What is it?

The Roland Kiyola KF-20 is not your typical digital piano. It is the result of a long-standing collaboration between Roland and Karimoku, one of Japan's most respected wood furniture manufacturers, combining centuries of Japanese woodworking craft with Roland's most advanced piano technology. The Kiyola line began in 2015 with the KF-10, and the KF-20 is its 2026 evolution.

Each Kiyola is a one-of-a-kind instrument, with unique grain patterns and natural ageing that make every cabinet distinct. The KF-20's rounded edges draw inspiration from Hikimono craftsmanship, a traditional Japanese method of carefully preparing wood to achieve smooth, organic forms. The result is an instrument inspired by 'wa', the Japanese concept of harmony, where aesthetics and function are given equal importance.

The new Kiyola line offers two cabinet designs: the KF-20 with smooth, rounded edges and gentle curves, and the KF-25 with a sharper, more angular style inspired by the Japandi aesthetic, a fusion of Japanese and Scandinavian design. The KF-20 comes in four finishes: Pure Oak, Walnut, Sheer White, and Celadon Green. The KF-25 is available only in Smoked Oak. Although the Kiyola series places a strong emphasis on furniture design, Roland has equipped it with many of the same core technologies found in its premium digital pianos.

The keyboard is built around Roland's PHA-50 action, a hybrid of wood and plastic with escapement simulation across all 88 keys, ivory and ebony touch surfaces, and high-precision sensors designed to capture even the subtlest playing nuances and deliver a genuine grand piano feel.

For sound, the Kiyola uses Roland's Piano Reality Modelling engine, the same technology found in the premium LX and GP grand piano series. Rather than relying on pre-recorded samples like most digital pianos, Piano Reality Modelling generates sound in real time by mathematically recreating the behaviour of an acoustic piano, from the vibration of the strings to the resonance of the soundboard. As a modelling instrument rather than a sample-based one, it also benefits from unlimited polyphony; every note sustains naturally without the cutoff that sampling engines can impose.

Roland has kept the onboard controls minimal, with just a few buttons giving direct access to six tones. Connecting to the Roland app opens the full picture; 48 additional sounds become available alongside Roland's Piano Designer, which allows detailed fine-tuning of tone and touch.

In terms of connectivity, the KF-20 covers all the essentials. Two headphone outputs make quiet practice straightforward, a USB-C port handles connection to phones, tablets, and computers for MIDI and audio, and a USB-A port allows for additional storage. Bluetooth MIDI enables wireless connection to the Roland app and compatible devices, while Bluetooth Audio allows music to be streamed directly through the piano's speakers.

The KF-20 comes with a matching piano stool and a three-pedal unit featuring wood detailing that complements the cabinet finish. What the KF-20 promises on paper is one thing; how it delivers in practice is another.

Performance

The KF-20 demands to be looked at before it is played. The cabinet is unlike anything else in the digital piano world, a genuine design object that would enhance any room it sits in. The quality of the woodwork speaks for itself up close, with smooth, rounded edges that give it a warm, organic character. It carries a quiet confidence that is rare in this category, where most instruments prioritise function over form.

Nothing here is accidental. The lid itself doubles as the music rest when open, a simple but neat solution that keeps the design uncluttered. The matching stool is equally beautiful, and the buttons are refreshingly minimal, positioned discreetly on the side of the cabinet rather than across the top, with a timeless, almost vintage quality that feels a world away from the busy control panels found on most digital pianos. Throughout, Roland has made a clear choice to prioritise timelessness over technology, and the result is an instrument that looks as though it has always belonged in the room. The KF-20 makes an unforgettable first impression before you play a single note, and it turns out the piano inside is equally impressive.

Beneath the woodwork, the Kiyolas mean serious business. They are built around the same core technology found in Roland's premium LX and GP series, instruments that sit at the very top of the digital piano market. Starting with the keyboard, the PHA-50 action makes an immediate and convincing case for itself.

The escapement simulation is particularly impressive; escapement is the subtle mechanical click felt on a grand piano key just before it reaches the bottom, a detail that experienced players rely on for precise control at low volumes. Here it is rendered with real delicacy, and acoustic pianists will find it immediately familiar. The sensor detection delivers an organic, responsive feel that rewards nuanced playing, and the ivory and ebony-feel key surfaces are comfortable across long sessions. Roland's actions tend to sit on the heavier side, which experienced players will welcome, though beginners may need a little time to adjust.

The piano sounds are a genuine highlight. Warm, detailed, and with an impressive stereo image, the Piano Reality Modelling engine delivers a sense of realism that is hard to match in the digital piano world. Through headphones in particular, the experience is remarkably convincing; the instrument simply feels alive in a way that sampling alone rarely achieves. The KF-20 may not have the physical resonance of a transducer-driven soundboard like the Kawai CA901, but for most players, it will more than hold its own. The additional voices are enjoyable and well-suited to casual playing, though none quite match the richness and character of the piano tones that sit at the heart of the KF-20.

The KF-20 holds its own on connectivity for the most part. Bluetooth MIDI and Audio are present as expected at this price, and the USB-C port for MIDI and audio is a welcome modern touch, putting it ahead of many rivals that still rely on the older USB-B connector. Dual headphone outputs cover shared practice and silent playing without issue.

That said, there are a couple of notable absences worth flagging. There are no line outputs, which most competitors at this price include, meaning connecting to external speakers or a PA system is not straightforward; something those wanting to integrate the piano into a home studio setup should bear in mind. The KF-20 is also more app-dependent than most rivals; where the Kawai CA901 offers a full touchscreen on the instrument itself, and Yamaha CLP-885 provides clearly labelled direct controls, the Kiyola’s deliberately minimal control panel means the Roland app is effectively essential rather than optional for accessing the full range of sounds and settings. It is a trade-off that keeps the cabinet beautifully clean, but one worth knowing about before you buy.

Verdict

The Roland Kiyola KF-20 and KF-25 make a convincing argument that a digital piano does not have to look like one. Roland and Karimoku have struck a confident balance between furniture design and serious piano technology, and the result is an instrument that holds its own on both fronts. The PHA-50 key action and Piano Reality Modelling engine would be impressive in any cabinet; in this one, they feel like a genuine statement of intent.

At this price, the competition is real. Kawai's transducer soundboard and wooden key action edges ahead on pure piano realism, and Yamaha is a strong alternative for those who prefer a more traditional approach. But neither looks like the Kiyola, and for a growing number of players, that matters. As always with instruments at this level, key action is a very personal choice, and we would always recommend trying each side by side before committing.

One thing worth noting is that the minimal, almost vintage interface will not suit everyone, and those used to a touchscreen or clearly labelled controls may find the app-dependent approach a little frustrating day to day.

For the intermediate to advanced pianist who wants to play seriously while also making a considered interior design statement, the Kiyola offers something that no other digital piano currently does, and it does it without compromising on what matters most.

Hands-on demos

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Billy Joel has been pretty open about the “brain disorder” he was diagnosed with in 2025 that forced him to cancel all of his upcoming performances, while also being at pains to reassure fans that his condition isn’t quite as scary as its label sounds.

It doesn’t seem like there’s any guarantee that he’s ever going to fully recover from it, though, or that he’ll be able to resume playing shows in the way that he used to.

In a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Joel confirmed that he’s still living with the condition, known as hydrocephalus. “It used to be called water on the brain, so it affects your balance, it affects your memory, it affects your vision, your hearing,” he said. “But I’m OK. They call it a brain disorder, but it’s not that serious. It’s just something that affects your balance mostly.”

Asked if he’s ever going to be able to tour again, Joel added: “I don’t know. I have to take a series of tests before I know, but I can’t drive right now. I’m not allowed to drive. And I can’t do performances because what the neurologist told me, every time you do a show, it’s like you’re getting a concussion.”

Joel further explained that it’s not just the volume of playing a rock ‘n’ roll show that’s the problem: “It’s the lighting, the sound, the stress of the show, the audience, the energy of the performance. There’s a lot going on when you’re onstage. And they said, ‘Well, you really shouldn’t be doing that right now.’ So they have to test me further to see if I can go back and do performing again, which I would like to be able to do.”

Joel was speaking as he prepares to auction off 70 of his motorcycles at Christie’s. Asked whether he’d ever had an accident while riding one, he said that he had, back in 1982.

Discussing the injuries it caused, he said: “I still have no bone in my left thumb. And my right arm, the wrist got pulled out of its socket on my right hand, and my left hand got smashed and my leg got broken.”

Sounds rough – so did that mean that the Piano Man had to relearn how to play the piano. “No,” says Joel, before quipping: “I was never that good to begin with.”

Anyone who witnessed U2’s performance at Live Aid on Saturday 13 July 1985 will remember that their setlist did not go to plan.

In keeping with Bob Geldof’s stipulation that all artists perform no longer than 17 minutes (“Don’t get clever – just play the hits” as he bluntly warned Freddie Mercury of Queen), the band had chosen three songs to play – Sunday Bloody Sunday, Bad and Pride (In The Name Of Love).

Pride was their biggest hit at the time, and Live Aid was a golden opportunity to close their set with a song that the colossal TV audience would remember. But they never got around to playing it.

Instead, Bono went on walkabout to commune with the crowd – making an arduous clamber down from the stage to hug and slowly dance with a female member of the audience, 15 year-old Kal Khalique, who he suspected was being crushed against the front barrier by the surging crowd.

This meant that U2’s second and final song was an impromptu 12-minute version of the song Bad, from their latest album The Unforgettable Fire. Over the course of the song, Bono would ad lib snippets from the songs Satellite Of Love and Take A Walk On The Wild Side by Lou Reed, as well as Ruby Tuesday and Sympathy For The Devil by the Rolling Stones.

The band were reportedly furious that they had to scrap their performance of Pride (In The Name Of Love) and an argument allegedly broke out in their dressing room. Bono flew home to Ireland with his wife Ali, convinced he had blown it big time. “It was a great day but I thought I had fucked it up,” he told Rolling Stone.

But in the days that followed it became clear that U2’s performance of Bad was being viewed as one of the emotional high points of Live Aid. The themes of suffering and vulnerability that run through the song were particularly powerful in the broader context of Live Aid’s appeal for human compassion.

“It really took us by surprise when people started talking about U2 as one of the noteworthy performances of the day,” The Edge told Rolling Stone. “I thought they were joking, I really thought we were crap. But looking back, as I did a week later, I started to see what it was. It was the sense of real, total jeopardy, which is always very exciting for a live event, and Bono’s complete determination to make physical contact with the crowd and eventually getting there after two minutes of struggling over barriers. I think there was something about the effort he had to put in to do it that somehow made it even more powerful.”

Bono’s actions may have been perceived as indulgent and narcissistic by some, but that day he built an emotional connection with the audience and the 1.9 billion people watching across the world. Bad was the song that made it happen.

It remains one of U2’s most emotionally intense songs, and the band’s performance of it that day was a major turning point in their career. It introduced them to a colossal audience and paved the way for global mainstream stardom.

The song began as an improvised guitar riff during a jam session while U2 were living and recording at Slane Castle in County Meath in 1984, working on The Unforgettable Fire, their fourth studio album. The band had appointed Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois as producers and they in turn helped create a more ambient sound.

The results were radically different from their previous album, War.

“We were looking for something that was a bit more serious, more arty,” said Adam Clayton in the 2016 biography, U2 On U2, co-authored by the band and music journalist Neil McCormick.

Bono wrote the lyrics to Bad about heroin addiction, which was a devastating crisis in Dublin in the late-’70s and early-’80s. He specifically wrote the track about his friend Andy ‘Guck’ Rowen, who had turned to heroin after being traumatised by witnessing the 1974 Dublin and Monaghan bombings.

For a long time, Bono didn’t specifically name Rowen, simply saying that it was written about a friend. But in later years he did. On 26 July 2011, at the final US show of U2’s 360° Tour at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh, Bono paused before performing Bad, to deliver a direct tribute to Rowen, who was in the audience that night. “This is for a very special man, who is here in your city, who grew up on Cedarwood Road. We wrote this song about him and we play it for him tonight.”

Bono has said that the song explores themes of surrender, isolation and personal addiction. “If you twist and tune away,” it begins, “If you tear yourself in two again/If I could, yes I would/If I could, I would/Let it go/Surrender/Dislocate.”

In the biography U2 On U2, Bono talks about watching teenagers fall victim to the heroin epidemic in Dublin. “They gave up everything they held sacred to this drug,” he explained. “I tried to describe that with the song, Bad, what it was like to feel that rush, to feel that elation, and then to go on to the nod, the awful sleep that comes with that drug, and then scream, ‘I'm wide awake, I’m wide awake, I’m not sleeping!’ I can see what’s going on.”

Instrumentally, the song was developed by the band improvising on the riff that the Edge had developed. “Some of the songs had no structure to them until we started playing,” The Edge told Guitar Player magazine in 1985. “We actually improvised them as we were working. Bad is an example.”

Producer Brian Eno reportedly used an Oberheim DSX sequencer to add the distinctive sequencer arpeggios, which give the song an enigmatic heft.

Bad is essentially an anthem in the key of A major, simply built around variations of the A and D chords. It’s been described as one of the Edge’s “ultimate delay” songs. According to Amnesta.net he used his Korg SDD-3000 digital delay as his primary modulated digital delay, with a secondary shorter delay, set to a dotted eighth-note rhythm and this was sent to a separate amp.

Opinions vary on which guitar’s and amp’s he used for the studio recording of Bad. While he certainly went on to primarily use his Stratocaster when playing the song live, some of the studio tracking on The Unforgettable Fire was reportedly done on his 1976 Gibson Explorer and a 1971 Telecaster.

As for his choice of amp, a vintage Vox AC30 was central to the Edge’s sound. Across the album, he also increasingly used various muting techniques.

“I was experimenting a lot with damping my guitar strings, using felt or gaffer tape over the strings near the bridge to give zero sustain,” he told Guitar Player magazine in 1985. “Using echo, I found some remarkable effects.”

The basic track of Bad was recorded at Slane Castle in just three takes, but the studio recording of the song on The Unforgettable Fire was panned by some critics as lacklustre, with Rolling Stone magazine describing it as “forgettably muddy”.

In many ways, Bad was a song that only really came to fruition once the band began playing it live. There was a sense that the song had not been sufficiently developed and only when it was performed live did it begin to show its true greatness.

“That is potentially a truly great song… if I had finished it,” Bono said of the studio version of the song in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine. “It was very difficult to do, almost an impossible collision of cultures for us. It was a different kind of songwriting, like Philip Glass meets Astral Weeks, Van Morrison crossed with German electronica. You have sequences which are rigid and metronomic and then you have a bass which is improvising all the way, and the voice too. We were struggling so hard to find that song.”

While the studio version was stilted, on tour, U2 would play it obsessively in soundchecks until the song really came to life. Which is why the version of the song that would become most played on radio was not the studio version, but a live performance, recorded on 12 November 1984 at the NEC in Birmingham, England. This was released on the 1985 four-track EP Wide Awake In America, a curious title given that the EP’s two live tracks were recorded in England and the two studio tracks were recorded in Ireland.

It’s not a great EP but the version of Bad that is featured on it has a fire and intensity that the studio version lacks.

In the years that followed, four other versions of the song would be released. An edit of the studio version from Unforgettable Fire appears on the band’s 1998 greatest hits compilation, The Best Of 1980-1990. It is the only non-single to appear on the compilation, with the exception of a hidden version of the song October.

A live version of Bad from U2's 1987 The Joshua Tree tour appears in the documentary Rattle And Hum and a version of the song from the band’s 2001 Elevation: Live From Boston Tour, along with a snippet from the song 40, appears in the concert film of that tour.

Another version of Bad is featured on the live album Live From The Point Depot, from the 2004 digital box set The Complete U2.

Bad became a central song in U2’s setlist and a fan favourite. And it kept evolving, a work-in-progress with a life well beyond the studio and with seemingly no definitive finish.

“In a way, I do finish it every night, live,” said Bono in the biography U2 By U2. “I change the lyrics. Poets have no problem with revising their work. Songs shouldn't be set in stone. If they are any good, they are living, breathing organisms.”

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.

Polyphia guitarist Tim Henson has some explaining to do when he talks to MusicRadar about his band’s new album, Be Not Afraid.

Last year, Henson intimated that this album would feature guest appearances from System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian and Japanese pop-metallers Babymetal.

But once you play Be Not Afraid front to back, once your ear has surfed its breakneck changes between Polyphia at their most apocalyptic and most ecstatic, and your brain has processed this information as best it can, you’ll realise there are no guests.

Henson shrugs: “Yeah, well that came from our last record [2022’s Remember That You Will Die]. Half of the tracks on it had guests, and I know there’s a large portion of our listeners that really only fuck with half of the record, because the other half is different genres of vocalists.”

Previously, Polyphia had operated an open-doors policy when inviting guest musicians to collaborate on their recordings. Over the years, the Texan instrumentalists have drafted the likes of Yvette Young, Mateus Asato and Ichika Nito as pinch-hitters on guitar.

Early recordings featured stunt shred from Jason Richardson, Aaron Marshall and Jakub Żytecki, as Henson and fellow guitarist Scott LePage shuffled through their contacts book to seek out complementary talents – players whose style could be subsumed into their radically unorthodox whole. Virtuosity is the common thread.

Remember That You Will Die featured a cast of guest vocalists. Chino Moreno appeared on Bloodbath. Pop/R&B vocalist Sophia Black starred on ABC. Killstation, $NOT and Lil West brought the rhythm, and, most famously, Steve Vai brought his own brand of electric guitar genius to Ego Death.

A little help goes a long way when you’re taking progressive metal guitar, math-rock, hip-hop and R&B and EDM experimentalism through the looking glass.

But as Henson says, this time around they decided: “Let’s just give them us – us in our most raw form, and I say that loosely because the sound design on this record is so insane.”

Henson is not not exaggerating either. Be Not Afraid is the sound of Polyphia everythingmaxxing, splicing together those preacher samples so loved by Chicago and Detroit house producers with extended-range metal guitar riffs, pitch-shifted into glitchy squawks, setting all this to jacking beats. There is just so much sound.

“There are so many moments where it was just, like, ‘How can we make sounds that literally tear your mind apart?’” says Henson. “But in an effort to express raw emotion, it’s like the equivalent of tearing your vocal cords as a screamer in a screamo band, I guess, but on guitar.”

Henson says going all-in with a maximalist production allowed them to take their sound places their guitars couldn’t go.

“The sound of you literally snapping your string isn’t pleasant, and you can’t really do anything musical with that, so let’s use sound design to kind of express that same raw emotion,” he says. “That’s the thing.”

But then then the guitars are pretty nuts, too, with Scott LePage putting together a rhythm part that sounds like “the devil throwing a tantrum” and spending hours nursing a Scotch while putting together some of the wildest tones he can imagine.

So yeah, no guests might be a change of pace but Be Not Afraid is still the sound of Polyphia taking guitar to the frontier. Who knows how they're going to recreate this live when, but it's Scott LePage told us in 2022, “There is a small aspect of, ‘Okay, this needs to be performable.’ But sometimes we just do cool shit for the sake of doing cool shit and worry about it later.”

