes’ meaning, like the words RESPECT and SPECTRE. When you move from A minor to C major, you aren’t changing any of the notes, just the relationship of those notes to each other. Pretty cool!

You might also expect the key of A minor to be closely related to the key of A major, because they both center on A. Beyond that similarity, however, the two keys don’t have much overlap. They only share four of seven possible notes in common (A, B, D and E). The relationship between A minor and A major is more like the one between the words RESPECT and REVENGE than the one between RESPECT and SPECTRE. While moving from A minor to C major is so smooth as to sometimes not even be perceptible, moving from A minor to A major feels more disjointed.

Anyway, the bridge stays safely within A major, before plunging you back into the gloom of A minor when it goes back to the verse.

| A | C#m | F#m | C#m |

| Bm | | E E/F# | E/G# E |

For more musicological insights into the tune, check out Alan Pollack’s analysis, part of his epic project to analyze the Beatles’ entire recorded output.

The Beatles recorded While My Guitar Gently Weeps over a few sessions in August and September of 1968. It was one of their first songs to use an eight-track tape recorder. (Everything up until the White Album had been recorded to either two or four tracks. For everything! Can you imagine?) You can read all the details of the sessions in The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions by Marc Lewisohn.

On the final version of the song, George sings lead (sometimes doubling himself) and plays acoustic guitar and Hammond organ. Paul sings harmony and plays bass and piano. He also takes the unusual step of overdubbing a second layer of fuzzed-out bass. John plays electric guitar with a tremolo effect on it. Ringo plays drums, overdubbed tambourine, and a strange galloping rhythm on castanets. The tempo drifts around between 110 and 120 beats per minute, but Ringo’s halftime drum pattern makes it feel like an incredibly slow 55 to 60.

In an unused early version of the song, George tried one of his trademark backwards guitar solos, but he was dissatisfied by it and didn’t keep it. Instead, he brought in his buddy Eric Clapton to play lead guitar on the finished version. Clapton was concerned that he wouldn’t fit into the band’s sound, and he suggested that they manipulate the tape to make him sound more “Beatle-y”, as he put it.

During mixdown, engineer Chris Thomas made a copy of the lead guitar track and used varispeed to slightly wobble its speed, which also resulted in wobbling of its pitch. This is why Clapton’s guitar sounds vaguely seasick. It sounds like they did a similar varispeed effect on the organ track. The Beatles used varispeed a lot, sometimes to make things higher and brighter (like John’s voice in Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds or Paul’s on When I’m Sixty-Four) and sometimes to make things lower and sludgier (like the entire band on Rain.)

While the chords to While My Guitar Gently Weeps evoke European classical music, Clapton’s lead guitar comes out of a very different musical tradition: the blues. He uses string bends to play pitches in between the piano-key notes, giving the guitar a vocalistic quality.

Clapton plays more simply than usual–his solo on the outro starts by repeating the note E thirteen times–but he uses expressive pitch bends to create emotional intensity. Those thirteen E’s aren’t monotonous because he bends them a slightly different amount every time, so none of them are tuned exactly “right.” I prefer this style of playing to Clapton’s showier stuff, it feels more emotionally direct.

John Lennon gets a nice blues moment in the song too, right at the beginning of the first bridge. He plays a little guitar fill that ends on C, a note that’s part of the Am chord. But the chord here is A, and the note is supposed to be C-sharp, so John bends the C up toward where it’s supposed to be. Maybe this was intended, or maybe John forgot that the change was coming and reacted to his wrong note in the moment. Either way, it’s very satisfying, because he traverses all the microtonal pitches in between C and C-sharp, and the effect is exquisite.

Covering late Beatles songs is hard. Their musical impact is so dependent on the specific sonic atmosphere the band and their engineers and producers created in the studio, the exact guitar tones, the surreal timbre of slowed down and sped up tape, the odd instrumental touches (castanets!), the layered vocals. Any competent rock band can learn While My Guitar Gently Weeps in ten minutes, but it won’t sound exactly right without all that sonic atmosphere.

To really convey the vibe precisely, you would need two bass players, and someone playing castanets, and a way to create that pitch wobble on the lead guitar and the organ, and on and on.

Danger Mouse used samples of the White Album recording to make a new backing track for “What More Can I Say” by Jay-Z on his mashup classic The Grey Album – it's an excitingly fresh approach to these holy relics of rock and roll. There are steep legal obstacles to sampling and remixing the Beatles, but I don’t know of a better way to engage creatively with their sounds.

Labor Day is nearly upon us, which means it’s a great time to bag the last of the summer savings on music gear. Over at Guitar Center, you can save up to 30% on all manner of gear, which admittedly doesn’t sound like all that much compared to some others who are offering bigger headline discounts.

GC has an ace in the hole, though, as much of the gear that’s discounted is exclusive to Guitar Center, which means you can’t get it anywhere else. That means not only are you getting a great deal, but you’re potentially getting something that not many other people will have, helping you stand out on stage, in the practice room, and in the studio.

The first model I want to shout out is the stunning Epiphone Les Paul Custom Quilt in Ocean Blue. This is a classy and pretty unusual guitar, but thankfully it plays and sounds as good as it looks! You can save $150 at Guitar Center right now.

Next is the striking Gretsch, with a $70 reduction, and its midnight blue finish with gold hardware makes it a real head-turner. Dual Filter’Tron pickups are perfect for rock and roll guitar playing, while the treble bleed circuit ensures you can roll off the volume and still retain the clarity. Add in a Bigsby tremolo, and you’ve got yourself one amazing guitar for a lot less.

Next is a favourite here at MusicRadar, the Alesis Nitro Max electronic drum kit. It’s got a not-insignificant discount of $50 at the moment, bringing the price just below the $400 mark, which is excellent value for money.

Next up, I spied a nice discount on a JBL 306P MkII studio monitor. We reviewed the 5-inch version and found it to be a fantastic-sounding monitor for the money. A $50 discount takes the price down to just $199 each.

Finally, for those looking to start playing piano with the new school year, the Casio CDP-S110 has $70 off. The weighted keyboard offers a realistic, grand piano-style response, with a responsive touch that lets you express yourself.

Now, obviously, there's a lot more on offer in this sale, so I highly recommend browsing the entire offering. You have until September 9 to get involved.