You can read all about the making of Polyphia's Be No Afraid in full, coming soon to MusicRadar.

• Be Not Afraid is available to preorder via Rise.

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: “I used to make these punk cover versions of records I loved as a kid,” Rob Cavallo, Grammy Award-winning producer, tells us when asked about his initial route into music-making.

“My dad was in the business, he managed Prince for a time and accidentally played my version of When You Were Mine to him in the car when he once collected him from the airport. Apparently, Prince looked confused, then demanded I join his band, The Family, in Paisley Park. My dad said he couldn’t have me – I was only 16.”

Despite his dad denying this early opportunity for him, Rob went on to become a true heavyweight producer in the world of rock recording.

His stellar CV speaks for itself, being the studio mastermind behind myriad best-selling albums including Green Day’s most cherished canon; Dookie, Insomniac, Nimrod, American Idiot - all made under Rob’s watchful eye. Goo Goo Dolls’ Dizzy Up the Girl and My Chemical Romance’s era-defining The Black Parade, too.

Rob’s career began in earnest during the late eighties and has seen him navigate various technological changes, surfing the wave of opportunities afforded by software and the arrival of Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs).

“I was one of the first guys to ever use Pro Tools, Green Day’s song Brain Stew was recorded on that when the DAW was only two tracks and 16-bit,” he says.

“In my studio now, I have a computer filled with every single sound and every single DAW. But despite technological innovation, the end results still boil down to your taste and how you take the listener on a journey from the beginning of a song to the middle, then end. It doesn't matter if you’re programming or talking to a drummer in a room with 16 microphones set up, the producer’s job is still the same gig.”

Rob was brought up in a musical family with his dad, Bob, a hugely successful industry figure who, as we said earlier, worked with Prince as well as Earth, Wind and Fire and the Lovin’ Spoonful.

While Rob was finding his own feet in the industry, he managed to secure some work experience in LA with George Massenburg, an influential producer in the studio universe.

“He was one of the great engineers of all time, and I was like the third engineer guy, I didn’t even know what a studio was although I learned quickly,” Rob explains. “George was amazing, he was so tough, and it was a gift he was like that.”

Rob made some demos during the holidays when the studio was closed to the public. Warner Brothers and their crack team of influential executives and producers - Ted Templeman, Lenny Waronker, and Michael Ostin - got wind, heard one of the demos he’d worked on, then offered Rob a job as an A&R.

“I really needed a job at the time and I was so just so in love with music,” Cavallo tells us. “I was going to all the clubs, listening to every band I could find and involved in a network of people. I knew who was playing the Troubadour, The Music Machine, the Roxy, Madame Wong’s, all these old LA clubs.

“This combined with me making records and being a player - I could play bass, drums and guitar - it all made sense and fit together for Warner Brothers.”

As a producer, Rob’s discography is full of huge, global success stories from early on in his career. Green Day’s seminal 1994 major label debut Dookie was one of his very first production gigs. Making the record with the three young men who’d soon become a global alternative phenomenon, Cavallo was driven by a vision of what the album should ultimately sound like.

“When working with bands, you need a clear goal of what you’re trying to make - and be as balls out as possible,” he laughs.

“With Dookie, it was the second record I ever produced and people were telling me not to work with a punk band. But I had this feeling about it, I wanted to sonically create something where there would be higher BPMs and it would still be clear for you to hear.”

Rob came up with a way to record the drums using an SM57 microphone and used a tube direct box to ensure that “the bass cut through all the way into the guitars”, Rob recalls.

“I devised a way to capture the first reflection of the drums so it would be aggressive but it wouldn’t be too roomy so the next snare drum would avoid being on top of the prior one,” Rob tells us.

“For the drums, it’s an SM57 pointed an inch away from a hard surface at a ninety degree angle to the snare. It really helps the drum set grow teeth and you can quite clearly hear it on Dookie.”

Alternative rock bands like Green Day and Nirvana both had similar trajectories, working on indie imprints at the start of the nineties before signing with majors. Green Day’s preceding (independent label) LP Kerplunk! had a raw edge that Rob leaned into when translating Green Day’s live sound into a chart-friendly, radio-ready sound.

“[Nirvana’s debut] Bleach and Kerplunk! are similar because they were recorded and mixed in the studio, live off the floor, so everyone played together, there were minimal overdubs and it was recorded, mixed and finished in three or four days,” says Rob.

“Now what would be interesting with today’s modern studio software would be to take a band into a rehearsal studio, rehearse them so they sound great, then make a record like Bleach where it’s recorded in a handful of days. You could make something that sounds almost as good as Dookie with today’s tech. The possibilities it offers are so great.”

Beyond Green Day, and another pop punk troupe owe their finest hour to Mr. Cavallo. My Chemical Romance recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of their landmark emo concept album, The Black Parade, and Rob was at the helm of the original recording sessions.

Infamously, some of the record was made at LA’s Paramour Mansion in Silverlake where the band’s frontman Gerard Way suffered recurring night terrors.

“I think environment is important in the writing and production, and the mansion was a cool, spooky place to go,” Rob says of the sessions. “It was absolutely haunted and freezing in there as there was no heat in the giant basketball sized living room. We put a PA in, hung a couple of fancy mics in there to record them stereo live.”

Rob also worked with Dave Matthews Band on their album, Big Whisky and the GrooGrux King in New Orleans while Green Day recorded much of their 2024 Saviors album at RAK Studios in London.

“With Dave Matthews Band, I convinced them to go to New Orleans and you can hear how the city rubbed off on them for that album, we even recorded some of the sounds of the city,” Rob explains.

“London is one the favourite cities for me and Green Day to work in, it’s such a vibe there, the people are amazing - and the microphones are pretty good too,” he adds.

“Culturally, people in the UK love rock music, they respect it, it’s a high art-form, you feel embraced and loved when you go to the UK as a music person. The energy is infectious.”

My Chemical Romance’s Black Parade and Green Day’s 2004 conceptual opus American Idiot both bristle with plenty of big ideas, although Rob feels they were born from quite different creative places…

“With Green Day, we didn’t like how iTunes, one of the biggest retailers at the time, would take your record and chop it up into 14 $0.99 dollar songs,” says Rob. “So we wanted to combat this and make an album that had to be heard as a whole.”

“With My Chemical Romance, Gerard is such a prolific writer, he has backstories for all his records, he just doesn’t show you - there are other things going on in his head that he’ll let you know when he’s ready.”

Rock music has gone through peaks and troughs over the years and Rob has rode the waves firsthand, including what he sees as today’s peak. At the moment, he’s working with a young band called Riff Wood who have just released their Butterfly In Black And White album after becoming a viral sensation.

“Guitar music coming off the stage is still the most powerful thing, you still feel it physically and emotionally when it’s performed there - more than any other genre,” he says of the sound’s enduring popularity.

“During Covid, more guitars were sold than ever before too, people needed something to connect with. And songs still find new audiences due to streaming. A song like Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls, I cut that in the mid-nineties, it was their biggest streaming song in 2025 and younger audiences love it.”

Rob might be known for the big guitar outfits but he’s also worked with American rappers 03 Greedo and the late Lil Peep too.

“I always think there’s room for everything and innovation,” says Rob. “Lil Peep was the first emo hip-hop artist to ask me to collaborate with him, it was a tough one when he passed.

“I thought he could be so big due to how smart he was and as an artist, he asked if he could take one of my guitar riffs and put it to one of his FL loops. The first thing we did was Benz Truck and I love the sound of that record.”

With so much experience behind him and still in the mixer when it comes to new talent, Rob is well-placed to share some studio advice. He believes all producers should make sure they remember their purpose is to serve the band, not themselves.

“You want your artists to love what you’re working on,” says Rob. “I want whoever I’m working with to be over the moon with how the record sounds. What’s really smart about that, when you’re done, they’ll want to promote it, and serve it up to the world for the next few years, even the rest of their lives.”

Dookie might have been an early triumph for Rob, but the album's popularity - which includes Green Day staples Basket Case, When I Come Around and Longview - has an influence on guitar music that lives on and continues to inspire new generations of bands.

“After Billie Joe had sung about 90% of the record, he invited this couple to the studio and he played them the tracks,” Rob remembers. “I watched the look on their faces, their jaws hit the floor, they’d heard something they couldn’t believe, it was like a hit happened on the first listen.

“Then I remember Wendy Griffiths was in charge of promotions for MTV, she told me how the channel was looking for something faster and colourful after two years of grunge, maybe with a sense of humour. I was sitting on Dookie at the time, and just knew it would work.”

Rob is now busier than ever - he’s working with a string of acts including Henry Morris, and Riff Wood. He’s also trying to break Japanese band One Ok Rock in the US and Europe.

“Ultimately, your role as producer is just to try to serve up the record that meets the standards of every record you’ve ever heard,” he says in his final words of wisdom.

“Everyone has their own list of favourite bands - your goal is to make a record or sign a band that is as good as those. If you can compete, then you’re onto something. And of course, it might sound easy, but it’s definitely not.”

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

In 2026, even the most casual on-stage comment can get carried around the world and get turned into a ‘talking point’ via social media.

Take James Hetfield, for example. Last Saturday (10 October) at one of Metallica’s Sphere shows, the frontman took time to thank the audience for turning up and supporting the band. An uncontroversial thing to do, of course.

Hetfield said: “Unless you live in Vegas, you’ve come a long way to spend some time with Metallica. We’re grateful for that - your travels, the money you spend, the time it took, thanks for coming to celebrate with us.”

He then continued: “And I just gotta say, Metallica is not here, like some other entertainers, to influence you with their bullshit, OK. No bullshit. We’re here to forget about all the outside shit, OK? Metallica’s agenda is love, energy and heavy music, baby!”

Many on social media have interpreted this as some sort of dig at Macklemore and the recent controversy over his pro-Palestine comments on the Ed Sheeran Loop tour. Who knows? Hetfield didn’t mention Macklemore by name. He could have also been referring to countless other artists, from Lennon to Springsteen to the (Dixie) Chicks who have all ‘done’ politics at some point or other.

Anyway, since then a clip of Nikki Sixx from Mötley Crüe saying much the same thing as Hetfield has gone viral on the socials. Recorded at the North Carolina date on the Crüe’s Return Of The Carnival Of Sins tour, it shows Sixx saying: “It does not matter to Mötley Crüe if you're a Republican, it does not matter to Mötley Crüe if you are a Democrat, it does not fucking matter if you are gay or straight, or if you're right down the centre of the fucking lane in life, because we are all in this together. Can we agree?”

Now, Roger Waters has lumbered in on this mini-kerfuffle with his usual understated charm. Appearing on Katie Halper’s podcast, the ex-Pink Floyd man said of Hetfield: “Can we stop talking about this prick? I’m so bored with him. He’s got an IQ of about three, and why we’re talking about him I honestly don’t know because he’s a nobody."

Waters then landed a below-the-belt blow: "He’s no musician. I heard them playing acoustic instruments, and they couldn’t. It was appalling.”

He added: “It’s a shame this prick didn’t have somebody around him to explain that being kind is way more important than all that loud music and bouncing around and whatever.”

Lovely.

Meanwhile, Metallica’s Sphere residency – with its loud music and bouncing around – continues through to March next year. Waters’ Pink Floyd Legacy tour, which one suspects will involve very little bouncing around, starts in February. Wouldn’t it be boring if everyone was the same?

Dance music is now the fastest-growing genre in the United States, and it's the UK's second most popular genre too, with styles like house and techno fueling its domination.

However, many younger listeners may not be clued up on the rich and complex history behind these genres. Born in Chicago and Detroit, respectively, house and techno both emerged in the 1980s, their growth spurred on by early pioneers such as Frankie Knuckles, Juan Atkins and Kevin Saunderson.

Our latest free sample pack celebrates the innovation and imagination of these visionary producers, compiling a varied collection of beats and basslines that should make a solid starting point for anyone hoping to recreate the timeless sounds of vintage house and techno in 2026.

Example sounds

How we made it

This sample pack focuses on the essentials of vintage house and techno: beats and basslines. These two instruments are subdivided into tempo (120, 125 & 128bpm) and, in the case of the beats, processing style.

The beats were run in parallel through four groups: Neutral, Tape, Room and Comp. Neutral was just some simple top'n'tail EQ, a dash of exciter and some compression/limiting to finish. Tape chained up a set of emulations and saturators, with a few EQs and compressors interspersed making slight adjustments along the way.

The main building blocks were the UAD Studer A800, Ampex ATR102 and Fatso Sr. Room took the basic process of Neutral and added reverb, courtesy of the new Eventide SP2016 Reverb plugin, with some compression to squeeze it all together at the end. Comp chains up compressors for a more upfront, aggressive sound.

The featured kit of each tempo (A – 120bpm, B – 125bpm, C – 128bpm) is broken down into layers (kick, kick/snare, snare/claps, tops, perc, etc.), so new combinations can be made, processed or blended with other loops. There are also a set of mixed layer loops from another kit in each tempo, for variety and more layering possibilities (these are a little more bare than the main kit BeatMix loops).

There is a set of basslines from six instruments, all very much in vintage mode. The only analogue offering is from the trusty Novation BassStation, which was programmed and then recorded through the Alesis 3630 compressor, JDK Audio R24 EQ and CAPI VP26 preamp. The others were programmed in Arturia V Collection synths (Prophet 5, Jupiter 8, MiniMoog, Matrix 12) and the UVI Workstation (DX synths).

What you need to know

These samples are divided into two folders: Bass Lines and Drum Loops. These two folders are further divided by tempo.

All the samples are supplied as WAV files so can be imported directly into your DAW or sampler of choice. Because they're royalty-free, you're welcome to use the samples in your music in any way you like - all we ask is that you don't re-distribute them.

The samples are supplied in a zip file, so you'll need to extract them before you can see them. Enjoy!

Vintage house and techno samples: click to download

Vintage house and techno samples (136MB)

Head over to the SampleRadar hub to download over 95,000 more free samples.

U2 have announced the first dates of what is going to be their first world tour since before Covid.

And they’ve given the global jaunt a typically ambitious title that literally taunts their many critics. The Greatest Show On Earth tour will kick off in Mexico City in February with two dates apiece in the Mexican capital and then two in both Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires. Support on all six dates comes from Beck.

The Greatest Show On Earth is also the title of one of the songs from the upcoming Carnaval De Luz album, which comes out next month. The track is being released as a single and its Anton Corbijn-directed video is already up on Youtube now.

The band have issued a statement about the tour: “‘The Greatest Show on Earth’? Now that's a throwdown. It's a dare, to ourselves as much as anyone, to try and have the best night of anybody's life.

“A bit of showman, a bit of shaman, a riot of colour, unreasonable guitar, bass and drums, and tunes you can hold onto. Because if people are gonna show up, we certainly are.”

Fans in North America and Europe are advised not to panic – there will be loads more dates announced over the next few weeks. The Greatest Show On Earth will be the band’s first extensive tour for eight years and their first dates with Larry Mullen Jr back behind the kit. The drummer had to miss out on U2’s Sphere residency between 2023 and 2024 due to his neck injury.

Anyway, those six dates are at Mexico City’s Estadio GNP Seguros (23 and 26 February), Sao Paulo’s Estadio Morum BIS (10 and 12 March) and Buenos Aires’ Estadio River Plate on 23 and 25 March. Given the space between those gigs, it could well be that additional shows are added.

For those dates, a presale via U2.com will commence on Monday 19 October, with remaining tickets being sold via Ticketmaster on Thursday 22 October.

And Carnaval De Luz, for those who don’t already know, comes out on 13 November.

The weekend is very nearly here, but there's one last thing we need you to do… And that's prove that you've been all over this week's music news.

At the close of every week we devise 10 fiendish and fun questions to test whether you've been paying attention. Or not…

So Are You Going To Go Our Way?

Then hit that button!

Brandon Flowers’ love of Bruce Springsteen is well documented. In fact, when his band, The Killers, released their second album, 2006’s Sam’s Town, critics noted the sonic similarities to The Boss’s classic 1975 LP, Born To Run.

After that, some sort of collaboration felt kind of inevitable, and it duly happened in 2009 at the Pinkpop festival in the Netherlands, where Flowers joined Springsteen and the E Street Band onstage to duet on Thunder Road, Born To Run’s opening track.

For Flowers, we’re guessing that this remains a career highlight, but even though Springsteen was one of his heroes, he still had to prove his knowledge of the song he was going to sing.

Speaking to The Standard, Flowers remembers what Springsteen did backstage in his dressing room before the show: “He put a piece of paper down and a pencil, and it was almost like, ‘how well do you know the song? Write out what you’re going to sing, what I’m gonna sing.’”

Fortunately, Flowers was able to rise to the challenge and demonstrate his Bruce-loving credentials. “I knew every word,” he says now. “We sang it together alone in his room, and that is about as close to heaven as you can get.”

Speaking of collaborations, Flowers also revealed that he was forced to raise his game when he recorded his new solo album, Thrasher, with a group of top-notch Nashville session musicians.

“I was humbled, because I went there feeling like I was hot shit, but I didn’t know how good these guys were,” he admits.

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.”

Glenn Hughes, the former Deep Purple and Black Sabbath star, has undergone a successful open heart surgery this week.

In August 2026 he announced he was retiring from touring after nearly 60 years as a recording artist and performer.

Known to his fans as ‘The Voice Of Rock’, Hughes has sung lead vocals and played bass in an array of bands including Purple, Sabbath, Trapeze, Black Country Communion, California Breed and The Dead Daisies.

On 14 October Hughes revealed via Instagram: “Now home after an eight day stay, and a 10 hour open heart surgery, operation, at UCLA, Ronald Reagan, Medical Center. Gratitude beyond.”

Back in August, when he broke the news about his retirement from live performance, he stated: “This past year, I’ve had some health issues. The results from numerous MRIs, CT scans, and an echocardiogram have alerted my medical team, that I need another open-heart surgery. I really have no option and no choice as health is my number one priority.”

Sadly, a small percentage of Hughes’s followers posted negative messages following this announcement, to which Hughes replied: “99.9% of you understand my predicament, but a very small minority of you think it’s OK to joke, trying to get attention… [this] is not the way to live & breathe.”

He continued: “All my social networks have been a safe place, with a great camaraderie between myself and all of you. At this time in my life, I have lived and done it all musically, and have surrounded myself with family and friends, who are all on the same page. Be kind to one another…”

The last time Hughes performed live was on 1 August when he appeared with rock supergroup Kings Of Chaos at the Agua Caliente Casino in Rancho Mirage, California. That night he shared the stage with former Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora and current Bon Jovi guitarist Phil X as well as REO Speedwagon frontman Kevin Cronin and ex-Guns N’ Roses and Velvet Revolver drummer Matt Sorum.

Of all the hundreds of performances in his long career, arguably the most iconic was on 6 April 1974 when Hughes was a member of Deep Purple. The band headlined the Californian Jam festival at Ontario Motor Speedway on Ontario, California. This show was co-headlined by Emerson, Lake & Palmer and drew an audience estimated at more than 300,000.

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!

Rockstar Games has confirmed French electronic duo Justice as the soundtrack composers for Grand Theft Auto VI, the most eagerly anticipated videogame of the year.