A grand piano once played by Freddie Mercury is up for auction in October and could be yours if you have a spare hundred thousand or so currently burning a hole in your wallet.

The Yamaha C3 grand is one of a number of Freddie-related items once owned by Reinhold Mack which the producer (who turns 77 today) is selling. The piano was played on the Hot Space, The Game and The Works albums, as well as by a list of not-insignificant artists including Bryan Ferry, the Rolling Stones, Leonard Cohen and Led Zeppelin. Its pre-sale estimate is somewhere between £200,000 and £400,000.

If that’s a bit beyond your budget, then how about an AKG C414 EB mic that Mercury used and which can be seen in the video to One Vision? That could set you back anywhere between £40,000 and £80,000.

Both of these fell into Mack's possession after his years working at Munich’s Musicland studios. Originally set up by Giorgio Moroder, Musicland birthed a number of classic albums – Donna Summer’s I Remember Yesterday, ELO’s Out Of The Blue and Black And Blue by the Rolling Stones, to name just a few.]

Queen were particularly fond of the facility, and struck up a close relationship with the in-house engineer. Freddie was godfather to Mack’s son, named Freddie Junior. He was also namechecked on Dragon Attack, a Brian May-written track on 1980’s The Game (‘gonna use my stack/ it’s gotta be Mack’).

The auction also includes a number of personal mementoes that the late singer gave Mack. There are handwritten lyrics to the songs My Love Is Dangerous and Let’s Turn It On, from Mercury’s 1985 solo debut, Mr Bad Guy. These are expected to fetch between £1,500 and £6,000. Rather touchingly, there’s also a teddy bear that Freddie presumably gifted to his godson that is estimated to fetch between £800 and £1,600.

In a statement, Mack has said: “Freddie was not only a colleague and close friend; in many ways, he was part of our family. Away from the countless hours we spent creating music together at Musicland Studios, our home in Munich became a place where he could escape the pressures of fame, relax and simply be himself. To us, he was never a celebrity; he was ‘Uncle Freddie’ - spending time with his godson Freddie Jr, playing table tennis with Julian and celebrating family birthdays with us.

“We have carefully preserved these items for decades, not because of their value, but because of the memories they hold. We now feel the time has come for others to enjoy and appreciate them, and we hope they offer fans a connection not only to Freddie’s extraordinary artistry, but also to the warm, funny and kind-hearted man we were privileged to know.”

Propstore are hosting the auction, which takes place on 1 and 2 October. Auction registration is now open with the full catalogue available to look at on the Propstore website. Alternatively, you can see the items at a free exhibition at The Cumberland Hotel in London from 23 to 27 September.

It is 60 years since the late Jimi Hendrix first plugged into a Marshall, turned it up and sent guitar spinning on a different axis, and the British guitar amp company is continuing its anniversary celebrations with a custom half-stack, headphones and a Bluetooth speaker.

All come in purple-and-black cosmic swirl, with silver details and commemorative badging, and for players who thought the hand-wired 1969 JMH Super Lead tube amp head launched in May was maybe too much of a fire-breather in this day and age, the more moderately powered 20-watt Hendrix 60th Anniversary JMH Studio Edition is a more portable – and more house-trainable – proposition.

A word of caution, though: 20-watts of tube power (a pair of EL34s do the grunt work under the hood) is still l-o-u-d, but this amp is switchable down to 5-watts.

This amp is all made at Marshall’s Bletchley factory, in the UK, and comes bundled with a matching 2x12 cab loaded with Celestion V12s, with both featuring a third eye badge. Another cool detail is the purple LED.

Elsewhere, it’s very much the Studio Vintage Plexi vibe we know and love – a downsized 1959SLP with two bridgeable channels, controls for Presence, Bass, Middle, Treble, High Treble and Normal.

Around the back you will find a series effects loop – hey, the originals did not have that – plus 16, 8 and 4-ohms speaker connections and a DI output, too.

You can check out how all this sounds in the demo video featuring Texan rock and blues guitar phenom Ally Venable above.

Janie Hendrix says it is incumbent on today’s generation of players to take the torch from her brother and reinvent the electric guitar their own way.

“Jimi was always searching for a sound that did not yet exist, pushing beyond what anyone thought an electric guitar could do,” she says. “Marshall gave him the power and freedom to turn those bold ideas into a sound the world had never heard before. Sixty years later, that connection between Jimi and Marshall still speaks to new generations of musicians who are pushing creative boundaries and searching for their own sound”

Also included in this release is a special edition Emberton III Bluetooth speaker and a set of foldable Royal V headphones.

These are available now direct from Marshall, priced £149 and £129 respectively, and from other retailers from September 9. The JMH Studio Bundle ships from September 9 and is priced £1,749. US prices TBC.

For more details head over to Marshall.

Operating at the intersection between electronic music, indie rock and pop music, British five-piece Hot Chip have built their career on tracks that balance undeniable hooks with an alluring strangeness.

That sound comes from the band's mix-and-match approach to songwriting, which combines synths and electronic instrumentation with guitars and acoustic drums, and sees band members regularly swapping roles in the studio and onstage.

But, as band members Al Doyle, Joe Goddard and Alexis Taylor explained to us when we visited them in their east London studio, in the band’s early days that approach often meant working around technical limitations.

“When we made our earlier albums, Joe was always trying to capture what was happening when everyone was playing, but it didn't always work,” Doyle says. “We just didn't have the setup to be able to do that. But the instinct was always there to try. Part of the reason for building this place originally was to make that whole process easy.”

Much of the band’s first few albums – Coming On Strong, The Warning and Made In The Dark – were started in Goddard’s home studio. Although to hear Goddard describe it, the word ‘studio’ might be overselling it a little.

“The computer and a small amount of gear was just next to my bed,” he says. “There was a kind of spaghetti of black cables all over the floor, which traumatised my wife and still does.”

In the years since, the band’s studio setup has been upgraded significantly. The band now primarily work out of a London studio primarily set up by Doyle. With multiple rooms, an envy-inducing collection of vintage synths and a Trident TSM desk at its centre, the studio allows the band to write tracks in a more collaborative manner.