In fact, scratch that: GTA VI is probably the most eagerly anticipated release of anything this year – movies and music included. As such, being tasked with writing the music for it is a considerable feather in Justice’s cap.

The announcement coincides with the release of Flower in a Hurricane, Justice’s new single, which also features Tame Impala, SZA, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard.

This features in the new Grand Theft Auto VI launch trailer, which has also landed and, for the first minute at least, has the vibe of Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing. The nuts and bolts of the music might differ, but the atmospheric synths, scattergun drums and chugging riff – played on an overdriven synth rather than a guitar, we think – definitely feel like an intentional nod. Have a listen and see what you think.

Flower in a Hurricane will also be included on Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, the official game soundtrack, which can currently be pre-saved on streaming services and pre-ordered on CD and vinyl.

This 34-track collection will, presumably, feature more of Justice’s music, along with confirmed tracks by the likes of Yung Lean, Travis Scott, CA7RIEL and Paco Amoroso (with PinkPantheress, Fred Again and Etienne de Crécy) Morgan Wallen, Rauw Alejandro and even still-Rolling Stone Keith Richards.

Whether Cliff Richard’s Devil Woman will be included remains to be seen. It was featured in an earlier trailer for the game, but isn’t in the new one.

Grand Theft Auto VI will be released on 19 November on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Roland has announced that it is updating its TD-07 electronic drums series.

These are the TD-07DMK2 and the TD-07KV2, entry-level drums that have been on the market since 2020. The upgrades for both of the kits include enhanced pads, improved practice tools and hardware and a simplified set up that, apparently, greatly reduces the time it takes to actually start playing.

Both TD-07 kits now include an onboard coach mode and free access to Drum Pass from Melodics, which can only help you improve, especially if you’re fairly new to the drums.

Of the two models, the TD-07DMK2 is the more affordable, with a price tag of $899.99. It has just five pads, all of which are smaller than the TD-07KV2. Roland suggests that: “The compact size is ideal for tight spaces, and an additional cymbal arm is included, allowing users to upgrade to a second crash later.”

Meanwhile, the TD-07KV2 is slightly larger, with two crash cymbals, offering “greater freedom of movement, providing more room for rudiments, fills, and classic drum solos.” It retails at $1,099.99.

Both kits are based around the TD-07 module. You can explore a whole load of drum tones via the interface and the module includes editing tools to personalise sounds that take your fancy, so you can tweak and save them for later use. Bluetooth is also built in, allowing you to play along with songs on your phone or to work with MIDI data via various music apps.

Roland has also updated the kits’ coach mode, which provides “a series of fun onboard exercises for drum timing and accuracy, keeping players focused on daily improvement.” Included with both kits is Drum Pass, an exclusive Roland bundle of interactive Melodics lessons developed for V-Drums players.

Needless to say, for more information and full specification, head over to the Roland website at roland.com.

Blondie are to release another album in the New Year, which will feature what are likely to be the last recordings of Clem Burke.

The drummer sadly died of cancer in April last year. But he’ll be heard once more on High Noon, which will be out on 26 February 2027. It’s the band’s first studio album since 2017’s Pollinator.

Aside from Burke, there are a number of guests on the record, including Glen Matlock and Johnny Marr. Indeed, Marr co-wrote the album’s first single, Spectral Eyes, which is out right now. You can hear his instantly recognisable guitar on the intro.

The album has been a long time coming. It was started way back in 2022 – hence Burke’s presence on the record. Back in 2024, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein announced during a BBC 6Music interview that a new record would be released. Then in August 2025, the band’s website announced that it would be released in spring this year. One way or another (sorry, couldn’t resist), that didn’t happen, and it was delayed again. Until now.

With Burke no longer with us, only Stein and Harry remain from the band’s classic lineup. High Noon will be the group’s twelfth album and the sixth since they reformed in the late 1990s.

So what’s it like? Well, in a statement, Harry has said that: “This album is classic Blondie – an amalgamation of all our different influences and eras into something new. This music feels grounded in the present, shaped by who we are and how we’re living now.”

Her longtime creative partner, Stein added: “It’s been a long, strange ride, and somehow here we are with another Blondie album. I’m not sure what the fuck I’m supposed to say at this point, except that we’re incredibly grateful for all your support over the years.”

When you play an electric guitar with a single-coil pickup, it is a fact of life – an iron law of physics – that sometimes you will plug in, crank up your amp and there is a whole lot of hum in your sound.

This 60-cycle hum could be from the lights. It could be from the AC power. And oftentimes whatever is engaged on your pedalboard only makes it worse.

Over the years, Fender has tried to find a solution, and with each successive generation of Noiseless pickups it has got closer to the acme of hum-free single-coil tone. But even so, it was receiving feedback from players who said that there was still some compromise – the Noiseless pickups lost something from the high-end. And so the Fender R&D team kept at it.

In 2021, it started work on a fully passive solution that it says has solved this 80-year-old problem. The Fender Silent System has been trialled on a limited run of American Classic Professional Telecasters and Stratocasters, and features a large dummy coil fitted under the pickguard.

MusicRadar caught up with Fender’s director of product management, Allen Abbassi, who shares the story behind the development of the Silent System, and explains how it works.

Tell us a little bit about the history behind this, because it’s nothing new. The press release even says the Silent System is the solution to a 80-year-old problem.

“Everybody knows that Fender is the forerunner in single-coil pickup design. One of the challenges, of course, is the 60-cycle hum, and we’ve tried many, many different ways to get rid of that hum.

“The main design that we've been using for the past X amount of years is the Noiseless pickup – and we have actually used dummy coils as well in the past, but to us, the form factor and the development of the Noiseless pickup achieved really, really good results for us.

“We’ve been doing this for a couple of decades plus, and that stacked-coil design we’ve evolved over the years – I think we’re on our fifth iteration of the Noiseless pickup right now – and we’ve done everything from adjusting the size of the stack coils, removing magnets out of the dummy coil that bucks the hum, trying different wire, different plates that separate the two coils of our stacked design, all these different things. And we’ve gotten ever closer to achieving no noise with true single-coil tone.”

There’s a ‘but’ coming here.

“There’s always a compromise. A stacked-coil design, or even using a dummy coil, often cuts a lot of high-end off, and it kind of sucks a little bit of the organic, transparent nature of the pickup. You can tell when you’re playing.

“The response, the feel, and even the tone, you can tell that you’re not using a true single-coil with all these different methods of noise cancelling. So, we’ve been working at this issue for decades, literally. And up to now, the single-coil Noiseless pickup was our answer to that question of how to get rid of the noise.”

And then you came to the conclusion it was time to look beyond the pickup itself for the answer?

“In 2021, we started experimenting with other ways of doing that. One of the goals with this new Silent System was to be able to use true single-coil pickups and not have to rely on the pickups itself to get rid of the noise. And the dummy coil was the natural progression of that thought.

“Again, dummy coals have been used in the past. I think what’s unique about ours is the size and shape and the type of wire. All those different elements are key to making this system as successful as possible. This noise cancelling has been something that we’ve been working on for decades. This Silent System has been in development since probably 2021.”

The Noiseless pickups do a pretty good job though. If they were good enough for Clapton, then they’re good enough for the rest of us hacks. Did you consult with artists when developing the Silent System?

“Yeah, I mean, I agree with you that the Noiseless pickups do sound fantastic. We did get feedback from people that they noticed that that the design of our Noiseless pickup sometimes isn’t as sparkly and doesn’t retain as much high-end as a true single-coil. Also, the response to your pick attack and the transparency of the tone is affected a little bit.

“We work with a lot of different artists that have very fine-tuned ears, and they all say these pickups are great – and like you, a lot of artists are completely happy with the Noiseless pickups that we make – but we did get a lot of feedback from a lot of people that thought we could do better, that we could reduce more noise and retain more of the single-coil tone – and we believe that ourselves.”

A lot of these artists, like you say, have a great ear for this, and they are also listening to them in a studio environment, through hi-fidelity monitors.

“I think there are a lot of people whose feel that Noiseless pickups are a compromise. They recognise that they don’t feel as organic and transparent. There’s a little bit of high-end loss. The response is a little cloaked with the noiseless design. Subtle for sure, but a lot of people do notice this.

And so, just like Leo, we’re always talking to artists, and people that we work with, and always trying to evolve our designs and make them better, and respond to what the artists and players are asking for. This is a perfect example of that.

If we think of hum-free pickups, we immediately might think of what a brand like EMG does with active designs featuring a preamp to kill the hum.

“An active system requires a battery, and it is very effective at cancelling hum. But one of our goals was we didn’t want to saddle the guitars or the players with having to worry about a battery. We wanted something completely passive so that it works forever. You don’t ever need to worry about opening the guard and changing a battery. We didn’t have to rout an extra cavity with a little battery box. We didn’t want to deal with anything related to active systems.

“That was one of the absolute requirements of this project. We want to reduce as much noise as possible, retain as much single-coiled tone as possible. We wanted it to work with any Fender model and any Fender set of pickups, and we didn’t want to use a battery.”

How should se talk about it? For all intents and purposes, this is a large dummy coil secreted under the pickguard, adjacent to the pickups. It’s about the size of a Wide Range Humbucker. What makes it so different to dummy coils we’ve seen before?

“Yeah, it’s very different than the average dummy coil. A lot of systems just use another pickup, like a Strat pickup wired in series and reverse-wound to cancel the hum. In all our development, we discovered that the key to cancelling the noise is the size of the bobbin. It’s the shape of it. It’s very wide, and there are a lot of turns of very thick gauge wire. So all these elements are part of the recipe.

“We use very thick wire, and it’s a very wide coil. It’s kind of like a bucket in the rain, the wider the bucket, the more rain you can catch. Similarly, with the pickup, the wider it is, the more cancellation you get. So our pickup is much wider than an average single-coil pickup, it’s much deeper, and it uses much thicker wire.”

“Otherwise, the functionality of the coil is similar to what people understand. It’s wired, wound in reverse to the pickup that’s selected, and then phase cancels the hum. So it’s working just like a normal dummy coil would work.

“The key to our development was it had to fit under all the different pickguards of fender instruments, and it had to reduce as much hum as possible, retain as much single-coil tone as possible. And the size and thickness of the pickup was very important to that end result, as well as the thickness of the gauge of the wire.”

You raise a good point. The size matters if you’ve got to route the body and hide it under the pickguard.

“Also, another element was weight. You know, with all the experimenting we did, the bigger the pickup is, the more hum you get rid of. But once it gets really, really large, now all of a sudden, the route doesn’t fit under the pickguard, and all of a sudden it’s very heavy. Depending on how much wire you’re using, pickups can get very heavy. And that was also important to us to not burden the guitar with too much extra weight.”

That’s the next question – how heavy is this system?

“Only two, three ounces heavier than a set of our Noiseless pickups. I think we did really well in that respect.”

You have rolled out it in these limited edition American Professional Classic Telecasters and Stratocasters. But you mentioned it is compatible with all Fender models.

“We route an extra cavity right next to the pickups. Some guitars, it’ll be in between the pickups. I think if you mounted it on a Jazzmaster, you’d probably have to mount it in between the pickups. But again, we wanted to make sure that, whatever we arrived at, the size and shape of this bobbin has to fit under the pickguards of all our models.”

That’s interesting, so so if I were grab my Telecaster, scoop out a tangerine-sized bit of ash, then stuck this system in, then theoretically, it should work just the same?

“Yeah, absolutely. It’s passive and it works with all different fender pickups. The only thing you might have to concern yourself with is the phasing, because the phasing is really what accomplishes the noise cancelling. The pickup that it’s paired with has to be wound in reverse.

“If a pickup is reverse wound or not, sometimes you might have to mess with the wiring a little bit to get the phasing properly. But it works with any pickup set that we sell right now, and we’ve tested it with a lot of different pickups.”

How did you test it? I could imagine you recreating Ritchie Blackmore’s rig or something like that, and going at it.

“The guy who really developed this system, his name is Steven Casado. He’s one of our best engineers, and he started in 2021 at the beginning of the project. We literally would have him build us a guitar with different versions of this system. We’d load in the current version of the coil into a guitar, and then we’d plug it in and compare it to the noise level of other guitars that we make.

All the different guitars, and we would just plug them in and see how much noise was reduced, and how much of the single-coil tone was maintained, compared to other guitars that we make. We were obviously plugging into vintage-style amps, like Deluxe Reverbs and Twins.

We tried all different shapes and sizes, so many different iterations. Probably 23-plus different versions. We build a guitar and throw the pickup into it, and then test it at the factory. There are a lot of areas in the factory that have fluorescent lights and a lot of noise, so it was a great environment to plug into and test.”

Teenage Engineering CEO Jesper Kouthoofd recently declared that the company would stop making synthesizers, but it seems that the Swedish brand isn’t going to be leaving the music-making world altogether just yet.

A recently unearthed FCC filing shows that Teenage Engineering is preparing to release an amp, the EP-35 K.O.-AMP. The filing, which contains several pictures and a user manual, reveals that the EP-35 is a portable battery-powered amplifier with – as is to be expected from Teenage Engineering – a few unexpected quirks.

Housed in a blocky, grey plastic chassis that closely resembles its sampler counterpart, the EP-133 K.O. II, the EP-35 is topped with a handle for convenient transport, and this is where you’ll find the inputs and most of the controls.

On the front panel you have a 30-watt woofer and 25-watt tweeter with a frequency response of 50Hz-20Khz. Round the back, there’s a handy storage compartment behind the plastic grille, for cables, USB drives, or even a sneaky cold one. Opening up the compartment turns on a built-in “camp light” with an intriguingly-named “disco mode”, and the unit is splash-resistant, too, just in case your outdoor jam gets a little out of hand.

The EP-35 is well-equipped in terms of connectivity, and can be used to amplify guitars, synths, keyboards, or any electronic instruments you like. Active inputs are automatically selected, so it’s plug-and-play, and it looks like there are digital effects onboard for both the guitar and mic inputs, though we don’t yet know what these are.

On the top of the amp is a 3.5mm line input, an XLR microphone input with +48V phantom power, a ¼” guitar input and a 3.5mm line output, along with two USB-C ports. A device port is used to hook up to your computer or phone for firmware updates and to act as a sound card, and a host port for connecting to thumb drives, USB audio devices and as-yet-unannounced accessories.

EP-35 has both FM radio and Bluetooth, so it’ll act as a portable speaker. The amp can also transmit Bluetooth audio via Auracast, so you’re able to link up with other EP-35s wirelessly. Judging by the pictures, it looks as if multiple amps can be stacked on top of each other to create a multi-speaker rig that really pumps up the volume.

We’ve no word on pricing or availability yet. As the amp is part of the EP range, we wouldn't expect it to be exorbitantly priced, but you never know with Teenage Engineering – this is a company that charged $1,599 for an aluminum desk and called it a “modular workspace solution”, after all.

In other Teenage Engineering news, the company has just announced a firmware update for the OP-XY that introduces a new drum synthesizer called drumline, multichannel audio over USB–C, a new dynamic filter, expanded envelope controls and more.

Billy Corgan has showered Travis Barker with some extravagant praise, calling him “the most influential drummer of the last thirty years”.

Barker was a guest on Corgan’s The Magnificent Others podcast where the pair chatted about drumming, rock music and so on. About a third of the way into the interview, the Smashing Pumpkins man says of his guest: “You have influenced more popular drummers in the last thirty years than any drummer I can think of. When we talk about rock/ alternative, something about the way you played kind of unleashed this different way of playing.

"I guess power pop or rock drums, that comes directly from you because before you people didn't play like that, and after you, almost everybody plays like you.”

What can you say to that? Clearly honoured, the Blink drummer replied: “That means so much. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know what to say,” before going on to talk about his influences.

He described those as “just this weird kind of mixture of everything that I was raised on. I owe it to like Buddy Rich and everyone from Buddy Rich to, like, the Meters drummer was like a huge influence. Cissy Strut - I would sit at home and try to figure out these drum parts, you know.

"Even Tommy Lee, like seeing a drummer in the forefront of the band was… There was just so many great drummers. Jimmy Chamberlin, Dennis Chambers… Animal from the Muppets was my biggest influence as a child.”

Barker also told Corgan about how after his 2008 plane crash, getting back to the drums was an essential part of his recovery. “It was the first thing I did when I got out of the burns centre,” he reveals. “I actually didn’t tell Dr Grossman, my burns doctor… He was a straight shooter and he was like ‘I don’t know if you’re going to play drums again’. No one knew, but both of my hands were numb. And I didn’t want to say anything because I just wanted out of the hospital.”

“So I didn’t tell Dr Grossman and it turned out I had a bunch of nerve damage, but I just couldn’t wait to get home. And they would push me outside, and I would play on a practice pad. My hands were still scabbed. My burns weren’t even completely healed yet. (But) that was (when) I finally felt connected to something.”

RECORDING WEEK 2026: The humble patch bay is easily one of the most-used, and least-appreciated, pieces of equipment in the world of music-making. This is true, at least, on one side of the recording-studio glass. On the other, recording engineers feel a pleasant little flutter in their belly every time they patch a signal from somewhere to somewhere else. Oh, quelle convenience!

And there’s no reason you can’t benefit from that same convenience, too. As your own set-up continues to take shape (read: accumulates gear), so too do its possibilities expand. And a patch bay is the key to unlocking them, whether you want to craft different signal chains for recording with or use your extensive collection of pedal effects and outboard gear to mix with.

In this article I'm going to go into the details of patch bays and how to set one up for your own studio.

Magnets Patch bays… how do they work?

In patching something to somewhere else, you’re essentially dealing with ins and outs – exactly the same as with any other piece of audio equipment, only now there’s an abstract slab of sockets between you and your stuff.

Let’s use a guitar pedal to visualise things.

In the photo above we see the input and output of our Line6 DL4 pedal connected to two sockets on our patchbay.

A signal can now be plugged into the bottom front socket of the patchbay which will then reach the pedals Input. Be that a guitar, microphone, whatever. Meanwhile the DL4’s output is routed to the top rear socket of the same column on the patchbay, and can be accessed from the top front socket.

From here, it can go wherever you’d like – including the bottom-front input of the next channel on the patchbay and thereby, potentially to your next effects box… Should be what you require. And on and on the signal will go.

Some describe the flow of audio through a patch bay as being like a waterfall, but I like to start with stitching as an analogy.

The needle and thread go in the bottom of the material, back out through the top and then in through the bottom again. Each loop in and out chains together an effect. And on and on it goes.

How normal(led) is your patch bay?

Some patch bays stop here; each column is a new effect, and you effectively choose the order of effects with your patch cables at the front. These patch bays are called ‘un-normalled’ patch bays – which begs the question, ‘what is normal?’

Normalling refers to the internal connectivity of jacks in each column of a patch bay. In a normalled patch bay, the top-rear and bottom-rear jacks are internally connected, meaning signal automatically flows between them.

For normalled patch bays, this is always happening until you plug something in the front – at which point that internal connection is broken, and the signal is diverted. This is useful where you have the output from a pre-amp coming in the top-rear jack, and the bottom-rear jack connected to the input of your audio interface; now you can patch in to that signal and send it elsewhere first, crucially without having to unplug a bunch of stuff.