“Because we’re in this studio that Al built, we have space to make things very readily from scratch,” Taylor says. “There may still be times where somebody brings an idea they’ve written in to play to the rest of the band, but there are also times with the new records we've been making where everything is just happening in real time. We’re improvising things, trying things out.

“You make a beat on a drum machine and then somebody joins in on the keyboard, and another person simultaneously joins in on another keyboard over the other side of the room. Kind of just building up layers to see what the song could become.”

As Doyle explains, allowing multiple people to try out ideas simultaneously is one of the key benefits to the design of the studio space.

“In terms of how Hot Chip operates in this studio, that's why everything is basically plugged in all the time, because it means that there's no barrier to capturing a performance that's happening on any instrument in any space in here,” he says. “I think that came from that culture of trying to do that, even when we weren't quite able to do it.”

“The room allows you to be working on one thing in here collectively, but then there's also the drum room and the piano room through there,” Taylor continues. “Often I’ll run in there if I have a different idea for something. So you can kind of develop a second song while you're working on the first song. There are different spaces to try things out, and for some reason I think that's been quite key to the way we've always worked.

“Whether it's going into a different room or just stopping what you're doing and starting another thing, basically having a couple of things on the go in one day can mean that you have a breather from something. Then when you try a new idea, a second song, that could be quite exciting because you feel like you're making progress on a different thing. It gives you the space to then come back to the first idea with a fresh perspective on it.”

We took the opportunity to quiz Hot Chip on a few of their studio highlights. In the video above, Doyle, Goddard and Taylor talk us through some of their favourite synths, and why the Trident desk brings a distinctive vibe to the studio.

The band has recently reissued breakthrough albums The Warning, Made In The Dark and One Life Stand. Revisit our breakdown of the band’s classic track Ready For The Floor.

Okay, so the end of August isn’t exactly known as prime bargain-hunting season for music gear. But sometimes, the universe throws us a curveball, and today, it’s a seriously good one. I’ve just stumbled across a microphone offer that genuinely rivals the best Black Friday music deals.

Right now, Guitar Center is slashing up to 25% off a bunch of studio equipment, but the real headline here is the jaw-dropping $170 discount on the Aston Origin condenser microphone. That brings the price down to a tiny $79!

I’m a big fan of the Origin even at its usual wallet-friendly price, but at $79, it’s honestly a no-brainer. I’d even be tempted to grab two and run them as a stereo pair.

So, if you’ve been on the fence about upgrading your mic locker, or just want a killer new sound for your studio, this is one of those rare times when hesitation could mean missing out.

For me, the Aston Origin isn’t just another entry-level condenser mic. This large-diaphragm, cardioid-pattern mic has earned a reputation for punching well above its price class. In our glowing in-depth review, we said, “Close up, the proximity effect doesn't get boomy and misbalanced; the low-end characteristic is pleasing, rendering the source with little tonal alteration beyond the basic physics of proximity. Vocals are a clear winner here, with plenty of scope for playing the mic from close-up intimacy to a more roomy distance without losing or altering the voice.”

The custom-finished, wave-form mesh head gives the microphone a boutique look, but it’s designed to handle knocks and bumps that would leave other mics bruised, or worse. Plus, Aston’s unique mesh acts as a built-in pop filter, so you can often skip the extra gear for controlling plosives.

MusicRadar’s resident recording expert Matt McCracken put the Origin to the test in a recent session, and here’s how he described the results: “I used the Aston Origin recently to record a Tweed Fender Blues Junior, on the edge-of-breakup with a healthy dollop of spring reverb. The Origin perfectly captured the lush, complex overtones of the metallic reverb wash,” says Matt.

“Paired with a dynamic mic, it nicely complemented the more direct tone with detailed room ambience, blending beautifully for an organic-sounding guitar tone that sat in the mix perfectly,” he continues.

The only issue Matt had with the microphone was the bulky shock mount, giving us this handy tip: “You have to do a lot of manoeuvring if you’re using it in close quarters with another mic. It’s fine on a single source like vocals, but a bit awkward when dual-micing a guitar cab.”

At $79, the Aston Origin is a steal, whether you’re a seasoned engineer or a bedroom producer looking to level up. Deals like this don’t come around often, so if you’ve been waiting for a sign to expand your mic collection, this is it.

Hey do you fancy recording an EP at the world-famous Real World Studios near Bath? Of course, you do. Who wouldn’t?

Well, that’s the enticing prospect that awaits “four to six” unsigned South West-based artists in a new initiative the studio is launching with a bit of help from the Arts Council.

It’s called ‘amplified@rw’. The selected artists will be given a multi-day recording session with Real World’s in-house engineers, including full mixing and mastering.

The package also includes “mentoring from industry professionals covering publishing, rights, and release strategy” and all the lucky artists will be part of “an exclusive showcase event at Real World Studios in front of key music industry decision-makers.”

Real World says they are looking for applications from unsigned artists that are over 16 years old and are based in the South West, which means Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorset, the Bristol and Bath area as well as Somerset, Devon, Cornwall and The Isle of Wight.

You don’t need a professional-sounding recording to enter, a rough recording, a phone note or a video will suffice. Any sort of genre is accepted. Indeed, Real World says it's “keen on attracting a diverse range of artists.”

“We’re searching for authenticity,” said Real World Head Engineer, Katie May. “It doesn’t need to be polished or perfect. We want to hear the spark of an idea, and that idea can be recorded on a phone or in a bedroom studio. Our goal is to find talent and provide the facilities and support to let them flourish in a way they wouldn't be able to otherwise.”

"This is an incredible opportunity for emerging talent," adds David Maher Roberts, General Manager of Real World. "By providing studio time, professional mixing and mastering, mentorship, and a showcase for these artists, we hope to support the growth of the South West's vibrant music scene.

"I am curious to hear the diverse range of music from the region and proud that the Real World team can help these artists take the next steps."

Real World is something of a South West institution. Founded in 1989 by Peter Gabriel in the Wiltshire village of Box, it’s become home to the Real World label and the WOMAD festival, which was also founded by Gabriel and has offices there.

Who’s recorded at Real World? Generations of artists from the UK and abroad, including Take That, New Order (Technique was one of the first albums to be cut there), Amy Winehouse, Bjork, Alicia Keys, Arctic Monkeys, Pixies, Harry Styles and Robert Plant, to name just a couple of handfuls.