Half-normalled patch bays also exist, wherein patching in at the top splits the signal instead of diverting it. However, plugging into the bottom front jack does break the connection, meaning whatever you’ve patched in will always take precedence (hence, half-normalled).

OK. That's the basics. But how can you make this useful?

Step 1: Draw up a plan

Every good setup starts with a plan. This isn’t just a way to feel productive before you start plugging stuff in; it’s a guide to foolproof your patching ideas, finalise your set-up’s signal chain and give you a clear idea of what exactly you’ll need to put where in order to realise your vision.

My plan involves a normalled patch bay; four channels of incoming audio are received in channels 1 to 4 of our patchbay, from an analogue Studiomaster mixing desk. These are then normalled to the four rear inputs of a Focusrite Clarett 4Pre audio interface.

The 4Pre’s line outs are also then also sent to the patch bay, and normalled to the line inputs of the mixing desk.

This set-up enables the patching of incoming audio to rack effects while recording, and the easy patching of outboard gear right back into the interface for re-recording.

A stereo reamp box at the end of the bay enables the stepping-down of interface-borne audio to pedal-friendly levels, for even more versatility.

Step 2: Get everything you need

The one thing you'll need for patchbay nirvana is cables. And lots of them.

Try cable looms for the rear of the patch bay, to make physically routing cables (and tracing signals) easier. For the front, you’ll want smaller 12” long patch cables. For a TRS patch bay, make sure to buy TRS cables as opposed to TS for lower-noise audio.

And whether or not you have other rack effects to plug in, you should also buy a rack unit to house your patch bay. Patch bays are short and sometimes unhoused, so a rack can both protect your circuitry and make it easier to access.

Step 3: Populate your rack

Using the four holes at the front of each rack effect panel (the 'ears' that stick out) affix your rack equipment to the rails of your rack. The patch bay doesn’t go in yet, though, as you’ll want the space around it to make wiring easier. Speaking of which…

Step 4: Wires, wires, wires

It's time to start wiring everything together. Start with the gear, as opposed to the patch bay, and start with anything multi-channel so as to keep your channels in the right order.

Labelling your cables, or noting their colour codes, is crucial to keeping track of cable runs. I've lost hours to forgetfulness in this regard; learn from my pain.

Here, all the cables are pulled through the gap where the patch bay will go. They are colour-coded and labelled for inputs and outputs, making plugging them in a simple matter of following the plan.

Go methodically, left to right, and you won’t get lost.

Step 5: Program your interface outputs

In order to use your audio interface outputs properly, you need to make sure they are routed correctly. Chances are they are routed as monitor outs, and so receive the same master-track info your speakers do. Fix this before you lose some hearing to a deafening feedback loop!

You may have to work with both your interface’s proprietary software and your DAW. Whatever software it is, you should be able stop your line outs from automatically outputting the stereo master tracks.

In your DAW, you can send audio out and back again any number of ways, including simply setting a send from a channel to the line out, and creating a new channel to receive the effected signal from an input elsewhere. You might benefit from creating a mix template in your DAW, with aux channels that automatically send to your line outs. This way, you can use your DAW’s send function, and buss whatever you like out to your patch bay. You could also create a virtual send and return path in your FX chain using an I/O plugin.

Step 6: Feel the benefit

And that’s it.

You’ve successfully installed a patch bay into your audio interface rig, and hopefully haven’t split any ears in the process.

Now, by routing sound to the correct output from your audio interface you can make it appear on your patchbay exactly where you were expecting it and, through the magic of wires placed in the correct sockets, send it onwards to whatever external effect or box (or chain of effects or boxes) you could ever dream of.

Now just sit back and enjoy the near-endless possibilities your brand new ins and outs afford you.

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.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer created some of the most accomplished and acclaimed progressive rock music of all time during their imperial phase in the ’70s. But if drummer Carl Palmer had to pick just one track that captured ELP at the very peak of their powers, what would it be?

Palmer has spoken to MusicRadar while preparing for his next set of shows in which he performs classic ELP material live – synchronised with 1992 video footage of his late former bandmates, keyboardist Keith Emerson and bassist/guitarist/vocalist Greg Lake.

These upcoming shows are billed: Welcome Back My Friends – An Evening with Emerson, Lake & Palmer. The drummer is joined on stage by Paul Bielatowicz on guitar and Simon Fitzpatrick on bass and Chapman Stick.

The setlist will of course feature the landmark tracks that established ELP as leading lights of progressive rock and also one of the biggest selling bands in the world.

But which of those tracks represents the absolute peak of the trio’s artistry?

Palmer smiles and tells MusicRadar: “When people say, ‘Can you can you tell me what Emerson, Lake & Palmer was like? What was it?’ Somebody who doesn’t know it. I’ve only ever come up with with two answers.”

First, he names the definitive ELP album, a classic from 1973.

“If you want the pinnacle of the creativity, I would say Brain Salad Surgery was the top end of that creativity.”

Then he names their greatest track – an interpretation of a famous English hymn that served as opening piece from Brain Salad Surgery.

“If you want to get the band in a nutshell, there’s the Englishness of it – because Greg had a choir boy voice, it wasn’t a bluesy soul voice. And we were keyboard-driven, not by guitars. Very unusual at the time.

“I would have to say the grandest piece that displays absolutely everything – our connection to classical music, and our connection to the big production – I would say it’s the track Jerusalem. Because that fulfils everything. We did play it on stage, not all of the time, but that to me just opens up the door and says, ‘That’s what ELP sounded like.’”

He continues: “Yes, there are other tracks like Fanfare [For The Common Man]. Yes, there are other big tracks like Lucky Man, C’est La Vie. But all in one, where you get the full blast of Keith Emerson, of Greg Lake, myself, I would say Jerusalem would always be the track that I would refer to as being The One.”

Palmer is hugely proud of what he achieved with ELP and proud of the show he is currently taking around the world. He does admit, however, that he wasn’t entirely happy with the last show that the legendary trio played together as Emerson, Lake & Palmer – headlining the High Voltage festival in London’s Victoria Park on 25 July 2010.

Palmer admits: “The band wasn’t in good health by the time we got to that concert. But we rehearsed for about five weeks. We got as much done as possible, and that was it.

“Really, after what everyone had gone through in the band, we knew we couldn’t actually tour again full time. We were offered other stuff, other shows, but it just it never felt right to me at the time, and I know that Keith and Greg felt the same as well.

“We knew that it wasn’t practical to tour with like three weeks off in between dates. So, truthfully, I think that High Voltage show was a way of saying goodbye to all of the English fans.”

The Finnish symphonic metal outfit Nightwish have parted company with their vocalist Floor Jansen.

The group claim it was a mutual decision. In a statement, they have said simply that: “Nightwish and Floor Jansen part ways.”

They continue: “After careful consideration, we have, in mutual agreement, decided to part ways. This decision is necessary and important to us and our future ambitions. Thus, we will now pursue those goals in our own separate ways. We wish each other nothing but the very best on our respective artistic journeys.”

“For you, dear listener, and indeed for us, this marks the end of a truly great voyage. Nightwish will continue. We will move forward and enter the studio in 2027 to record a new album. As we celebrate 30 years of Nightwish, we couldn’t be more excited about our music and our future.”

Jansen doesn’t seem to dispute this version of events. In her own statement on social media, she says: “Endings create new beginnings, and even though it was a hard decision to make, I believe there is a bright musical journey ahead of me.”

”I invite you to follow along on this path, as you were with me in all the great years before. Thank you for your support through the rollercoasters of life. My solo career will now get all of my attention and gives my new upcoming album Hytress (out 2027) and the tour all space to grow. Hope to meet you on the road again in a near and happy future.”

The Dutch singer has been with the group for thirteen years. Indeed, she is the third lead vocalist the group have had in their 30-year history. She replaced Anette Oizon in 2013, who herself replaced Tarja Turunen in 2005.

The band haven’t played live since 2023, but revealed recently that they have been working on their next album, the follow-up to 2024’s Yesterwynde. Speaking to Metal Hammer in August, keyboard player and songwriter Tuomas Holopainen said that he had already written six new tracks for the new album, which will presumably be recorded with a new vocalist, for release next year...

Born in Wakefield, Bill Nelson studied at the town’s art college before recording his first album, Northern Dream, in Mike Levon’s bedroom studio in 1971. Much to his astonishment, legendary DJ John Peel played it in its entirety, before Nelson formed Be-Bop Deluxe and forged a reputation as one of art rock’s most exemplary - if under-appreciated - guitarists.

Nelson’s kit has always leaned towards the experimental, using a Minimoog, an ARP Omni and an EBow on his stylish 1983 LP Chimera, collaborating alongside YMO’s Yukihiro Takahashi, Kate Bush drummer Preston Heyman, and Japan bassist Mick Karn.

Others soon called, with Nelson adding guitar and EBow to records by Yukihiro Takahashi, Yellow Magic Orchestra, David Sylvian and Harold Budd. Meanwhile, he produced the Skids and famously took his name off the production credit for Gary Numan’s 1983 LP Warriors.

In recent years, Nelson has distilled an astonishing 218 recorded tracks into improvised, texture-rich electric guitar instrumentals. Titled Guitars of Tomorrow, the first volume has produced the LP Magical Thinking. We caught up with Nelson to discuss his fascinating and surprising career.

MusicRadar: Hi Bill, tell us a little about Duane Eddy. We believe he was quite an influence on you when you first started?

Bill Nelson: “I was about 10 years old when I first got a Duane Eddy record - I’d heard a single he’d done called Because They’re Young on the radio and liked it an awful lot. My younger brother received a little toy plastic guitar, which he didn’t bother with, but I managed to pick out the theme from The Third Man on it. Then when I heard the electric guitar on the Duane Eddy records, I fell in love with its twangy, echoey sound.

“As a result of me being such a fan, my dad bought me a second-hand Zenith Archtop Acoustic. I tried to transfer what I’d managed to do on the toy guitar, but found it really hard going because the action was pretty high and it didn’t have little toy plastic strings.

“I almost gave up and then I met a pal at school called Ian Parkin who had an electric guitar. We were both trying to translate what was going on in our record collections, and I guess that gave me the encouragement to keep going.”

MR: When did the penny drop?

BN: “Before long, we’d managed to get some rudimentary chords, but the first time I ever played something properly was when we figured out the chord progression to The Ventures’ Walk, Don’t Run, but neither of us was playing the melody and then the penny dropped.

“I thought, ‘Hang on, let me try and figure out how this melody goes,’ and that’s when I became a lead guitarist and he became a rhythm guitarist. This was all during the late ’50s/early ’60s with instrumental bands like The Shadows, The Ventures and The Fireballs.”

MR: Jumping forward to when you first started making your own music, we understand that DJ John Peel opened a door after you released your debut LP, Northern Dream?

BN: “It was amazing because I had very little ambition to be a professional musician. Not that I wouldn’t have loved it, but it just seemed impossible for a young man from Wakefield to break into a music industry that seemed centred in London. I made Northern Dream in Mike Levon’s back bedroom studio. We recorded onto a two-track tape recorder and pressed up around 250 copies, one of which got into John Peel’s hands.

“He actually contacted me and said, ‘Listen to my programme tonight - I’m going to play the record.’ I thought, ‘Great, he’s going to play a track’, but he played the entire album in one go. I was thrilled to bits and about a week later I got a message from EMI saying they were interested in signing me as a solo artist and would I have a chat with them at Manchester Square in London.”

MR: Was this prior to the formation of your first band, Be-Bop Deluxe?

BN: “I’d just put the first line-up of Be-Bop Deluxe together and told EMI that I’d got a band and was now doing something different to Northern Dream, so they asked if they could get a cassette of it. We recorded the first two songs I’d ever written for the band, took it down to EMI’s A&R and they said they’d come up and see us in three months’ time to watch us play live.

“We did a gig at the Staging Post in Leeds and had already built up a good local following. It was packed out, but EMI still wanted to sign me as a solo artist. I said ‘It’s the band or nothing’.

“Eventually, we got a gig at the Marquee Club supporting String Driven Thing, and EMI turned up again to see how we’d go down with a London audience. As it happened, we went down very well, so they agreed to sign the band if they couldn’t get me on my own. That was how we got our first record deal, so we did the Axe Victim album and went on tour with Cockney Rebel.”

MR: At this point, were you practising guitar day and night?

BN: “I did when I first got into guitar, but I never learned to read music or study theory. Before Be-Bop was born, I’d played in lots of different vocal bands doing rhythm and blues and working men’s club kind of material, playing everything from Jim Reeves and Elvis Presley to Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry.

“That was useful because although my heart might not be in all those kinds of music, that sort of cross-cultural education helped me to understand a wide range of music. I’m not just a rock guy - I like to listen to jazz, classical and folk.”

MR: In 1979, you produced the Skids’ album Days in Europa. Why did you take a diversion into production?

BN: “I never intentionally wanted to produce other people. John Leckie and I co-produced the Be-Bop albums from Sunburst Finish and the Red Noise album. As it happened, Richard Jobson and Stuart Adamson from the Skids were big fans of both and approached me with a view to us producing an EP for them.

“For their next album, they asked if I’d do it on my own, so I produced it. It was the same with all the bands I produced, which was nice but it wasn’t something I went out looking for. It’s a very different skill set, but it’s quite frustrating watching other people have all the fun so I’d always try to get a little bit in there on guitar or keyboards.”

MR: You started Cocteau Records about a year later for your own music and other bands. Did you regret getting into such a cut-throat industry?

BN: “I wanted to open the label up to other artists because I had this altruistic idea that an independent label could be artist-centred rather than business-centred. I got a deluge of cassette tapes and 90 per cent of them were just horrible, but some good things came out of it.

“We released this band called Man Jumping, which was a bit like a cross between a prog band and Philip Glass, but my manager did a runner and it all fell apart. After that, I was picked up by Mercury, who liked my second album Quit Dreaming (And Get on the Beam). They bought it from EMI and it went top 10 in the very early ’80s.”

MR: You also signed the ’80s synthpop band A Flock of Seagulls, which seemed like quite a strange choice?

BN: “One of their managers had been part of the road crew for Be-Bop, so they rang me up and said ‘We’re managing this band from Liverpool but can’t get a deal’. We recorded the single (It’s Not Me) Talking at a tiny studio in Leeds and put that out, but they suddenly got a deal from a major label.

“In terms of electronics, I’d been dabbling since the early-to-mid-’60s. At college, I produced an electronic score for a play of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt and used various techniques that John Cage had pioneered with tape cut-ups and putting objects through the strings of the guitar to slow it down and reverse it.”

MR: That takes us nicely to Chimera, your 1983 solo LP that leaned on a lot of synthesisers and sequencers. How did you acquire those instruments?

BN: “The first synth I ever got was the Minimoog, which I bought from a band called Hudson Ford. They couldn’t get on with it, so I got quite a reasonable price and used it a lot to write some of the Red Noise stuff. In fact, when we did the final Be-Bop album, Drastic Plastic, I used a Hagstrom Patch 2000 guitar synth on various tracks.

“I also used a big Yamaha CS80 and a Roland synth guitar that had a strange reinforced part that went over the neck to the headstock. It had really delayed tracking, so it wasn’t great for anything other than steady chord playing.”

MR: On Chimera, you worked with Yukihiro Takahashi from Yellow Magic Orchestra and Japan’s Mick Karn. What do you recollect from those sessions?

BN: “For the drum stuff, I’d been to Japan to play on a YMO album called Naughty Boys, and then I played on Yuki’s album What Me Worry. I basically asked if he could send me some drum tracks that might be useful to write to, so I got a tape of improvised parts and used them as a starting point for songs.

“I’d also done an album with another Japanese musician called Masami Tsuchiya and Mick Karn was at those recordings at Air Studios, so I asked if he’d like to play on Chimera. He came up to Yorkshire and we ran through the material, but he didn’t actually bring his bass. We used a proper studio for the recordings, but Mick was very talented.”

MR: Around that time you were invited to produce the Gary Numan album Warriors. Your relationship started well, but went downhill at some point. Why do you think it didn’t work out creatively?

BN: “I got the impression that Gary didn’t want to move from a safe place. His record company had contacted me and said that, whilst he was one of the early synthpop artists, the newer ones were moving ahead and doing something different. They felt he needed to push the envelope a little.

“I tried to get him to do certain things, but found it really hard going because he wanted to do stuff the way he’d always done it, which I can understand after you’ve been working in a certain mode. Anyway, engineer Nick Smith and I mixed the album, but I got a call from him about a week later saying he’d quit because Gary had gone in and remixed it.

“I managed to get hold of a copy of the remixes and it just wasn’t what I wanted to have my name put to, so I took it off the album before it came out. It was all a bit silly and sad really, but he’s actually been good enough to say he was young and naive and should have given me more space. I did some EBow guitar on the album, which hopefully stands up, but I haven’t heard it for years.”

MR: A happier collaboration unfolded in 1986 when you worked on David Sylvian’s Gone to Earth LP. We’re guessing Sylvian gave you a lot more latitude to interpret his material?

BN: “From what I remember during the sessions, the songs weren’t finished. In fact, there was no vocal at all and the tracks had ghost-shaped chords so it was literally let’s do six takes and improvise - then David would sort through all the takes, edit bits together and build a song around them. It was quite open and free - playing whatever came into my mind.

“At that time, I was into a lot of esoteric philosophical stuff, and he was very hungry to learn about that. I gave him a list of obscure books, which he sent his girlfriend out to buy from Atlantis Bookshop in Museum Street. I also introduced him to the music of Jon Hassell and they ended up working together.”

MR: You returned to work with Sylvian when the band Japan reformed as Rain Tree Crow. Was that one of your more gratifying projects?

BN: “It was an interesting project but slightly fraught because they didn’t stay a band and David and Steve Jansen fell out after that. It had a sad side to it because of the tensions within the band, but I remember doing sessions at Pete Townshend’s Eel Pie Studios and gave him a box set of ambient pieces I’d done.

“Pete got in touch later asking if I’d be interested in working with him on music for a stage production of The Iron Man, but I don’t know what happened.”

MR: When you do sessions for other people, do you make sure to reference whatever you’ve worked on?

BN: “I always found playing with other musicians nerve-wracking because it’s hard to know exactly what they want. Most times they probably wanted my guitar to sound like whatever it did on my records, but sometimes they wanted a certain style that I wouldn’t naturally gravitate towards.

“I can’t say that I always enjoyed playing on other people’s records because it’s always slightly stressful, but as long as they’re happy with it - and they usually seem to be - I won’t bother referencing it again. I tend to be like that with my own albums once I’ve released them too.”

MR: You made some albums with ambient master Harold Budd. Did you specifically seek him out for collaboration?

BN: “When I was working on the Red Noise album in the late ’70s, we were recording at one of Richard Branson’s studios in Shepherd’s Bush and I decided to go into the West End and browse some of the more avant-garde racks at the record store. It was there that I pulled out a Harold Budd album called The Pavilion of Dreams. I bought it on spec because the track titles were speaking to me in some way and it was just stunningly beautiful.