If you fancy following in their footsteps, head over to www.realworldstudios.com/home/amplified.

The closing date is September 9 and the two recording blocks will be between October 26 and November 3 and November 16 – 19 this year.

From the mighty concert grand to the mini MIDI controller in your backpack – there are countless ways to play keys and trigger notes into your DAW or reach your audience’s ears. If you’re striding out, choosing your first keyboard, or simply looking to flex your creative might, here's everything you need to consider.

If you've spent any time shopping for a keyboard or comparing instruments, you'll have noticed that not all of them have the same number of keys. So why are some keyboards bigger than others? And do you need that extra space? Here's a breakdown of what's going on.

The Standard: 88 Keys

Let’s start with the big guns. The full sized acoustic piano has 88 keys. That’s 52 white keys and 36 black keys and it’s been this way since the late 19th century when piano manufacturers gradually extended the range of earlier instruments to meet the demands of ever-more experimental composers and performers.

Those 88 keys span a full seven and a quarter octaves, from the lowest A at the bottom of the keyboard to the highest C at the top.

The vast majority of the canon of classical and contemporary piano repertoire sits comfortably within this range, which is why 88 keys became – and remains – the definitive standard, able to cope with anything a composer can throw at it.

The 88-note keyboard is essentially your ‘flight deck’ of controls, each key striking single or multiple physical strings with a force that’s directly proportional to the velocity and pressure you apply.

The result is an infinitely nuanced tone that both allows expert players to inject their personality, skill AND will show up newbies as the players-in-waiting that they are.

And let’s not forget each key’s weight and heft. Playing a good quality piano is a physical clash between a well-trained human musician versus a wood and metal machine that can weigh in excess of a hatchback.

Can’t afford the space but still want that feel? Don’t worry. These days there are countless 88-note MIDI controller keyboards that will go a considerable distance to delivering the touch, feel and weight expert players need, all within far more compact and home studio-friendly frames.

Eyes closed and fired up alongside a modern high-quality piano plug-in, most players would be hard-pushed to tell the difference between the modern approximation and the half-a-ton real thing.

Your choice all comes down to space, money and whether you need that DAW recording, arranging, composing flexibility at the end of the day.

Keyboardists and producers will appreciate the convenience and be willing to take a compromise on feel, while true ‘players’ will always prefer the full-on ebony and ivory real thing.

So why do some keyboards have fewer keys?

The short answer is, again, practicality, size, weight and cost. A full 88-key instrument is large and expensive to manufacture, so for many less militant players and purposes, a reduced keyboard is a perfectly reasonable compromise.

73-key ‘stage pianos’ are a great middle ground. There are plenty to choose from, from all the big names and six and a third octaves and handles the vast majority of piano repertoire without the full width of an 88-key instrument.

For gigging musicians who need something portable, a 73-key keyboard (there are also 76-key models too) with a professional playing action is often the sensible choice, offering great feel and a wide-range of authentic keyboard and string sounds on board.

And plugged into your DAW (try doing that with a concert grand…) it’s a luxury keybed for composing and programming with synths, drum machines and more.

Sure, 73- or 76-note weighted keyboards are sizey and still very ‘pro’ beasts but at least they CAN be put in the back of a car and taken to a gig.

The four/five octave sweet spot

Next step down the tree we have 61-key keyboards – a size and weight that has pretty much become THE de-facto standard for the modern keyboard.

This five octave size is extremely common across entry level, mid range and even pro synths and keyboards.

Five octaves is sufficient for beginners learning scales, chords and simpler pieces, and keeps the instrument compact and affordable. And it’s certainly wide enough for playing chord and lead two-handed parts with comfort and ease.

That said, you will start to notice the limitations if you progress to a more demanding repertoire. While pop and rock will fit easily onto 61 keys, you’ll find yourself running out of notes on classical and jazz pieces written for the full piano, making exciting use of those extreme upper or lower registers.

And you can forget any piano-style weighting or real/fake ivory feel here.

Five octave keyboards are strictly ‘synth-action’, often being able to read and express key velocity and pressure, but lacking any of the feel of a ‘real’ piano (or clever ‘weighted’ approximation). Sure, you can get good synth action five octave keyboards and bad ones too, but none are as good as a properly weighted, larger alternative.

49 keys (aka four octaves) meanwhile, is becoming the standard for hardware DAW controllers. That is, ‘soundless’ controller keyboards, typically aimed at producers and studio musicians rather than pianists.

These compact instruments are designed primarily for programming and MIDI control rather than traditional playing and as such WILL usually allow the recording of velocity but will also more usually lack pressure (or aftertouch) feel.

As for any kind of piano weighting… Forget it.

Want to go even smaller?

Take your pick! There’s countless options right down to those that feature mini keys for extra portability and even flat key octave-and-a-half controllers specifically made to be used alongside your laptop on the move.

Just remember, the smaller the keyboard the less authentically ‘playable’ it’s going to be.

Want to get notes out of your head and into your DAW. Fine. Want to jam and solo with a band? Maybe you need something larger…

Does size matter?

For an intermediate player, yes, it can. If you're working through piano grades, playing classical repertoire or serious pop and jazz arrangements, you'll increasingly encounter pieces that venture beyond the range of that popular, standard 61 key instrument.

As a general rule, if you're considering yourself as a player (rather than a producer or programmer) then 73 keys is the practical minimum for you. And weighted keys to replicate the feel of an acoustic piano is a vital ingredient in order to develop a ‘proper’ technique and ability to express ‘feel’ that you can actually hear and – in time – make your own.

88 keys is always preferable if space and budget allow and you’ll often find that the weighted action on such ‘piano controllers’ is even better. Full sized weighted or ‘hammer action’ keys behave much more like an acoustic piano than unweighted synth action keys. If you're developing as a pianist rather than a keyboard player, weighted keys on a full 88 key instrument is the combination worth aiming for.

Synth player and/or programmer/producer? Start here:

Not so fussed by style and feel? Want to sound great fast? A 61-note synth would be perfect for you.

Just starting out with a laptop and a DAW? Try a 49-note controller keyboard.