“Later, I did a track called the Shadow Garden on a cassette release for a Belgian label called Les Disques du Crépuscule and Harold had a track on that album. That’s how Harold heard my music and he later asked my friend for an introduction while he was working with Brian Eno.

“He came up to Yorkshire and we hit it off straight away and became great friends. Even though he lived in LA, Harold came over to watch me play live in 2020 at the Clothworkers Hall in Leeds and we did three numbers on stage.”

MR: What do you remember about working with Harold as a session player?

BN: “We recorded By the Dawn’s Early Light in Daniel Lanois’ Kingsway Studio and that was a fabulous experience. Harold had written out parts for everybody to play. BJ Cole was on pedal steel and there was a viola player, a harpist, Harold and myself, but I was a bit worried about this.

“I said, ‘You do remember, Harold? I can’t really play scored parts’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll play the piece, I’ll give you the nod when I want you to come in and you just play whatever you want for as long as you want.’ It was so easy to do and all the musicians were looking at me thinking, you lucky so and so, we’ve got to follow this score’.”

MR: You called your latest project, Guitars of Tomorrow, “heavily layered futuristic guitar instrumentals with a historical twist”. In what way is it futuristic, and what historical period are you nodding to?

BN: “The idea behind Guitars of Tomorrow started when I was thinking about what sort of guitar playing would be acceptable in, say, 20 or 30 years’ time. I almost called it Guitars of Tomorrow - Echoes of the Past because it sort of harks back to The Shadows, The Ventures, Duane Eddy, and even Wes Montgomery’s jazz stuff. It’s about trying to pull together all those different elements from the guitar’s past and possible future.”

MR: Over a period of around three years, you recorded something like 200 tracks and apportioned them to different albums. Is Magical Thinking the first of those?

BN: “The idea is that there’s going to be a series of albums, all subtitled Guitars of Tomorrow, but each one will have an individual title. Magical Thinking has just been released, and the second, Art of Light, is more contemplative and abstract.

“The third will be called Elsewhere, but it’s been hard going through all the tracks and deciding how to put them in the right running order. The process is very old school, but I do like to think of an album as a journey with variations in tempo and key. The tracks have to relate or flow somehow, but it takes time to come up with the right combinations.”

MR: Are you still working with hardware to process guitars, synths and other instruments?

BN: “When digital recording started, I got a Mackie D8B digital mixing desk and 24-track hard drive recorder, which worked fine because it was a fader-based system that I was used to with individual channels that could be manipulated by hands rather than a mouse. It eventually broke down, so I knew I’d have to bite the bullet and go down the software route.

“I eventually got a Mac mini with Cubase and a Mackie control surface with eight faders so that I could still have that sense of being able to ride a fader, which is totally different from messing about on-screen.”

MR: In terms of guitar improvisation, how do you decide when the playing ends and the editing begins?

BN: “There are two ways that I start a piece. One is using a drum or percussion sequence of some kind and playing guitar or keyboard chords against it; another will be starting with a keyboard pad sound and building on top of that. There’s not an awful lot of editing. I tend to play keyboards and guitar live and if there’s a mistake I’ll play it again rather than copying and pasting.

“I’ve got a Yamaha Motif 88 and a DX7 somewhere in my storeroom. I keep getting tempted to get myself another keyboard because I’ve exhausted all the sounds on the Yamahas, but I work in a very small space full of guitar amps with shelves full of science fiction toys, antiques and stuff. The house is more like a museum now. It’s terrible. My wife keeps asking me to throw stuff out, but I won’t! [laughs]”

MR: Do you lean towards using a chosen few guitars that you feel truly comfortable with?

BN: “I’ve got about 100 guitars and I’m actually going through a process at the moment of documenting them. I’ll typically try to get about eight out at a time and use them in the studio, but I’m nearly 78 now so lugging all these things around is getting to be a chore. I don’t use amps anymore and haven’t for a long time - when I play, I’ve got an Axe-Fx modeller and the POD Go effects processor going direct into the recording system.

“At the moment, I’ve got a 1962 reissue Gretsch White Falcon double-cutaway, a Fender Stratocaster, Les Paul Custom three-pickup and a couple of obscure things like a Musicvox. The Fenders, Gretsches and Gibsons are all great guitars, but I sometimes like to use something a bit quirky and obscure because it inspires different things. If something’s not so easy to play, that puts a different shape on what you actually do.”

MR: Does acquiring techniques make you a more creative player or do you have to unlearn certain habits in order to move forward?

BN: “I have arthritis in my hands, so I even find it hard to do an open D-shape chord. You work around your limitations, but when it comes to playing I’ve always said to people ‘If you’re thinking, you’re not really playing’.

“You should almost approach it like a child with building blocks and just let it happen. Once you’ve put the time in to understand how a guitar works and are reasonably competent, play and lean back on your instincts because they’ll usually serve you well.”

Bill Nelson’s Magical Thinking: Guitars of Tomorrow Volume One is out now on Sonoluxe. For more information, click here.

There’s been a new development in the tale of Hateful Eight smashed Martin.

You may recall that in Quentin Tarantino 2015 western, one of the climatic scenes is when the 145 year old Martin acoustic – worth something in the region of $15,000 - that Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character Daisy Domergue plays, is snatched out of her hands by John ‘The Hangman’ Ruth, played by Kurt Russell. Russell declares “music time is over” and smashes it in front of her - and our - eyes.

The story goes that there was a mix-up and instead of one of the doubles, the real Martin ended up in smithereens. The scene has become so notorious that the smashed acoustic was actually displayed at NAMM the other year.

Now in a new twist, it seems that Russell smashing it up wasn’t a ghastly error after all…

Speaking on the Gear Gab with Eric Dahl podcast, Dick Boak, Martin’s in-house historian, has revealed that Tarantino absolutely knew what he was doing: “Tarantino filmed it at night on purpose so that the guitar tech wouldn’t be there. He (the tech) had gone home, and they never brought the papier-mâché guitars out. They just had the regular guitar. She (Leigh) played her little thing, and Kurt Russell grabbed it out of her hands.”

Boak said he was worried that the incident would get him sacked. He’s since retired and thus doesn’t really have anything to lose by telling all now.

“Tarantino wanted to get a genuine reaction out of her,” Boak says of the scene. “And yeah, he did. I’ll never forget it, you know – the reaction on her face and everything from that.”

Not surprisingly, Martin changed its policy regarding the loaning out of its museum instruments after this unfortunate episode. Too late for the $15,000 Martin, alas.

As for Russell, in an interview with Esquire last year, the actor disputed the idea the guitar was ever worth that much and claims that the whole thing was overblown. “Nobody ever said it was 145 years old,” he said. “Not that it was a priceless Martin guitar, because it wasn’t. Nobody said that. Nobody made that claim. But when we did the take – you can even see it – I give it an extra beat. And nothing, so I go ahead and smash the guitar.”

“I can tell when I grab her (Leigh) and sit her down, I can tell she’s not happy about this. Something’s wrong,” he continued. “As soon as it’s over I said, ‘Tell me that’s not the guitar that you’ve been practising with.’ And she went, ‘Yeah.’ I only felt bad about that. I (didn’t) give a shit about the guitar.”

RECORDING WEEK 2026: “We’ll let you guys prophesy. We gon’ see the future first,” says Frank Ocean on Nikes, the opening track on his genre-melting musical patchwork, Blonde.

Few more prescient lyrics have been delivered by an artist who has managed to remain deliberately elusive despite the over-exposed times we’re living through.

The record, released back in 2016, is rightfully regarded as Ocean’s masterpiece – a brilliantly woozy immersive world that has yet to be followed up a decade later.

Featuring a huge cast of collaborators including Beyonce, Andre 3000, Pharrell, James Blake and many more, the starry names belie the subtle and nuanced atmosphere that surrounds the album's 17 tracks.

Blonde was the long-awaited follow-up to Ocean’s 2012’s debut Channel Orange and landed amid much speculation, following hazy rumours and intrigue behind the record’s delay. Was it writer’s block or Ocean’s bid for perfectionism that lay behind it?

“I had the time of my life making all of this,” Ocean wrote on his Tumblr in the days after Blonde’s release, in posts that led to as much online discourse around the record as it did offer clarification.

“Thank you all. Especially those of you who never let me forget I had to finish. Which is basically every one of ya’ll. Haha. Love you.”

Although born in California in 1987, it was in New Orleans when Ocean first began writing music. Real name Christopher Breaux, it was in the aftermath of the devastation wrecked by Hurricane Katrina that his life’s direction changed.

With his home and studio equipment destroyed, Ocean chose to move to LA with the little he had left and began working in a series of day jobs while writing songs for major artists.

In an interview with the New York Times Magazine in 2013, when discussing these formative experiences, Ocean said: “I had a problem listening to anybody. I had a problem listening to A&Rs telling me how a song was supposed to sound, or what this artist's vibe was.”

Despite the creative and financial challenges, these years saw him write Quickly for John Legend, Justin Bieber’s Bigger and Scared of Beautifulfor Brandy among many others under the pseudonym of Lonnie Breaux (a collection of more than 60 tracks of this music ended up online).

These songs were game-changing for Ocean, ultimately finding their way to the ears of producer Tricky Stewart who helped him sign a songwriting and artist contract with the legendary Def Jam label towards the end of 2009.

Some months later, Ocean came into contact with the left-field hip-hop collective Odd Future, including Tyler the Creator and Syd, at a live gig in the Valley near LA. It proved to be another turning point after he started to feel increasingly creatively neutered by his label.

Speaking to journalist Jeff Weiss in 2011, Ocean shared how Odd Future ignited a new fire within him.

“It’s refreshing for me to be in sessions with them. When I started working with them, it was the first time in a minute that I’d had fun in a session. If you f**k up on a take, someone’s clowning you on it, busting up at you. In normal settings, it’s not like that. It reminded me that this is supposed to be fun.”

His frustrations with Def Jam led to the unveiling of his mixtape, Nostalgia, Ultra, in February 2011 as an independent release.

The genre-splicing mix featured Ocean rapping over tracks by The Eagles and Coldplay, with the former seeing the rock band threatening legal action. But it also led to greater visibility too. Ocean was subsequently called up to work on two tracks from Jay-Z and Kanye West's Watch The Throne album.

Nostalgia, Ultra attracted a cult status which, less than two years later exploded even further following Ocean’s debut album release, Channel Orange. It was a record that changed his fortunes forever.

Praised by critics, the album, in the words of Rolling Stone,displayed a, “kind of radical openness that would come to define a generation of young people who, like him, discovered their true selves with the help of the internet”, it debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 and sold more than 130,000 plus units during its first week.

At the 2013 Grammy Awards, Channel Orange was nominated for Album of the Year and won Best Urban Contemporary Album. Not only was the musical approach otherworldly, the teaser track Pyramids was ambitiously audacious - a nine minute masterpiece moving between ambience to electronic funk, it also came days after Ocean published an open letter on Tumblr detailing his first love with a man. The record marked a cultural moment, not only for shaping the innovative sound of contemporary hip-hop and R&B but also widening how artists in these genres could identify.

The record’s production was steered by Ocean alongside the likes of Om’Mas Keith, Malay and Pharrell. After three months of writing, the record was captured in the order the songs appeared on the record at a number of Hollywood studios including EastWest on Sunset Boulevard.

In an interview with Complex, Malay described how Ocean’s perfectionism saw him spend nine months on his vocals. The majority of takes were recorded using vintage microphones including a Neumann U-47 and a Telefunken 251. If a live feel was required, then a Shure SM-58 was utilised.

Keith said: “Channel Orange is one of the most incredible f*cking albums ever, and I’m just humbled to no end to have had the opportunity to participate in something so powerful and impactful.”

The record was a huge global success and one that meant Ocean was catapulted into the limelight, becoming much more in demand. He also caused intense speculation about what his next moves might be by telling the Guardian that Channel Orange could be not just his first, but also his last record.

“Storytelling's a different thing,” he said of his passions. “Like I said, it's the more interesting part about making music for me, or making albums and songs and stuff. So much so that I might not make another album. I might just write a novel next. I don't know!”

So what happened next? After the release of his debut amid its huge success, Ocean did the unthinkable for an artist of his stature at this point in the 2010s - he retreated from view.

Disillusioned with his label Def Jam and locked into a two-album deal, Ocean spent four years musically silent. Without any hints or teasers, fans and music journalists could only speculate as to what he was up to before he showed his hand in a dramatic move once again in 2016.

The first hints of what Ocean had been up to arrived via his website, which unexpectedly presented a live stream of a warehouse space. This mysterious black-and-white video loop ran for 15 straight days, and showing Frank silently building a spiral staircase in a warehouse. On the 15th day, Ocean unveiled his visual album Endless on Apple Music. Then days later, Blonde landed in what was described as one of, “the most cryptic album rollouts in music history”.

Unbeknown to the wider world, the working relationship between Ocean and Def Jam had completely deteriorated, with industry insiders telling Billboard that their final days were akin to a toxic, broken marriage where all the artist wanted was total independence.

The release of Endless in 2016 was described as the final move in what has been called "a seven-year chess game" with Def Jam Records. Having successfully fulfilled his contractual obligations, Blonde was released on his own label, Boys Don’t Cry. As a result, industry analysts believe that in its first week, Blonde saw 275,000 album sales and made Ocean more than $1m.

While the pre-release build up was unorthodox, the music on Blonde veered between elusive illusions and soul-baring emotion. It’s a blend that made the record so alluring back then and why, some ten years later, an album that explores the transience of our lives has so powerfully endured.

The records shifting title spelling alternated between Blonde and sometimes Blond, and was perceived as being a spearing of identity/masculinity and Ocean’s experiences with both men and women, recording for the album took place throughout 2013 and 2016 initially at New York's Electric Lady Studios. Then after a period of writer's block, he moved to London to work at Abbey Road Studios and in Los Angeles' Henson Recording Studios.

The themes of the 17 tracks hark back to Ocean’s past life as a teenager, reflecting on his relationships, sexuality, drugs and heartbreak. Nike is the opening track of the record, and, rather than announce Ocean’s return with huge bombast, is an all together weirder and more unexpected tune.

A stark drum beat, high-pitched vocals and synths evoke the teenage uncertainty and ambiguity surrounding how he identifies. The lack of drums on the rest of the record means it’s also aesthetically unusual within the hip-hop world.

In an exclusive statement provided to NME, producer Mysko talked about some of the Abbey Road sessions working with Ocean.

“During my time working with Frank it felt to me like we had embarked on a journey to find another world,” he said. “The path he chose was anything but linear and we travelled down routes to the furthest extremities imaginable. No rules applied and dimensions were explored that ended up bearing no relation to the eventuality. Somehow, at the end of it all, it feels to me like the planet he found is much like our own, it feels familiar and is full of beauty but contains wonders never seen or experienced by anyone before.”

Blonde’s musical palette is deceptively simple yet still tricky to pin down. The sonic landscape is built from guitar and loops with melodic highs and effects sprinkled liberally throughout from tracks Ivy to White Ferrari. At times, its psychedelia is more reminiscent of the Beach Boys than Ocean’s hip-hop peers.

Producer Malay, who worked on a number of tracks including Ivy, Siegfried and Pretty Sweet, said that it’s Ocean’s vocals that make the whole coherent. Instead of a traditional musical artist, his is a more magpie-like approach, compiling fragments of recordings and loops before fusing them together.

In an interview with Reverb, he said, “If you were to mute and go through the instrumentals on all the Frank Ocean stuff, it's super eclectic - the music, a lot of it, it doesn't connect at all. You could really [listen and say] there's no way that this should be with this, but it's just the subject matter, the feel, the vocal…”

One of the most revealing pieces capturing the creative process behind Blonde came from the New York Times. When Blonde and Endless were in the process of being made, Ocean reportedly carried the hard drives with his music in his backpack, and the backups, too. After suffering blocks in New York, he moved to London. Here he removed the flat he stayed in of everything but the essentials. Ocean then did the same at Abbey Road too, decluttering to focus solely on the music.

Speaking to the newspaper, Ocean said: “I just wanted to be able to walk around and not run into an end table or some useless piece of furniture.”

Alongside the two albums, Ocean also released his Boys Don’t Cry fanzine where the influence of cars was shared. Memories tied to drives ranging from late-night journeys on LA freeways to mushroom trips inspired the album’s sense of unstoppable forward motion. Still, there are some ironies to be found in how the popularity of an album defined by transience has continued to grow. He depicted the influence of cars in its production via Tumblr.

He said: “I found it romantic, sometimes, editing this project. The whole time I felt as though I was in the presence of a $16m McLaren F1 armed with a disposable camera. My memories are in these pages, places close by and long ass-numbing flights away.”

Despite the veneration that only continues to grow for Blonde since it turned 10 earlier this summer, at the time, some reviews were less than complimentary claiming the record was half-finished.

The Guardian declared 2016’s two albums as a “double dose of hookless morass that Ocean finally heaved on to the world”. The Independent gave the record two stars out of five, proclaiming it to be “a trickling bubble bath of an album that ultimately runs lukewarm”. Much as in the way critics struggled to comprehend Radiohead’s Kid A when it was released in 2000, it has since been universally applauded.

In the decade that’s passed since Blonde, Ocean still hasn’t released a third record. Instead, he appears to have been more preoccupied with other creative ventures into fashion and photography. But the impact of the record lives on despite Ocean’s silence.

As United Masters said, “from Omar Apollo to Daniel Caesar to Mk.gee, Frank Ocean didn’t just make an album, he opened a door that a generation of artists walked through.”

The fact that there is so much speculation surrounding and love for Blonde underlines his impact. Now DIY recording processes, surprise releases, stepping back from the limelight are strategies adopted by many.

What Frank might do next in music is anyone’s guess, but we can be assured that it certainly won’t be boring.

It’s one of the biggest hit songs of the 1980s, but its story begins way back in the 1890s.

In the small rural community of Elmore City in Oklahoma, a ban on public dancing had been imposed in 1898 – in an effort to curb heavy drinking. The ban remained in place until 14 high school students decided that enough was enough and that they wanted a high school prom.

In 1980, they persuaded the school’s board to overturn the antiquated legislation, so that they could dance. And when an aspiring screenwriter and songwriter named Dean Pitchford chanced upon this story in a newspaper, he knew it had all the elements of a powerful musical drama.

The screenplay Pitchford wrote would become Footloose, a film that would become box office gold when it was released in 1984, making $80 million in ticket sales and turning its star Kevin Bacon into a household name.

But it was the title song, released five weeks before the film, that seared itself into the public consciousness and kickstarted interest in the film.

Co-written by Pitchford and Kenny Loggins, the song rocketed to No 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released on 11 January 1984. Over four decades on, it remains a quintessential ’80s classic.

When Dean Pitchford came up with the idea for Footloose he was working as a staff songwriter for Warner Brothers Publishing. Intrigued by the newspaper story, he visited Elmore City to interview high school students and their parents.

While Pitchford had never written a screenplay before, he had worked as an actor before moving into songwriting and had an abundance of talent and an impressively diverse skillset. In 1980, he and composer Michael Gore wrote three songs for the Alan Parker-directed film Fame, including the title song, for which they won an Oscar.