Making music on the move? Grab any of the many knob-and-slider equipped 37-note or less controllers from the likes of M-Audio, Arturia, Native Instruments and more.

One thing is for certain. Once you stop drawing notes on screen and start physically interacting with them via a music keyboard, you never go back.

Now go choose your weapon!

We'll give you a good head start with our pick of the current best keyboards on the market.

AI is cutting-edge technology but one of its leading platforms has announced a new service that uses distinctly old skool tech.

Suno is launching a vinyl pressing and shipping service that will give users the ability to order a one-off 12-inch record with a custom-designed sleeve.

The process, it seems, will be a three-step one. First, you select the tracks you want on the record from your own personal Suno library. The maximum running time for these is apparently 46 minutes.

Then you upload your chosen artwork for both the front and back of the sleeve, as well as the labels. Once the finished record is pressed and passes through quality control, you’ll receive your own disc on polyethylene terephthalate glycol vinyl, which Suno are claiming is “eco friendly”.

The price, according to the platform, is just $45 excluding shipping, which seems pretty competitive for a one-off, considering that mass-produced vinyl by established artists is around that mark in 2026.

It’s not clear from the Suno website whether you’ll be able to press tracks that are in your Suno library that aren’t generated via the AI platform. However, you could fill your record with stems, beats and drum breaks, resample them and chop them up without the need to clear samples. If you so wished.

Of course, should any bedroom producers use this service and then go on to find success on a wider scale, their one-off pieces of Suno vinyl will go on to become very valuable indeed.

For more information head over to the Suno website here.

What is it?

Novation’s Launch Control series first appeared in 2013, and 2026 brings us the third generation, mirroring the revisions made to the recently-updated Launch Control XL. Ironically, given the name, neither of these units have dedicated ‘launch’ features any more – the pads from earlier versions have disappeared, which is a shame because they were useful. Along with the cosmetic update, the LC3, as we’ll call it from now on, promises improved DAW integration on one hand, and customisation on the other.

The controller arrives in a simple recycled cardboard box (and in keeping with that, the LC3 chassis is made from 85% recycled materials), and the contents are equally straightforward – the LC3, and a 1.5m USB-C to USB-A cable. Your purchase includes a software bundle that includes Ableton Live Lite, Cubase LE, and plugins from Baby Audio, Kievgrand and Output.

Products like this are rather mysterious when powered down; monolithic black shapes with dark-toned controls, and plain white text – the device needs to be powered up before things make more sense. The upper panel includes a 128 x 64 monochrome OLED display at the top left, two rows of eight endless knobs each, with indicator lights under each one, and 15 buttons in all.

Connections are located at the back, with, from left to right, a USB-C port, MIDI Out/Thru, MIDI Out, and MIDI In, all on full-size DIN plugs, and a Kensington lock slot. It’s very rewarding to see full-size MIDI connections making a comeback here, and improving our chances of adapter-free communication with other equipment.

Performance

We connected to a MacBook Pro via USB and used Novation’s Components application to check for firmware updates. Our tests began with Ableton Live 12, and configuration was as easy as could be, with the words ‘Live 12’ popping up on the OLED. The Mode/Function buttons flip between DAW Mixer mode, where knobs take over pan and volume, and DAW Control mode. The lower buttons can be used for tasks such as mute, solo, and arm, while the Page buttons cycle through banks of controls in familiar Live control style, and the Track buttons, naturally, navigate through tracks.

We then installed Novation’s Logic Pro script and enjoyed the same degree of control as with Live (other DAWs are supported, including Bitwig, FL Studio, Cubase, and anything that supports HUI). Furthermore, the LC3 has seven custom mode slots, which can be uploaded from the Components software.

We used the provided modes for Novation’s Circuit Tracks hardware, powering the LC3 via USB, with a MIDI cable connecting the devices. It was an excellent way to expand physical control for the Circuit’s onboard synths – we achieved similar benefits with Akai Pro’s MPC One+. Other templates are provided for products from Novation, Elektron, Arturia, GForce, and Xfer’s Serum, and it’s important to remember the level of customisation available, so if your gear isn’t represented, simply upload your own template, containing your chosen MIDI messages, and even keyboard shortcuts (very useful for DAW control). You could use the LC3 with iPadOS/iOS in the same way.

We would have preferred touch-sensitive knobs, MPC-style, so we could instantly see the assigned parameter; this would be a real workflow boost. Also, we would have loved a side-mounted USB port so we could more easily butt the LC3 up against other hardware, including Novation’s own Launchpad Pro, and the computer itself, a placement currently blocked by the protruding cable at the top.

And – our final question, something we’ve seen mentioned online – it looks like there’s room for another row of knobs or buttons, maybe even pads. Could be there’s a good explanation for how it is, but it feels like valuable space is being wasted.

Verdict

Those quibbles aside, taken for what it is, we enjoyed our time with the LC3. The DAW and other modes work well, and we appreciated the compact size. Other compact controllers are available, at various price points, but the Launch Control continues to strike a balance between features, size and price.

Hands-on demos

Novation

Alternatives

Specifications

What is it?

The words “field recording” and “four-track” elicit a fair few associated words, but it’s highly likely that the first one to come to mind is “Tascam”. The Japanese audio brand has been there on the ground floor of every new technological moment, ready with a suite of user-friendly recording devices to launch a thousand bands.

Tascam’s reel-to-reels were amongst the first recording devices to bridge the gap between studio and musician. Its four-track Portastudio cassette recorders were definitive home-recording fare, and are still sought-after today for their inspiringly limited features and sonic capabilities. Tascam’s digital field recorders are similarly definitive, for capturing a nascent market as a flagship standard. Which brings us to now, and to the Tascam DR-40XP.

The Tascam DR-40XP is the brand’s new flagship for handheld field recording, part of a range that takes some very familiar field-recorder designs and imbues them with the foolproof majesty that is 32-bit float recording. It’s a direct sequel to the DR-40X, keeping much of the same form and features, but with some vital future-friendly upgrades.

First, the basics. The DR-40XP is a four-track field recorder in sheep’s clothing, possessing a pair of on-board cardioid condenser mic capsules and two TRS/XLR combo mic/line inputs. The on-board mic capsules can be toggled between XY or AB configuration, for focused capture or a broad stereo field; the combo inputs are phantom-powered for favourable communication with any mic from your own cabinet.