Pitchford’s working title for his new screenplay was Cheek To Cheek, but he decided to change it once he had attracted interest from some major film studios. In an interview with Songwriting magazine in 2012, Pitchford said he filled page after page of a yellow legal pad with ideas for a new title.

“When I went back over the list, I think I had four that I thought might be good ideas. But Footloose was by far my favourite,” he said.

One of the studios that was interested in his screenplay was 20th Century Fox. For a meeting with Craig Melnick and Dan Zadan, two producers at Fox, Pitchford typed up four hypothetical title pages and deliberately placed Footloose on the bottom of the stack.

He recalled: “I took them into a meeting with Craig and Dan and I said, ‘Here are some ideas for the title.’ They looked at number one, they went, ‘Okay, alright.’ And they flipped it over, and number two, and they flipped it over, and number three, ‘Okay’. And then they flipped over the last one, which was ‘Footloose by Dean Pitchford’, and they lit up like a Christmas tree.

“They felt what I felt, which was it was just such an interesting looking word and it didn’t mean anything but it did. And all those ‘o’s gave it a visual kind of punch. We all just went for it. It sort of sold itself.”

In the end, Paramount was the studio that acquired Footloose. Pitchford’s plan was to create the film around a nine-song soundtrack, and he had an ace up his sleeve when it came to the person to co-write the title track with him.

Pitchford was good friends with Kenny Loggins, a major star at the time after having written the song I’m Alright (1980) for the film Caddyshack. In 1982, Pitchford had co-written the song Don’t Fight it with Loggins and Steve Perry, the singer from Journey, recorded as a duet by the latter pair.

Pitchford realised that a commitment from Loggins would carry real weight when it came to Paramount moving the project forward. In an interview with US journalist Dan Rather in December 2018, Loggins recalled the moment that Pitchford approached him to ask for his help.

“My best friend, Dean Pitchford, had written a screenplay, and he said, ‘Would you read my screenplay and check it out?’. And I read it, and he says, ‘I need a couple songs for this’. And I said, ‘Well, it's not Gone With the Wind, but…’”

Loggins then went on to explain to Dan Rather just how common screenplays are in Hollywood.

“People don’t realise,” he said. “In Hollywood, the cab driver has a screenplay. It’s not unusual to have somebody hand you a screenplay and say, ‘Would you write a song for it?’ But Dean was a friend of mine, so I did. So a favour to a friend becomes a favour to me. A year later, this is the biggest movie of the summer.”

With Loggins on board, Pitchford started to arrange a writing session. Creating a title song was the priority. But Loggins had tour commitments. When he fell off stage at one show and had to take time off to recover from his injuries, the project looked under threat.

There was only one possible opportunity for them to get together to write – at Lake Tahoe, Loggins’ last US show before the Asia leg of his tour.

“Paramount was chomping at the bit,” Pitchford told Songwriter magazine. “They wanted to know that Kenny Loggins was going to be doing the title song, and if he wasn’t then we had to move on and get somebody else. So it became absolutely vital that as soon as Kenny was back on his feet, I had to go and seal the deal.”

Pitchford flew to Lake Tahoe despite having a bad case of strep throat and a high fever, which he reportedly attempted to conceal from Loggins when they sat down to write in Pitchford’s hotel room.

“I think it was two or three days we kept up this charade with him showing up on his painkillers and me on my painkillers, and us getting the gist of the song,” Pitchford told Songwriter magazine. “We wrote the verses and the chorus melodies, we wrote the first verse, and we knew what we were going to do for the chorus.”

When Loggins left for his tour of Asia, Pitchford wrote the rest of the lyrics, except for the bridge. They finished the song when Pitchford visited the returning Loggins at his home in Los Angeles.

With a running time of just 2:55 in its single format, Footloose is an impressively lean and punchy track. It’s a pacy slice of high energy pop-rock, fuelled by feelgood vibes and a sense of joyous freedom.

The song boasts a big sound, with hefty thwacks of snare, jagged synths, punchy compressed bass and stabs of overdriven guitar. It kicks off with a thumping 4/4 beat, which hurtles along at 174 bpm.

In an interview with the YouTube channel The Professor of Rock, Loggins noted that the groove on the song was based on David Bowie’s song Modern Love.

He said that he got the idea for the chorus melody from the 1966 song Devil With A Blue Dress On by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.

Loggins also highlighted how Nathan East’s bassline in the song shared a similarity with a Little Richard classic. “Basically, he took Lucille out to the next level,” Loggins said.

There are other nods to ’50s rock ’n’ roll, such as the deep Duane Eddy-style bottom E twang that kicks in ten seconds into the song.

Loggins’ vocal on the song is gritty and powerful but it has a nice lilting cadence to it. His phrasing is impressive and he sits right in the groove with a tight, rhythmic delivery.

Structurally, the song is straightforward and mirrors the pent-up frustrations of the film’s central character Ren McCormack (Kevin Bacon), a native of Chicago who moves with his mother to a small town in Utah, where he attempts to overturn a ban on dancing enforced by a local minister (John Lithgow).

There are nifty compositional elements throughout the song, such as the second half of the pre-chorus, which builds with an ascending bassline before the stop, when the whole track shifts into the chorus.

At 2:20, guitar, bass and keys drop out, leaving drums, percussion and chants, with each instrument then gradually reentering the mix as it builds towards the climactic stop at 2:55 as Loggins unleashes the final line “Everybody, cut footloose!”

Footloose was released on 11 January 1984, five weeks before the film was released. But the official video, directed by Brian Grant, featured a montage of clips from the film and fuelled anticipation for the movie launch.

In his 2018 interview with journalist Dan Rather, Kenny Loggins highlighted the parallel promotional power of the song and the film.

“The movie thing is an interesting synergy because the movie lifts the song, the song lifts the movie, and back then that hadn’t been done,” said Loggins. “Pop music and movies were not necessarily symbiotic, and all of a sudden it was working. And MTV was a new thing, and MTV was playing the videos from the movies, and it was killing all the other videos.”

Footloose shot to No 1 in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Peru, Colombia and South Africa and reached No 6 in the UK Singles Chart. After his success with the film Caddyshack, Footloose bolstered Loggins’s growing reputation as the ‘King of the Movie Soundtrack’.

Dean Pitchford would go on to co-write all nine songs of the colossally successful Footloose soundtrack, which included other massive hits such as Let’s Hear It For The Boy by Deniece Williams and Holding Out For A Hero by Bonnie Tyler. Loggins also contributed another track, I’m Free (Heaven Helps The Man), which peaked at No 22 in the US Billboard Hot 100.

When Loggins co-wrote Footloose with Pitchford, he had no idea how prominent the song was going to be in the film. It first appears in the striking opening scene, which features a succession of people’s feet, moving to the beat.

In an interview with The Professor of Rock YouTube channel, Loggins spoke about watching the film for the first time.

“We wrote Footloose for that scene in the middle of the movie, where they go out of town and the first time they go dancing,” said Loggins. “And so when I went to the premiere of the movie and it opens with the shoes dancing and the song comes on, I turned to my wife and said, ‘Holy shit, this is a home run!’ It was so good.”

RECORDING WEEK 2026: While many have debated who the real ‘fifth Beatle’ truly was, in our mind there’s simply no contest. It’s quite obviously the late, great George Martin who deserves that honorary mop-top.

He’s the man who unlocked the Beatles’ creative ambitions and enabled them to evolve from pop sensation to music’s most pioneering figures, Martin was part-producer and part close confidante to four men who changed the way we think about music itself.

Although George Martin sadly passed away in 2016, George’s son, Giles Martin has inherited his father’s flair for manning a console, becoming a key figure in how the Beatles' recording canon is handled today, producing, remixing and supervising all major releases by the brand.

From Get Back to the recent Anthology re-release, to the upcoming Rubber Soul remix, Giles has overseen it all. He's, quite simply, the man entrusted with the keys to music’s most celebrated legacy

But Giles’ studio career extends beyond just taking on his father’s mantle, he has been involved in a wide array of projects including the remixing of The Rolling Stones’ Goats Head Soup and, notably, the incredibly fascinating Dolby Atmos mix of The Beach Boys' timeless Pet Sounds, released in 2023.

It was at that point that this writer was able to spend some one-on-one time with Giles, talking in-depth about why expanding Pet Sounds into Atmos was tantamount to genuine musical archaeology – but required some delicate, respectful hands…

“The fact of the matter is that mono can be immersive too – Sgt Pepper and Pet Sounds came out in mono, and people fell into them,” Giles said. “You have to mix to the source. It’s the equivalent of restoring paintings, brightening up an old Dutch master’s work and making it bright. So it’s always a challenge. I was deeply honoured that they asked me to do it.

“There had to be a lot of audio restoration. There were elements missing. So we used a combination of the original master tracks and newly-sourced mix elements,” Giles explained. “There were a couple of vocal things that had to be taken off the mono. Generally speaking, we had about eight tracks to play with. A lot of the instrumentation was on three different tracks, locked-in together.”

With the project on his desk, Giles settled on quite a daunting starting point; “You have to start somewhere, and I thought I’d start with God Only Knows, because it’s such an amazing song. It’s one of the greatest songs ever written. That can be challenging in itself. Then we went through the rest of the album in track order from then on. Then you go back and revise and revise and revise.”

Beyond the discussion of the complex process of converting this hallowed record into an immersive Atmos sphere, Giles talked about the vast creativity and singular vision of Brian Wilson - who sadly passed away last year - and also shared his father’s perspective on Wilson's exceptional talent.

“I was with my dad on a plane once, and I just suddenly realised how awesome he was. I said to him ‘Dad, what you did with The Beatles was kind of amazing, wasn’t it?’ and he looked at me and said: ‘not as amazing as Brian Wilson’. He explained to me that The Beatles always had him, and he had The Beatles. But Brian Wilson didn’t have anyone, and he went and made this record. Without this record, The Beatles wouldn’t have made Sgt Pepper.”

Giles also explained to us why Pet Sounds continues to be revered all these years on; “Forget sampling, this was real innovation.” Giles gushed, “Pet Sounds is an organic record, and you kind of want it to be real, you want to be closer to them in a way, you want to fall into the record. It’s almost like a classical record, it’s so intricate and so beautiful.”

Read our full interview with Giles Martin on how he brought Pet Sounds into the Atmos domain here

Josh Scott of JHS Pedals is selling a quote/unquote truckload of gear on Reverb, including unicorn-rare one-of-one pedals – plus some that are so rare they have become the stuff of legend.

The ‘Josh Scott Collection’ Official Reverb Shop opens on Wednesday, October 21, and not a moment too soon by the sound of it. “I’m about to sell a crap ton of really cool stuff that I need to sell because it’s all just crashing down on me and ruining my life,” says Scott.

We’re not exaggerating when we say a truckload of gear.

“It’s a truckload of things, literally,” says Scott. “A freight truck arrived and took pallets of gear for this Reverb shop.”

So, what went on the truck? Firstly, it’s not all guitar effects pedals – though there are hundreds of them, including a number of custom-wrapped and hand-painted JHS Pedals, of which there are only one of each in the world. “They’re rare. They’re so rare, they’ve never existed,” says Scott.

One of the coolest items we’ve seen previewed is a vintage Silvertone 1484 Twin Twelve, the 6L6-loaded piggyback 60-watter and its 2x12 cabinet. This ol’ tube amp inspired the JHS Twin Twelve.

There is also that 1990s Sovtek tube amp head that you might recognise from watching the JHS Show on YouTube (though it might not be the exact one). There’s a Satellite amp there, too, and, as per the picture of the Silvertone, some of these come in JHS-stencilled flight cases.

A lot of these items are steeped in JHS Pedals lore. There is all kinds of ephemera – including props from the show, JHS merch, jackets, T-shirts… There’s an original Barcus-Berry preamp that inspired the JHS Fumble.

If we are talking rare and hallowed pedals then you might be relieved to know that that there is an original Klon Centaur with a silver enclosure, and one of the original cheapo Behringer klones from before the Bill Finnegan lawsuit and the German company’s subsequent rebranding of the pedal.

There’s also a grey spare enclosure of the JHS Colour Box. Scott might be real glad to be rid of this.

“This is one of the ones from that NAMM Show where everyone first saw them and then for 10 years they told me they hated the white enclosure because I had already shown them the possibility of a grey enclosure,” he says Scott. “This is one of the craziest items in JHS history and somebody’s going to own it.”

There are 10 guitars, some keyboards, a Rhodes, a Yamaha organ, a Wurlitzer and, just in time for Halloween, there are some stompbox costumes from the set of Pedals: The Musical and Pedals on Ice.

Just imagine how much candy you will get when you go trick-or-treating dressed as a Tube Screamer.

A lot of this stuff will be affordable, too, with pedals priced from $60 to $600. More than half of the items will be listed under $500. Scott might be a pedal designer, an author, a YouTuber, too, but he’s also a retailer too. And he’s bullish this collection is going to eclipse all the bands who have listed their gear on Reverb.

“My one goal with this Reverb shop, beyond selling the gear, is to one-up every band that has ever sold on Reverb. Spoon, I’m looking at you. Modest Mouse, Seal, you, too. Green Day, I’m going to annihilate your shop,” says Scott.

He is joking. But he might not be wrong. There’s a truck’s worth of this stuff and you can check it out at Reverb.

Led Zeppelin have done something they have never done before. They have actually allowed the use of Stairway to Heaven in a film.

Famously, the group have always refused to license one of their most famous songs in cinema. Cameron Crowe had to cut a sequence from 2000’s Almost Famous which showed the characters attempting to convince William’s mother to allow him to go on the road with the band Stillwater by listening to Stairway to Heaven.

The group’s policy has become so well-known that it was referenced in Wayne’s World. When Wayne walks into a guitar shop and attempts to play the song, he is directed to a sign on the wall that reads in no uncertain terms: ‘NO Stairway To Heaven’.

However, now, some 55 years after it was first released, Zeppelin are finally loosening their grip on the track. They have allowed Greta Gerwig to use a section in the trailer for the upcoming CS Lewis adaptation Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew. During the three-minute-long snippet, you can hear Jimmy Page’s famous guitar intro, the bridge and Robert Plant’s outro line.

So why this film and why now? Well, it’s known that Robert Plant is a devotee of CS Lewis and Tolkien – his lyrics in both Zep and on his solo albums have referenced both authors’ works. Speaking to Rolling Stone about the trailer, Gerwig suggested that Plant and Page “saw the heart and the story and the drama in it.”

“It’s an epic song,” she said of Stairway. “It’s about the two paths of good and evil … It is a spiritual quest and a spiritual journey. So to me, this was a song that made sense to introduce the film to the world.”

Of course, the track has turned up in cinemas before, in 1976 in Zep’s The Song Remains the Same concert film/documentary. And some of their other more famous songs have been licensed to other films – Immigrant Song in both School of Rock and Thor: Ragnarok and That’s the Way in Almost Famous.

As for Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, you’ll have to wait a wee while to actually see it in the cinemas – it isn’t released until 12 February next year.

What is it?

The Darkglass Anagram first appeared last year and has been a big hit with bass players. The amp modeller, which sports a powerful six-core DSP, is a plug-in-compatible platform open to third parties and designed to evolve over time.

It ships packed with onboard amps and effects, has access to the Anagram Marketplace where there are more models for free download or purchase, and also supports Neural Amp Modeler (NAM) captures and IRs.

While Darkglass has been a company whose products are primarily aimed at bass players, the brand is branching out into guitar territory by getting together with UK retailer Andertons, and Sweetwater in the US, to create this Limited Edition pedal that’s loaded with the Guitar Essentials plugin pack.

This pack will be made available on Marketplace for any Anagram user to purchase, but only when these black Limited Edition units have sold out. So how does Darkglass's foray into the guitar market

Specs

• PRICE: $1,219 | £999 | €1,229
• ORIGIN: Finland
• TYPE: Multi-effects processor and digital modelling platform
• FEATURES: 126 presets, audio interface capability, soft-shell case, looper, tuner, tap tempo, support for NAM, IR loading
• CONTROLS: 6x encoders, 3x footswitches
• CONNECTIONS: Standard instrument input, XLR outputs 1/L & 2/R, standard outputs 3/L & 4/R, standard Send (Insert), Standard Return (exp), 1/8” stereo headphone output, MIDI In, MIDI Out, USB
• POWER: 9-12V power adaptor, 1700mA minimum (9V, 2000mA adaptor supplied)
• DIMENSIONS: 209 (w) x 103 (d) x 62mm (h) 
• CONTACT: Darkglass Electronics

Usability and sounds

At roughly the width of three Boss Compact pedals plugged in side by side, the Anagram is nicely compact whether you choose to use it as a desktop unit or on a pedalboard with other pedals.

While it will run from a nine-volt supply, it does require a minimum current of about 1.7A minimum, so you’d be more likely to add the supplied adaptor to your ’board than run it from your existing power supply, although a CIOKS DC7 with the added CRUX expander would do the job. Alternatively, it can be powered via a USB power supply that supports Power Delivery (PD) as long as that delivers at least 18 watts.

Connectivity is provided for a host of different scenarios with mono or stereo outputs available on both XLRs and standard jacks. To use the unit for silent practice or to take advantage of its USB audio interface capabilities, there’s a mini-jack headphone output, while for inserting external gear into the signal chain there is a pair of sockets with dual capabilities.

These can be used as a stereo send and return, or you can just use the Send socket as an insert point for a mono send and return. The return socket doubles as an expression pedal input, and while you could obviously not use this at the same time as a stereo S&R, alternatively there is MIDI capability for parameter control.

The Anagram has 126 user-programmable presets in 42 banks of three and each preset can be built from up to 24 blocks with various options for serial and parallel signal paths. The workflow to set it all up is intuitive, aided by the user interface being uncomplicated with just a bright seven-inch touchscreen and six encoders for quick tweaks of the associated parameters below them on the screen.

There’s no dedicated software editor as yet (it’s apparently in the pipeline), but you can connect to the computer-based Darkglass Suite for organising your preset banks, checking for firmware upgrades, accessing Marketplace and loading in any NAM captures or IRs.

This limited-edition Anagram workstation comes with a default setting (which can be changed if desired) to hide its original bass-centric models from these menus.

But those that also apply to guitar are present so you actually get eight overdrive and distortion blocks to choose from, with the likes of Rat and Big Muff emulations joining the Guitar Essentials trio of Tube Screamer, Klon and Bluesbreaker.

The description of Guitar Essentials is pretty much true when it comes to the amps. There may only be 12 of them, but all the primary colours of amp sound are represented with Fender Twin and Deluxe, Marshall JMP and JCM800, Vox AC30 (in the form of a couple of Matchless models), HiWatt 103, Peavey 5150, plus other high-gain and boutique favourites.

These are all a pleasure to play through with all the nuanced response you’d want alongside quality sonics. Each of the amps has a cab sim switch, meaning you can choose its matched cabinet, but you also have separate cabinets with mic’ing options.

Further to those 12 amps, the unit supports the very latest NAM Architecture 2 (A2) and is able to run three simultaneous instances of A2 Full. A visit to the Tone3000 website will give you access to loads more amps for free.

Verdict

Verdict: ★★★★½

Of the effects, there is everything necessary to build a complete signal chain with plenty of options for compression, EQ and more. All of the standard modulation types are here, as well as three octavers, plus a couple of pitch shifters, one of which is based on the whammy and requires an expression pedal.

Three basic types of delay – Digital, Analog and Modulated – are available, and while these can cover a wide range of use scenarios, they are mono-only, which is disappointing because all the reverbs have mono or stereo options and you get five types: Room, Plate, Hall, Spring and Shimmer. A looper completes the feature set.

While there’s no shortage of digital processors out there – and the provided Guitar Essentials pack provides less range initially than some rivals – the Anagram is suitably endowed to compete at the highest level.

MusicRadar verdict: I have no doubt that it has the attributes to take care of recording tasks, slot into live performance either as a complete rig or as an integral component of your pedalboard, and be an inspirational tool for home practice. the Anagram’s open-platform nature, and particularly its NAM support, means that this is one that will only get better over time.

Hands-on videos

Darkglass Electronics

Leon Todd

The Studio Rats

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• This article first appeared in Guitarist. Subscribe and save

• “A versatile overdrive and a high-quality octaver – two pedalboard mainstays in one box”: Darkglass Electronics Kaamos review

Never has there been a better time to be an in-the-box producer than 2026. Modern processors are lightning-fast, DAWs are more powerful than they’ve ever been, and the sheer breadth and variety of soft synths, virtual instruments and audio effects on the market is something to behold.

We can’t go a few hours without a new plugin popping up in our inbox, and with the recent surge in AI-based vibe coding tools making software development more accessible than ever, the floodgates have well and truly opened.

That’s all well and good, but faced with this deluge of digital audio tools, it’s hard to figure out which plugins have the potential to supercharge your creativity, and which simply aren’t worth the megabytes.

That’s where we come in. Each week, we comb through the latest plugins to single out the instruments and effects that you need to know about. Below, we've singled out five new releases that deserve a place in your plugin folder.

1. Phase Fiasco Kazu

Formats: VST3, AU | Platforms: macOS, Windows, Linux | Price: $29 | Find out more

We were already big fans of Phase Fiasco’s Tape Fiasco – a super-glitchy, idiosyncratic multi-effects processor that’s without a doubt one of the best free plugins we’ve covered this year – so were excited to learn that its creator announced had cooked up something even more ambitious: Kazu.

Kazu takes the concept behind Tape Fiasco – glitchy multi-effects with modulation, sequencing and performance capabilities – and turns it all the way up to 11, delivering an immensely creative sound design tool that’s also remarkably good value at only $29.

Kazu is equipped with 57 effects across eight categories, its collection spanning stutter, granular and modulation effects, time-stretching, pitch-shifting, and vocoding, and multiple styles of filter, distortion, delay, reverb and compression. You also get some more unconventional options, including several spectral effects and a Speak & Spell-esque voice-changer. (As if that wasn’t enough, there’s also a major update coming soon bringing 13 new effects.)

These alone would be worth the price of admission, but this smorgasbord of sound-manglers is joined by a deep, flexible modulation and sequencing system that brings those effects to life, alongside generative and randomization options that mean your next happy accident is only a click away. It looks the part, too, its cyberpunk glitch-art aesthetic and ASCII-style macro-linked XY performance pad looking straight out of Blade Runner 2049.

Dollar for dollar, this is the best value in a plugin we’ve seen in a long time. If you buy one piece of music software this month, make it this one.

2. UAD Empirical Labs FATSO Tape Simulator

Formats: VST3, AU, AAX | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $79 | Find out more

If there’s one style of plugin we can’t get enough of, it’s a tape emulator. Whether they’re mimicking the charmingly nostalgic lo-fi sound of a Tascam four-track or the toasty analogue polish of a Studer A800, tape emulation tools can do all sorts of subtle but special things to digital audio. They're a cheap and cheerful way to bring a bit of ‘oomph’ to sterile soft synths, feeble drum loops or even an entire mix, and they’re a damn sight easier than working with the real thing.

It must be our lucky day, as the folks over at Universal Audio have added another tape emulator to their ever-expanding stable of native plugins, making the Empirical Labs FATSO Tape Simulator (originally released in 2009) available for those that don’t own UA hardware.

Technically, FATSO isn’t a tape emulation plugin – it’s an emulation of an emulation, recreating Empirical Labs’ venerable Full Analogue Tape Simulator and Optimiser (FATSO) in software. Squeezing saturation, distortion and compression into a single piece of hardware, FATSO is a one-stop shop for reproducing the character, warmth and glue associated with magnetic tape, valve preamps, vintage transformers and analogue compressors.

Developed in partnership with Empirical Labs’ Dave Derr, UA’s software version arrives in two plugins, FATSO Jr and FATSO Sr. The former faithfully reproduces the controls of the original hardware and its ear-pleasing analogue-style saturation, while the latter adds more options, including variable transformer saturation, sidechain filtering, and extra compressor parameters.

3. Song Athletics Song Keys

Formats: VST3, AU | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: £29 | Find out more

Launched in 2023, Song Athletics is an audio brand headed up by Will Evans, former CEO of Spitfire Audio. The company has since made its mark with a series of top-quality sample packs and virtual instruments, some of them given away for free.

The latest plugin from Song Athletics promises to put all of your essential keys in a single go-to VST, bringing together eight meticulously multi-sampled bread-and-butter tones under one roof.

You get two acoustic pianos, a Bösendorfer 225 grand and an Eavestaff Pianett upright, and a single electric piano, a Rhodes MKI Stage 73. These are joined by two analogue synths: the much-loved Roland SH-101 and the legendary Juno-106, which has been used to record two characterful pads and a bright, punchy lead sound. There are a handful of built-in effects onboard too.

Perfect for those days that you simply cannot be bothered to dig through the 41,000-strong Omnisphere 3 library for two hours hunting for the right preset, Song Keys serves up a curated set of reliable and familiar sounds for keyboard players that want to stop scrolling and start playing.

4. Emergence Audio Envoy

Formats: Kontakt 8.1+ | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $149 | Find out more

If you’re an in-the-box beatmaker that’s curious about experimenting with analogue drum machines but the likes of Hexdrums and Analog Rytm are out of your price range, then Emergence Audio might have the next best thing.

Envoy is a Kontakt instrument built on a vast library of 600 percussion sources made using analogue percussion synthesizers and Eurorack, with ten round robins per source and 273 presets. These aren’t your bog-standard kicks, snares and hi-hats, however: Envoy’s library is made up of abstract, textural and cinematic sounds suited for use in film and television scoring, ambient and experimental electronic music.

Just as important as Envoy’s sounds is the way that the instrument lets you sequence and manipulate them.

Designed from the ground up to produce rhythmic patterns animated by movement, instability and variation, Envoy is equipped with two independent sequencers that can run together or at different rates, each one containing up to 32 steps with per-step velocity, pitch, length, pan, and filtering. Switch on Envoy’s Flux Randomizer, and probabilistic randomization will be applied to these parameters to create evolving, unpredictable sequences that can be tweaked even further using its seven effects modules.

5. Cableguys TimeStop

Formats: VST/AU/AAX | Platforms: macOS, Windows | Price: $16 | Find out more

Cableguys is on a mission to take time-tested production tricks – sidechain compression, for example – and make them fast, fun and easy to achieve. The company’s latest plugin, TimeStop, does exactly that with the classic tape-stop effect. Often used as a transition between sections or as an outro, the tape-stop mimics the sound of a tape or vinyl record rapidly slowing down by decreasing both pitch and tempo simultaneously.

There are a handful of ways to add a tape-stop to your track: you can achieve it in Ableton Live using only stock plugins by bouncing the relevant portion of a track to audio, dropping it in an instance of Sampler and automating the pitch bend. Though it's not exactly a time-consuming process, it’s admittedly a bit of a faff.

TapeStop streamlines this process by sitting on the original track and slowing down incoming audio via its central Pitch knob. To get the tape-stop effect, just load up an instance of the plugin, record or automate a well-timed knob-twist, and voila. There’s also a handy stop button with adjustable timing, and two additional tape-stop modes: Modern drops the pitch without slowing down the timing, and Loop adds in a stutter effect for DJ-style fills and transitions.

RECORDING WEEK 2026: Jack Antonoff thinks pop music is a paradox. “The irony of pop music is that it's this field that's so rigid, but the only stuff that's successful is the stuff that’s out on the other side of it,” he tells us. “If you write something that you think is a perfect pop song, that fits perfectly into everything, it’s probably boring as fuck. The perfect pop song is by definition the imperfect pop song.”

We’re inclined to agree, because if anyone knows a few things about how to write a chart-toppingly, world-shakingly good pop song, it’s probably Jack Antonoff.

Awarded the Grammy for Producer of the Year for three consecutive years, Antonoff has worked on some of the past decade’s biggest albums; collaborations with Lorde, Pink, St. Vincent and Florence and the Machine all come to mind, and that’s before we’ve even mentioned a screamingly successful year that’s seen him take the helm for The 1975’s Being Funny in a Foreign Language and Lana Del Rey’s Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd.

Are we forgetting something? Oh, yes: Taylor Swift. Since forging a longstanding creative partnership with Swift - by all accounts the world’s most popular artist - in 2013, Antonoff has co-produced and co-written on every one of her studio albums.

Alongside all of this, Antonoff has indefatigably maintained a career as a solo artist, writing, recording and touring anthemic, Springsteenian synth-pop under the alias Bleachers.

With a schedule this packed, it was surprising that Antonoff found the time to sit down with MusicRadar a couple of years back, but that's exactly what he did a little after the release of Swift's album Midnights – a stylistic left-turn that found Swift trading in Folklore’s sensitive, finger-picked guitars for a moody, dark-hued palette of vintage synthesizers, shattering streaming records in the process.

In our interview, which we republish here to mark MusicRadar's Recording Week 2026, he talks us through his deep love of vintage gear, the synths behind Midnights, and why he can’t stop scrolling through Reverb at 4AM.

MusicRadar: Let’s talk about your relationship with gear. For some producers the equipment is just a means to an end, but others love to geek out over technology. Which side are you on?

Jack Antonoff: “I'm completely out of the box with gear. I've never used a MIDI instrument in my life. I'm always pushing myself by using different things, and what's nice about analogue gear is everything is a completely new journey.

“I've been obsessed with Binsons. The Binson Echorec and the Baby Binson and the Binson Reverb, which was a really weird thing. Then I got into this thing of chaining Binsons together, and chaining Binsons into Copicats and then fucking with the tape. I go through these phases because I'm always pushing myself to a new place. When I started messing with the Copicat - that was a phase that I'm now kind of out of, because I'm always trying to use different things - I got really into manipulating the tape by hand.

“You're talking about really old tape machines that have tons of personality. In the same way, every Juno sounds totally different. Every Moog Model D has a life of its own. I'm really now into Opamp consoles and messing with a lot of that stuff. Everything is so sonically specific when it comes to vintage gear, that to make an album and not start - if you have the means to - with a new palette is such a miss, because you should be pushing yourself into a different place through the gear you’re using.”

MR: You’re clearly deep into your vintage gear, but are there any modern bits of kit that you’re a huge fan of?

JA: “I like modern stuff. There's a lot of great modern things, but I think that it takes a long time for something to develop a personality. It's the same with guitars - I think there's amazing modern guitars being made, but very often the feeling of something after it's been around for some amount of time has a different layer to it. It’s the same with microphones and preamps and consoles. I've noticed that the kind of music that I imagine in my head gravitates towards the mystery that comes out of things that are a bit more unwieldy.

“It’s an opportunity to continuously expand your sound and to try things that shock you and excite you. When you have a new piece of gear - especially when it's something that's been around, and has a lot of life in it already, and is filled with ghosts - and you plug it in, you physically can't make the sounds you've been making. You're in the desert, you're in a new frontier, and you just have to find your personality within it. I find that vintage gear pushes you very hard.”

MR: What was the last thing you picked up that excited you?

JA: “The last purchase that excited me… I mean, I buy so much crazy shit. [laughs] But there’s this old Opamps console that’s pretty remarkable.”

MR: How did you come across that?

JA: “The death of me will be that Reverb app. They're not paying me to say that, but Reverb and Vintage King and Soundgas and all those places… You know, at four in the morning when I can't sleep, I'm just looking for things and then dreaming about what I could do with them. Some people buy watches, some people buy cars, I buy gear. Since I was a kid, anytime I had a little bit of money, I would buy gear.”

MR: You’ve spoken before about working with sounds that are tied to a specific time period, but trying to bring them into a contemporary context. Could you tell us more about that?

JA: “I think the most modern thing you can do is use things that have been around for a while in new ways. If you think about the guitar, or the piano or, or the drum set, or the bass guitar, there's not a million versions of these things. It's all about how you use them. When someone picks up a guitar, and they play it a certain way, it feels like a million years in the future, because you’ve never heard it before, but it's the same instrument.

“I see a lot of vintage gear that way, too. If you think about how many instruments Moog actually made, there aren’t many models. If you think about what you can do with the Space Echo or the Chorus Echo or the Copicat - there’s not a million versions of these things. Sometimes, when it comes to soft synths, the ability to make so many sounds has an inertia within that. You can freeze a little bit.

“What I love about older, analogue instruments is that you truly can't duplicate the sound. Every time you turn it on, it’s on. The electricity, the fucking weather, all these things are changing the feeling of it. So it's nice to know when you're in the studio that you're creating something that can only happen right there. Because at the end of the day, I don't want to be able to duplicate things, I want to catch moments. I think vintage gear is very helpful for that.”

MR: You work across a number of varied projects with a lot of different artists. Are there any instruments or bits of gear you find yourself using on almost everything?

JA: “No, because it’s always about doing things I haven’t done before. That's why I spend so much time at night looking at gear on Reverb, because anything I get, I’ll use. So if I can find some old German tape machine, then I'll use that. It’s very important to stay in the wilderness with gear. Even if it's different versions, like you're at a different studio, and someone has their Prophet and it just feels different. Everything just sounds so different. It's the same deal with microphones. That's why it's so exciting to mess with vintage microphones, because no two are alike.”

MR: Tell us about how you approach vocal recording. Do you have a typical approach that you use across multiple projects or is it completely different every time?

JA: “It’s different for everyone. It's based on the context of what's happening. For someone like Lana del Rey, there's a very specific vocal treatment that we carried through her entire recent album. Whereas for other people, there could be different treatments for different songs.

“Lana’s a good example of someone who when I record her, we're just grabbing that moment. It has to be documented from that moment. We don't do overdubs, we don't come in a month later and do more vocals, because it's happening there. So the vocal tone needs to reflect that. The vocal tone has to have a level of the room within it. Not a room mic, but even just in terms of how we're compressing, or where we're placing her, there has to be enough feeling of the space.

“There’s two things that I always think about. The first thing is, what haven't I used yet? That’s the place I want to go. The second thing is marrying that with what the sentiment is. I think about that with effects. I've talked about this a lot, but the song has to dictate it. If the person is meant to be whispering in your ear, you don't want to feel the room - maybe you want to get your reverb from a small box, or maybe I'll get my reverb from a Space Echo instead of a big room. The most important thing is documenting the space that you're making something.”

MR: Are you still working primarily from your home studio in Brooklyn?

JA: “It’s a combination. I like being at home, but I'm at Electric Lady a lot. I'm wherever I am. I'm as happy working on my headphones somewhere as I am in the biggest, best studio. There’s so many beautiful qualities to both. When I'm alone and I'm in a small space, whether it's my studio or laptop, it feels like you're trying to find the idea of a big thing, but not a big thing. You want it to feel like what's happening. But when you're in a big studio, then you want to run around and use all the space. The same way you want to be true to the song, you want to be true to the sentiment and the artist, I feel like if you make something that feels like where you made it, you often recognize it in a very special way.”

MR: You’ve talked before about doing things in a certain way that people have told you that you’re not technically ‘supposed’ to do. Could you tell us about a time that you’ve done the ‘wrong’ thing in the studio and come out with something great?

JA: “Oh, constantly. Those are my favourite moments. Sometimes if I'm using a tape machine or some echo or outboard reverb and before it's levelled out, when it’s exploding the board, that's often the coolest part. Or when we're bouncing things to tape and you're levelling it out, and you're finding that zone when it's coming in and out of the crunch.

“Laura Sisk and I, who engineers with me, we just record everything, because stumbling around the sound is often the most interesting sound. Everyone knows what something sounds like, not everyone knows what something sounds like before you know what it sounds like. Tape is the most fun to play with, because you're really not supposed to touch tape - it's not good for the machines. But if you start physically manipulating tape, really destructive but beautiful things happen.”

MR: When it comes to sound design, are you someone that builds patches from the ground up or are you more of a preset-tweaker?

JA: “I have no presets. I’ve played synths long enough to know how to dial in the sounds I want. I know what to do, but I like the fact that it's new every time. Even if you have presets on a vintage synth, it's still new every time. That's one thing I love when we play live with Bleachers, we have Juno-106s on stage, and nothing ever comes out the same. Those things are just strange. Their mood is so interesting.

“One thing that I like about not having a preset is often if I’m just recording and I'm dialling in the sound as I'm going, the moments of dialling in a sound can become really interesting transitional pieces. If I’m dialling in a sound, it'll inherently sound like a question mark, and that's an interesting thing. So you can just go through the recording and grab those moments. For me, it's transitional bits: my rev up into a chorus or the panning sound that takes me into the next part, that could be a moment when I was searching for a sound and something happened that was interesting.

“The funny thing about that is that it's esoteric but it's universal. When you're in a room and someone's messing with a synth, something happens and the whole room will go ‘whoa, what was that?’ There are certain sonic moments that just play with our brains in a way that excites people of a similar kind. That’s all you're really trying to do. Making music for everyone is an absurd concept. The only thing I think about when I'm in the studio is making things that make me feel a certain way. Then anyone who feels that too, then they're kind of like my pen pal or my friend. That’s just what it is.

“I know enough people who think Aphex Twin is God, but other people can't hear it. Some people listen to Throbbing Gristle and want to tear their hair out, other people think it's sent from God. It has to be just what you feel. That’s what's so amazing about an analogue synth. You can learn it - ‘okay, I'm on a Moog, here's how I get my West Coast sound, here's how I get grime, here's how I mess with the modulation and the oscillators’ - you can learn everything, but at the end of the day, you're turning knobs until you hear your own personality. That’s really special. It makes the machine so human.”

MR: Synths were all over Taylor Swift’s Midnights. Which instruments featured prominently on that album?

JA: “Oh, I went nuts on that shit, man. The funny thing about Midnights is, as synthetic as it is, it's actually very analogue. So much was going into tape. I was really into the Oberheim OB-8, which I had never used on another album, so I got really crazy about that. We were getting a lot from Yamaha DX7s, which I hadn't used before really on anything. I was using the Solina in a lot of places, which I never use in other records. That album was just wanting to push into a different place with synths.

“There’s no Prophet on there, because I had used Prophet on a lot of other stuff, so I kind of just put that one away. Getting a lot of low end from the DX7, which I'd never done before. I was using patches on the DX7 that I thought were really rich, but then adding my low end afterwards, trying to find low end in odd ways. A lot of really grimy sounds I was dialling in on the OB-8 and then treating them after the fact.