The DR-40XP iterates on the DR-40X by adding the aforementioned 32-bit float recording capability up to 96kHz, but it goes further too. It adds Tascam’s proprietary HDDA (High Definition Discrete Architecture) mic preamps, with an EIN (Equivalent Input Noise) of less than -126dBu; it adds a more RF-resilient on-board mic design; and it adds USB-C connectivity – a welcome graduation from the micro-USB standard that held on for a few years too long.

That USB-C port isn’t just for delivering power or data, either. Like the DR-40X before it, the DR-40XP also works as a 2-in/2-out audio interface, with either the on-board microphones or the external inputs as your source. If you’re not running the DR-40XP on USB-C bus power, you’re running it using three AA batteries – which, in the right atmospheric conditions, will offer up to 30 hours of on-time.

And in that on-time, the DR-40XP will handily show up for practically any recording undertaking you have in mind. The on-board mics can handle a high SPL, which, combined with its 32-bit float capabilities, makes the DR-40XP suitable for practically any sound capture. Not only that, but an on-board tuner and six-preset reverb modifier mean you’re set for live performances or location-based multitracking. Throw in the overdub and file bounce features, and you’ve got a mini mobile studio on your hands.

Performance

For starters, the DR-40XP feels reliable in-hand. It’s a moderately dense bit of handheld kit, and reassuringly solid despite its all-plastic chassis and connection ports. The metal bars protecting the mic capsules are another reassuring touch; it could certainly handle an accidental drop or three. The tactile experience is a good one, too, with responsive clicky buttons in front of every user input.

My first attempt at using the DR-40XP in the wild was thwarted by a wrongly formatted microSD card from another of my devices. These are minuscule grumbles, made larger by already being outside and by the sad omission of a complementary microSD card in the first place.

Now, not testing before departure was my fault entirely, besides which Tascam doesn’t necessarily owe anyone free storage, and data storage has of course gotten more expensive lately. Still, it’s a modern convenience we’ve come accustomed to from other brands and products; a modicum of on-board storage for emergencies would be a nice feature indeed; and, curmudgeon that I am, I want my 90 minutes of pointless traipsing back. Devoting over a hundred words to a problem of my own making might seem a bit ridiculous, but I assure you there’s a good reason: namely, that it’s almost all I have to complain about.

Once up and running, the Tascam DR-40XP is a dream to use, and capable of capturing some magnificent audio. Even without acknowledging the freedom to use whatever mics or inputs you want, the on-board microphone array is a real wonder – a world apart from the noisier capsules of older field recorders, and easily a new standard for mobile audio captures. The HDDA preamps are impossibly quiet, too. All told, it’s an uneasy feeling, getting professional-grade field recordings just from wandering outside with the DR-40XP and a camera tripod.

Navigating the on-board menus seems like it should be more difficult than it is, a precedent set by early digital recorders with dense and impregnable user interfaces. The DR-40XP, with its ergonomic button layout and well-signposted utilities, is a simple thing with multitudes beneath. Also, a small change that’s huge enough for me: the DR-40XP has added one-press recording at long last, its lack being the only tactile bugbear I’ve had with Tascam field recorders past.

At home, I tried out the DR-40XP in its ancillary function as an audio interface. In this mode, it’s limited to 24-bit/48kHz at maximum – a small shame for those hoping to twin that bottomless dynamic range with a hard-wired DAW setup, but functionally no problem at all. Just with it sat on my desk, pointed vaguely towards the 12^th fret of my acoustic guitar with the mics in XY configuration, I got a stunningly natural, bell-clear sound. It’s effortless stuff. Remarkable, even.

I did, briefly, have some issues with getting computer audio back out through the device’s headphone output, a problem I narrowed down to a driver issue. A reinstall, and a reboot of both computer and field recorder, and full functionality was there. Seamless. A breeze. And for what it’s worth, that monitor output is clear, full and transparent in exactly the way you’d hope.

Verdict

The DR-40XP is, in my opinion, the new standard for all portable field recorders. The feature-set is outsized for the form, meaning more freedom to do more with it – with less than ever. It’s built well, it’s supremely user-friendly, and its results are, in a word, pristine. It might reach a little above some budgets accordingly, but as a versatile box for recording setups big and small, it can’t be beat.

MusicRadar verdict: The Tascam DR-40XP is a phenomenal four-track field recorder, with high-fidelity recording thanks to some excellent on-board microphones and some even more excellent built-in HDDA preamps. It’s everything anyone could need in a handheld recording device, and it’s good at it all too.

Audio examples

Also consider

Hands-on demos

Tascam Official

Specs

• Microphones: stereo cardioid condenser capsules, XY/AB configurable
• Inputs: x2 TRS/XLR mic/line
• Outputs: 3.5mm TRS headphone, USB-C
• Phantom power: 24/48V
• Recording formats: WAV/BWF, MP3
• Recording fidelity: 16-bit/24-bit/32-bit float, 44.1/48/96kHz
• Recording media: microSD, microSDHC, microSDXC (up to 512GB)
• No. of channels: x2 stereo input tracks, x4 recording tracks
• EIN (equivalent input noise, mic preamp): ≤–126dBu
• Dynamic range: ≥112dB
• Display: Backlit LCD
• Power requirements: x3 AA batteries; USB-C bus power; AC adapter (sold separately)
• Battery life: 30 hours
• Dimensions (WHD): 70 mm × 155 mm × 35 mm
• Weight: 282g (with batteries)
• Contact: Tascam

What is it?

Tascam’s a tried and tested brand in the field recorder space. It’s a frequent flier in our guides to the best field recorders, a brand that fields fierce competition in just about every price bracket, and the source of some of music’s most iconic recording devices (looking at you, Portastudio).

In previous products, Tascam’s already flirted with the audio-visual market, but the new FR-AV series goes all-in. This is the FR-AV4 – a brand-new four-track field recorder, designed as a compact and high-performance device for location recording, and as a compellingly seamless addition to audio-visual shoots.

The FR-AV4 is the second and largest in the FR-AV series, which takes some cues from camera-friendly Tascam recorders past, but also takes things in a maximalist – and thrillingly pint-sized – new direction. The FR-AV4 boasts 32-bit float recording at up to 192kHz, built-in timecode generation and HDMI sync, in a form factor so slim you could probably post two through someone’s letterbox.

The four tracks in the FR-AV4 are serviced by four combo XLR/TRS inputs, each of which is furnished with individually toggleable 24/48V phantom power, and Tascam’s own Ultra HDDA preamp design – which offers a wide gain range and an impressively low noise floor too. Inputs three and four can be superseded by a separate stereo 3.5mm input, for receiving audio from another camera or external device. There’s 3.5mm TRS ins and outs for the FR-AV4’s built-in timecode generator, and, handiest of all, a pair of HDMI ports that cover a great deal of clever business.

For one, connecting a camera via the FR-AV4’s HDMI port allows audio and video to sync, as well as enabling the camera to control record start/stop. With a monitor recorder plugged in at the other end too, via the FR-AV4’s HDMI out, 4K/8K video can be passed through with the FR-AV4’s audio embedded (and with the camera’s own audio, too, if you like). Game-changing simplicity for small rigs! Finally, the HDMI ports can also be used to daisy-chain multiple FR-AV4s, for virtually limitless extra tracks, all synced, and all slaved to the record button on the first in the chain.

There’s clever digital business going on inside the FR-AV4 too. It’s a high-fidelity field recorder, capable of recording up to 32-bit/192kHz audio. The dynamic range of 32-bit float trivialises gain-staging and, coupled with the four XLR inputs, makes this a potent partner for sound design and literal, bona fide field recording.

Each channel in the FR-AV4 gets some sound-sculpting tools too, including a four-band EQ, limiter and noise gate. All of this, in something roughly sandwich-sized – and powered by four AA batteries, or 5V bus-power from the USB-C port. Which is also a conduit for the FR-AV4’s second life as a six-in/two-out audio interface. It works hard for its price point.

Performance

As a musician with little professional experience shooting video, and being that I’m reviewing this field recorder for a publication with Music in the title, I’m actually not touching any of the Tascam FR-AV4’s AV-friendly features. I’ll leave the evaluation of anything video-like to other, more video-y people, and focus instead on its core multitrack field-recording functionality, which is excellent.

My first session with the Tascam FR-AV4 was to capture the ambient sound of an industrial passageway in the same building as my studio space; I wanted to experiment with quadraphonics, capture some spooky atmospheric sounds, and grab an impulse response for that spooky, atmospheric industrial-passageway reverb. Setting up for this was a dream, and a healthy portent of sessions to come.

The FR-AV4 has two embedded screw holes for camera tripods, on the top and bottom, so you can mount it any which way you choose. Getting it situated, connected to my four pencil condenser mics and ready to record was a matter of minutes – which, looking at the front panel for the first time (and not having looked at the manual at all), was far quicker than I expected.

Navigating the FR-AV4 is actually extremely intuitive, if a little tedious when you want a setting quite deep in the multi-page menu. Thankfully, almost everything I wanted to adjust was only a couple screens away, and I instinctively found it with ease.

As well as the big-picture cool stuff on display with the FR-AV4 – the per-channel EQs, the limiters, the ambisonics decode function in the menu that Tascam don’t even mention on their product page – there’s also a number of small, user-friendly touches that demonstrate a real thoughtfulness on the part of Tascam’s engineers. My favourite is that you can easily group multiple tracks to a single gain control, allowing you to keep your relative levels while broadly adjusting the whole mix.

The only place where the thoughtfulness outstrips its returns is with the screen, which is a touchscreen, but also far too small to reliably use without fat-fingering the odd input. Still, in places, using the screen is a small and welcome time-saver.

As for the results: I was blown away, in the most boring of ways. I recorded at 32-bit float/192kHz, and captured everything. The cold, sustained quality of the passage in three dimensions; the soft hum of air conditioning units some hundred metres away; birdsong and children played in the neighbourhood past the car park; even the band rehearsing in the studio below. I messed around with gain settings, and, predictably, could not create a situation with poor results. The audio is clean, clear and uncoloured; a reliably professional standard.

As a USB audio interface, the FR-AV4 is almost as seamless to use. Being able to run it in 32-bit float is a welcome feature, and one which is conspicuously absent from Tascam’s new entrants in its DR-X series. A tiny bit of menu-diving and you can manage all the FR-AV4’s functions in-unit, including a handy SD card browser and exporter.

If I were the type to nit-pick, I’d throw a minuscule amount of shade at the placement of the USB-C port. It’s on the left-hand side, close as can be to the front face – and in front of all the I/O accordingly. It might be easy to access on location, but when transferring files or using the FR-AV4 as an audio interface, the trailing USB-C wire only gets in the way.

A broader nit-pick would be that Bluetooth monitoring and timecode sync – a key feature in Tascam’s eyes – is locked behind the purchase of a separate Bluetooth adapter. I’m generally not a fan of paywalling core features, particularly when this paywall seems a bit arbitrary (£47/$61 for the necessary Tascam AK-BT2 adapter). Still, I ultimately consider these nit-picks small for a small four-track with big features.

Verdict

It’s safe to say that I’m a big fan of the Tascam FR-AV4. It’s trivialised multitrack recording in the field in a number of ways, most impressively through its diminutive form factor. Seriously, it will probably fit in your coat pocket.

There’s so much more to this device than covered in this review that makes it a compelling buy for multimedia creators at any level – though the £699/$999 cost will naturally give some pause for thought. I think the price is actually quite justifiable, given its outsized feature set and sheer practical utility.

MusicRadar verdict: The Tascam FR-AV4 is a four-track field recorder with its gaze levelled squarely at the audio-visual world. It’s a multimedia darling, with HDMI pass-through, sync and audio embedding – but for me, the real smarts are in the audio. High-fidelity multitrack recording through phantom-powered XLR ins and whisper-quiet discrete preamps, all in a box the size of your lunchtime sandwich? Genius.

Audio examples

Also consider

Hands-on demos

Tascam Official

Specs

• Inputs: x4 TRS/XLR mic/line; x1 3.5mm TRS line/camera; x1 HDMI-A; x1 3.5mm TRS timecode input
• Outputs: x1 3.5mm TRS line/camera/timecode; x1 3.5mm TRS headphone; x1 HDMI-A; x1 USB-C
• Phantom power: 24/48V
• Recording formats: WAV/BWF, MP3
• Recording fidelity: 16-bit/24-bit/32-bit float, 48/96/192kHz
• Recording media: SD/SDHC/SDXC (up to 512GB)
• No. of channels: x4 input tracks, x6 recording tracks (inputs + stereo mix)
• EIN (equivalent input noise, mic preamp): ≤–127dBu
• Dynamic range: ≥133dB (inputs 1-4)
• Display: 1.9-inch (4.8 cm) LCD touchscreen
• Power requirements: x4 AA batteries; USB-C bus power; AC adapter (sold separately)
• Battery life: 17 hours
• Dimensions (WHD): 184 mm × 42 mm × 130 mm
• Weight: 756 g (including batteries)
• Contact: Tascam

Following the release of the Rolling Stones' 25th studio album, Foreign Tongues, Technics has created a limited edition wireless earbud in collaboration with the iconic British band.

According to the Japanese audio brand, "this exclusive collaboration unites Technics' signature audiophile engineering with one of music's most iconic legacies," in a joint project designed to "deliver every note as intended".

The new Technics EAH-AZ100 wireless earbuds feature the band's legendary red Lips & Tongue logo on the rubber case, while the earbuds themselves are built for exceptional clarity across the full frequency range, and include new technology like a Magnetic Fluid Driver – supposedly the first of its kind in the industry.

The product enters the market two weeks after the release of the Rolling Stones' new album, which debuted at number one in the UK. It became the group's 15th chart-topping album, and their third consecutive number one LP after 2023's Hackney Diamonds and 2016's Blue & Lonesome.

Mick Jagger recently opened up about his experiences recording Foreign Tongues, explaining how producer Andrew Watt pushed them to use tape for Chuck Berry cover Beautiful Delilah.

"I said, ‘What does it matter? If someone listens to it on their phone, they don’t know it was cut on tape — it doesn’t make any difference,'" Jagger said. "[But] we cut it on tape and we did it live. That was old style."

Only a limited number of people will be able to experience the new record via Technics' new earbud collaboration, with just 5,000 units available to customers. And compared to other wireless earbuds on the market, they're not cheap: the EAH-AZ100 is currently available via Technics , Amazon and through Bravado for $299/£259.

Leading music industry bodies such as the Record Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) have launched a joint labelling program to help make fans aware of when generative AI has been used in recorded music.

The project sets out a unified approach to voluntary track labelling, with a distinction between 'AI-generated' and 'AI-assisted' labels, which will be used across digital music services and other partners.

This announcement comes after the revelation in April that a concerning 44% of all new music uploaded to the streaming service Deezer is AI slop. Meanwhile, Apple Music has confirmed that over a third of its uploads are 100% AI.

This move from record industry professionals is all about attempting to combat this significant shift.

“Fans want to know whether and how generative AI has been used in the music to which they listen," said Vikki Oakley, IFPI CEO and Mitch Glazier, RIAA Chairman & CEO, in a joint statement.

They continued: "Given how important human artistry and authenticity is to music lovers all over the world, these labels will provide an immediately understandable and easily scalable approach to transparency. We acknowledge the many ways AI is being used creatively, so we expect to offer fans additional information as adoption of generative AI labeling grows and technology evolves."

According to Noemí Planas, CEO of WIN (Worldwide Independent Network), “For artists and fans around the world, true connections and trust are everything. Clear labeling of AI-generated content is central to this: it gives fans the transparency they deserve and supports the human-centered, safety-first approach that the global independent community has championed through the WIN Principles for Generative AI."

Amid widespread controversy regarding anonymous AI-driven artists such as The Velvet Sundown, those behind the program will hope it can begin to clear up confusion about the origins of recorded music.

“As AI continues to be integrated into the creative process, artists and fans alike deserve a clear way to communicate how and when it’s being used," said Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of The Grammys. "This initiative ensures that creativity, authorship, and artistic intent remain at the center of every song. Giving artists the ability to tell that story strengthens trust and supports a more sustainable future for music.”

He might be pretty long in the studio recording tooth, but Mick Jagger admits that, during the making of new Rolling Stones album, Foreign Tongues, he didn’t see the point in going old-school and recording to tape rather than digitally.

The issue was raised when producer Andrew Watt suggested going analogue for one song in particular – a cover of an old Chuck Berry record. “We haven’t used tape for ages, but Andy wanted to use tape for Beautiful Delilah,” Jagger tells Billboard. “I said, ‘What does it matter? If someone listens to it on their phone, they don’t know it was cut on tape — it doesn’t make any difference.’”

Watt got his way, though: “We cut it on tape and we did it live,” says Jagger. “That was old style.”

Jagger’s fellow Stone Ronnie Wood also had a few words to say about Watt, all of which were complimentary. “He’s a great guitarist. He can play my parts better than I can,” he quipped.

Elsewhere, Jagger raised the possibility of the Stones releasing more music that features Charlie Watts, their late drummer. “We had a good track with Charlie [Hit Me in the Head, which is featured on Foreign Tongues] and we’ve got other tracks with Charlie. I keep reading this is Charlie’s final appearance – well, we’ve got other tracks with Charlie.”

Jagger also offered his thoughts on Gen-Z superstar Olivia Rodrigo, an artist who’s already received great notices from many of his peers. He was asked specifically about Rodrigo’s ability to make rock music, a genre that she’s explored extensively across her three-album discography.

“She’s really good at it,” he says. “Everyone thought she was a different kind of singer, but there’s quite a few female singers that have made that transition. It’s not a permanent transition necessarily, but the ability to change styles from what you think their original girly pop stuff is – it’s kind of interesting.”

To be fair to Rodrigo, she hasn’t so much ‘transitioned’ to a rock sound as specialised in it. Yes, her breakthrough hit (Drivers License) was a ballad, but right from the outset, she’s married heavy guitars to her pop sensibilities, and shared the stage with the likes of Weezer, No Doubt, David Byrne, Sheryl Crow and Billy Joel.

She’s also performed and recorded with The Cure’s Robert Smith, and has spoken of being a huge White Stripes fan when she was growing up (and yes: Jack White is a friend of hers, too).