“I was just trying to play with the boundaries of things I hadn't done before. So what happens if all my delays are coming from tape, and all my choruses are coming from outboard gear, and I’m just running everything through as much analogue outboard as possible to make it so incredibly rich? When I listen back to that album, I have these memories of putting myself into those places. But really, for me, the OB-8 was the star of that album, which I hadn't really delved into before.”

MR: The vocal processing on Midnight Rain and Question…? was a real standout moment in terms of production. What were you using there?

JA: “A combination of things. I was mostly using Soundtoys or iZotope VocalSynth to get those, but then what made them really cool was to process the vocals with plugins, find a really cool space, bounce it together and then take it elsewhere. So a lot of the weird modulation on some of that stuff, I'm actually getting by messing with the tape on the Copicat. We would go through some crazy processing on that where we'd send it out there, then take all the noise out and make it sound really clean again.

“We got very anti-plugin on that album. So we got really into recording things very dry. We would send things into the Klemt Echolette - it’s got a very harsh sound, I think it might be German - I was running her vocals through that a lot. That’s what I was saying - there’s no reason, I just wanted to use things I hadn’t used and extend myself. You just run things until you hear something that you think is interesting.”

MR: Another track that stood out to me was Vigilante Shit. It’s so punchy and there’s so much impact in the mix. How did you approach that one specifically?

JA: “Throughout the whole thing, there's moments where you hear this buzzy grind to it and there's moments where you hear this offbeat delay stuff. So I was smashing everything into a Copicat, and then I was taking transients to add to the kicks to make them buzzier, so then every once in a while, you hear the whole picture of the drums going through that when they’re wobbling and delaying out.

“With that, we got really into some fucked up panning with low stuff. Because there's this idea in recording that you don't pan low end. But you can, you just have to start it in the centre so that you can feel where it's going. So we were panning 808s, and that was really intense to carve out enough low end to make it work. It’s all using tape transients to get that buzz.”

MR: You’ve talked before about creating a unique sound world for each album that you work on. How did you approach that for Midnights?

JA: “It usually happens with the writing and the production. I've made a number of albums with Taylor by now and we've started them all in different ways. I think that helps. We did most of it at my house, but we were starting songs on different instruments and with different processing.

“So I'm using different machines - whether it's different echoes or different synths or different guitars - whatever I can just to make sure that we're not jumping off from the same place. So it all comes together: as the writing is coming together, as the concept is coming together, as the sound is coming together, they're all informing each other.”

MR: You’re credited as both a songwriter and producer on many of your collaborations. Are those disciplines entirely separate for you?

JA: “Very separate. My whole life, before I did anything else, I wrote songs. I sang songs and played songs and wrote them, and then I started falling in love with producing, which is the idea. Then I started falling in love with engineering, which has more to do with the execution. They’re very different loves: engineering is one thing, producing is one thing, songwriting, performing, playing… to love them all and to have them work together is a specific thing, but they're very different crafts. A lot of people think they're more blurred, but they're very, very different.”

MR: At what point in your career did you begin to feel that you’d truly adopted the role of producer?

JA: “I always felt that way. It was more that at some point people recognised it. Since I was a kid, I would write songs and I would have ideas for how they would live. That's what production is. Production is the vision of how a song will live, and then how an album will live and how things will sew together and how it will fill the void of what you're not hearing out there. So it's a natural thing, but it took me a long time to literally be able to do it. That’s when you start to learn how to be an engineer and start to articulate and actually have language and have some fearlessness about how to get it.

“It’s the same thing with writing: I've always written, I didn't write because I thought it'd be cool to write, I just always wrote. Same thing with playing, I always loved playing. Even when it came to engineering. They're all different loves. But to me, in my small head, I've always just imagined what things could be and how they could sound and where they could go. The trajectory of entire moments and time and albums and sequencing, I’ve always been thinking about things that way. I always did that. I used to do it with my friends, and I’d do it myself. Then I would do it with some people who'd let me in the room, and then over time, more and more people responded. But I've been on the same journey as far as what I've been after.”

MR: How do you get the most out of the artists you’re working with? You seem to be skilled at bringing a certain level of honesty and vulnerability out of your collaborators.

JA: “The room is a sacred place. There's no bullshit. It's not about this, or that, we're all just working towards the album or the song. Like I keep saying, we’re finding that void in culture and then imagining what we want the world to hear and what's exciting us right now. It’s a gut thing, it's undeniable. When you're inspired, you're inspired. When you're not, you're not. I think that level of zero bullshit about what we're feeling is the bedrock of making it at the level that it needs to be made at. I’ve always felt that way. I've always had a bit of deep, do-or-die, endless preciousness about how important this process is.”

MR: You’ve said previously that as a teenager you felt somewhat dismissive of pop music, but you’ve ended up shaping the sound of contemporary pop. What makes a perfect pop song?

JA: “The only reason that I felt separate from it as a kid was because I was really into a very specific scene. That scene was very claustrophobic, and I liked that at a certain age. The perfect pop song is by definition the imperfect pop song. The perfect pop song is the one that everyone says, ‘I can't believe this is on the radio’!

“The irony of pop music is that it's this field that's so rigid, but the only stuff that's successful is the stuff that’s out on the other side of it. So what's the perfect pop song, Hey Ya? My favourite pop songs are the ones that would be called an imperfect pop song. My quest is more about that. Otherwise, if you wrote a perfect pop song, and you think it's a perfect pop song that fits perfectly into everything, it’s probably boring as fuck.

“Anytime you do anything, you need to have two feelings. Feeling number one is: ‘can I do this?!’ Feeling number two is: ‘I don't care.’ That’s when you know it's time to put something out. I won't put something out unless I have that feeling. Thought number one should be: ‘oh my God, is this gonna make sense?’ Thought number two, ‘I love it so much that I don’t give a shit.’”

Jackson has unveiled the Legend Series, a limited edition run of signature guitars based on some of metal’s most iconic instruments.

The collection includes a replica of Randy Rhoads’ original Concorde, the asymmetric V-style that would become a mainstay of the Jackson catalogue to this day.

There’s a recreation of Scott Ian’s ‘NOT’ Rhoads, the single-pickup guitar he used across the first five Anthrax records.

And there are a pair of signature models that relive Megadeth’s Rust In Peace era; the Marty Friedman Kelly KE-1 and the five-string David Ellefson Concert Bass, both in black-on-black, with that unimpeachable six-in-line Jackson headstock that is one of the most aesthetically pleasing silhouettes in metal guitar design.

These four instruments are freighted with the weight of history. The significance of seeing the Concorde taking flight once more in the Jackson lineup was not lost on the late Randy Rhoads’ sister, Kathy Rhoads D’Argenzio.

She says her brother and the former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist would approve. “There is no doubt Randy would be so honoured to know the impact he has had on Jackson Guitars and on the world of rock and metal guitar,” she says.

Jackson has had quite the impact on some of the other players who have put their names to these instruments. Scott Ian has been a Jackson endorsee since the start. He says the NOT Rhoads played a fundamental role in shaping his super-aggro tone.

And long-time Anthrax fans will immediately recognise the graphics, the ‘NOT’ sticker, the anarchy logo… But look closely, that NYHC sticker has been changed to NYSI, the only aesthetic update to recognise Ian’s connection to the Big Apple despite moving out west to California many moons ago.

“My Not Rhoads was such an important part of my journey,” says Ian. “I discovered my tone with it. It’s been used on every Anthrax record – it was the main guitar on those first five albums in the ’80s. It’s the guitar that kind of made my life. I love that people connect with it.”

Part of the appeal of Ian’s NOT Rhoads is its simplicity. It has a single Seymour Duncan JB-1 humbucker, or technically its TB-4 trembucker-sized version to accommodate the string spacing on the Floyd Rose 1000 Series vibrato. It has an alder body with maple neck-through construction, built to shred, but as Ian’s right hand has proven over the years it is a bona-fide chug machine too. The blue Jackson logo on the white painted headstock is so cool, too.

Speaking of iconic single-pickup shred machines with a single Seymour Duncan JB-1 at the bridge position and some history in a Big Four thrash band, the Marty Friedman KE-1 Kelly, complete with the “1” graphic and the Kahler 7330 fixed bridge, is possibly the quintessential Megadeth guitar – the one you’re only allowed to plug in once you have posted a passable cover of Tornado Of Souls on TikTok.

Again, like the NOT Rhoads, it has the alder wings, maple neck-through construction, the 12” to 16” compound radius ebony fingerboard (those dimensions are almost ever present on today’s Jackson range), and is so recognisable that it doesn’t need many more signature details.

Friedman’s signature is on the back of the headstock. He says the devil is in the detail.

“The KE-1 represents living the dream to me,” said Marty Friedman. “When I had the opportunity to create my own signature guitar, I went all out with Jackson to build the ultimate heavy metal guitar. No expense was spared, from the pickup and bridge to every detail and dimension.”

Friedman’s former bandmate’s signature five-string bass guitar similarly takes us back to that halcyon era, Hangar 18, Vic Rattlehead presiding over a fetus in a jar, the Clash Of The Titans Tour… Great times.

This is also a neck-through build, with an alder body, quartersawn maple neck, plus EMG pickups and a HiMass bridge. All in black. There’s a radiation symbol on the headstock. Very Rust In Peace.

But it all started with Randy Rhoads and that Concorde, and this with the ivory finish and black pinstripes, the gold hardware and gold Jackson logo on the black painted headstock, and the block inlays on the ebony fingerboard, this limited edition CD-1 just too cool.

We’ve got one of the all-time great metal/rock pickup combos, with a Seymour Duncan JB-1 at the bridge, a ’59 at the neck. Note the positioning of the three-way pickup selector switch.

The simple non-locking tremolo unit might not have the same travel as a Floyd Rose but it’s a more fuss-free proposition. Well, it’s also more faithful to the original design.

Interestingly, all of these signature models are neck-through builds. All of the guitars feature Seymour Duncan humbuckers. Four players, four instruments, and we see the steady evolution of Jackson’s artist builds.

The Legend Series Marty Friedman KE-1 Kelly is priced £1,849/$2,299. The Scott Ian Rhoads RR22 is priced £1,849/$2,199. The Randy Rhoads CD-1 will set you back £1,899/$2,499, while the David Ellefson CB V Concert Bass is £1,899/$2,499.

Get them while they’re hot. Those prices include a Jackson Foam Core guitar case.

See Jackson for more details.

The Super Bowl Halftime Show now generates almost as much buzz as the game itself – probably more outside of the US – but it wasn’t always this way. In fact, the Halftime Show didn’t really become a ‘thing’ until 1993, when it was performed by Michael Jackson.

This moment is now set to be documented in a new film – Spectacle: Michael Jackson at the Super Bowl – which is coming to Hulu on Disney+ and ESPN in February 2027. Directed by Bao Nguyen, who previously helmed Netflix’s The Greatest Night in Pop, it promises to detail the behind-the-scenes events leading up to the performance, and includes never-before-seen footage.

Jackson’s show was produced and directed by the late Don Mischer. He was brought in at The King Of Pop’s request, having previously co-produced and directed the Motown 25 TV special 10 years earlier. This was notable for being the first occasion on which Michael Jackson performed his signature moonwalk dance move.

“I will always remember the first meeting with the NFL and with [TV broadcaster] NBC,” Mischer told Rich Eisen in a 2023 interview. “I brought Michael in and Michael went around the room and introduced himself quietly. We sat at the table and the first thing Michael said was ‘Now the first thing I want to do is move the start of the game four hours later so that my Halftime show will be in the dark.’”

With this request, Jackson was forgetting a couple of important things: firstly, that the Super Bowl is kind of a big deal in itself and isn’t likely to have its kickoff time moved on the whim of a pop star; and secondly, that the show was being staged in Pasadena, California, which is several hours behind US Eastern Standard Time.

It was left to Mischer to explain: “There was silence in the room and I said, ‘Michael, you know that means that people are going to be seeing you at midnight in New York? It won't work, man.’”

Mischer would go on to produce and direct Super Bowl Halftime Shows by Paul McCartney, the Rolling Stones, Prince, Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen, and Jackson’s start time request gave him an early lesson in how to deal with the talent on these occasions.

“The first thing you say to them is, ‘This is not your show. You're not 100% in control of it. It's not like going out on tour and playing a big venue like the Hollywood Bowl. You are one cog in a whole wheel that is called Super Bowl Sunday you’re one little piece of it.”

A little piece Jackson may have been, but his show was a landmark moment for the Super Bowl. His star power was deployed specifically to stop people from changing channels during the break – NBC had been stung in 1992 when rival network Fox aired a special episode of sketch show In Living Color during the halftime break, drawing viewers away – and the gambit worked.

In fact, for the first time ever, viewership actually increased for the second half, indicating that many people had tuned in specifically to watch Jackson’s performance.

Not that his set was as crowd-pleasing as it could have been. Yes, we got Billie Jean, but the rest of the set (other than the 90 seconds Jackson stood stock still after being propelled upwards through a trapdoor on the stage) was filled with songs from his 1991 album Dangerous – Jam, Black or White, and Heal the World – and a performance of USA For Africa’s 1985 charity hit We Are The World.

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.

You wouldn’t think Paul McCartney – one of the rare individuals for whom that cliché ‘living legend’ doesn’t feel out of place – would ever feel shy about approaching any of his peers.

But there’s one that he, apparently, still feels nervous around.

When asked by Amy Poehler on her Good Hang podcast who he would most like to collaborate with Macca admitted: “I always think Bob Dylan. But I’m too nervous to ring him up.”

Poehler joked that he couldn’t exactly see Dylan on the phone, McCartney quipped that he was more likely to be “in some bush, in a sleeping bag, maybe.”

Dylan and McCartney have, of course, met on many occasions – famously, it was Dylan who introduced marijuana to The Beatles in 1964, thus altering the course of their career.

Speaking to BBC Radio Two earlier this year, McCartney describes another meeting backstage at the Desert Trip festival in 2016: “I came in to see him and it was like, ‘Wow.’ It was just him and me in this massive, big tent backstage and he was very complimentary,” he recalled. “It was funny ‘cause… A little bit embarrassing, he said, ‘You’re a star.’ I thought, ‘What do you say to that?’”

In the same Poehler interview, McCartney also revealed he’s a bit upset at the way he’s portrayed in the numerous biopics that have come out in recent years. Primarily because they depict him as shorter than he is.

It started with the 2009 Sam Taylor-Wood-directed Nowhere Boy, which depicted John Lennon during his teenage years. “The John character, he’s bigger than me in the film. My character is kind of wimpy, smaller than John. John knocks me to the floor. It’s like, Sam, this is not true. She said, ‘This is a movie; it’s not a documentary.’ And I thought, Well, I don’t like that explanation. But I couldn’t do anything.”

Now, he claims that Sam Mendes is doing the same thing in his quartet of Beatles biopics, in which Paul Mescal plays McCartney. “And guess what? He’s smaller than the guy who plays John,” he said of Mescal.

It seems Macca contacted Mendes about this very issue. “I said, ‘Sam, I’ve got just one thing that I need to say to you.’ I don’t know how Sam is going to deal with it. He sent me a picture, a still, from the filming they were doing and they’re crossing the Abbey Road crossing. And the Paul character is markedly smaller.

"I texted him, ‘Sam! Smaller! Don’t do this. You said you wouldn’t do it!’ He said, ‘No, it’s okay, it’s just the stride pattern.’”

Harley Benton has revealed its autumn 2026 collection, and it is a typically bountiful mega-drop that skews both vintage and modern – and as per the brand’s USP, these electric guitars offer quite a lot of spec for the price.

It is is hard to think of a better-value instrument than the ST-Modern Plus. Harley Benton’s hotrodded S-style guitar comes in a variety of guises but has been refreshed here with a reverse headstock, metallic finishes and a floating VT1 Ultratrem from VegaTrem, and you’ll be getting change from 500 bucks (these are listed on Thomann for £383/$422).

And the hardtail version, the ST-Modern Plus HH, is now offered in Radiant Red, Desert, Root Beer, Tangerine, and Purple. You can get a left-handed version of the latter.

Elsewhere, Harley Benton is referencing more golden era semi-hollow electric guitar designs with the unveiling of its HB-35Plus Rotary and Tribute Series HB-35TL – a guitar whose angular f-holes immediately calls to mind Gibson’s Trini Lopez and Dave Grohl signature guitars – it even has the six-in-line headstock – but has a measly £297/$328 price tag.

Maybe we should start there. Once upon a time, you just did not find beginner-priced electric guitars like this. It’s both a testimony to how Grohl has popularised the model with Foo Fighter fans, and how ambitious Harley Benton has become when populating its range of cheap electric guitars with some more hitherto obscure or cult designs.

You can get this HB-35TL in Pelham Blue (there are leftie versions in this finish), Burgundy, and Golden Mist. It is fitted with a pair of Tesla VR-60 Alnico V humbuckers, with push/pull coil-taps on the controls, and belying the price tag, we actually have a rosewood fingerboard with rolled edges FTW, and diamond inlays to match those soundholes. Sweet.

But what about something more conventionally semi-hollow? The HB-35Plus Rotary could be that. This shares the solid centre block of okoume that you’ll find in the HB-35TL, a level of insurance against unwanted feedback, but also has an okoume body finished with a figured maple veneer, and a glued-in mahogany neck.

The HB-35TL has a maple body, with a glued-in maple neck, but both neck profiles share a relatively full C profile that measures 22mm at the 1st fret, 23.5mm at the 12th.

The big talking point is this rotary switch which behaves much like the Varitone you will find on old Gibson semi-hollows. It’s a six-position, deal, with position 1 a bypass, then positions 2 to 6 dialling out mid-range frequencies.

Furthermore, like HB-35TL, the HB-35Plus Rotary has coil-taps. Finish options include Transparent Black Gloss, Transparent Cherry Gloss, and Vintage Sunburst Gloss.

The price on these is £255/$281, which is remarkable when you consider that, yes, that fingerboard with the handsome split-block inlay is rosewood.

Lastly, the ST-Modern Plus HH – with or without the VegaTrem – remains a very respectable build.

There’s the solid alder body, tactically sculpted for high-performance styles (these look like shred machines for grown-ups but with a price tag for beginners).

We have the ever-fashionable roasted Canadian flame maple bolt-on neck, topped with a maple fingerboard with the 12” to 16” compound radius.

Both hardtail and VegaTrem versions feature a pair of Tesla CROW-85 humbuckers with three-way switching, volume and tone controls, with coil-taps on the tone pot.

We got excited about the VegaTrem, and rightfully so – it’s a premium piece of hardware – but then so is the Babicz hardtail on the regular ST-Modern Plus, a guitar that is available now on Thomann for £339/$375.

For more details, head over to Harley Benton, or to Thomann, where these are all on sale now.

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

The best day of owning a synth or keyboard is the one it arrives at your doorstep. You've been looking forward to this day for weeks, perhaps saving your hard-earned cash for an instrument which, most likely, will change your music-making fortunes.

On this first day, you unpack it and wonder at its gleaming and sparkling finish – it's ready to make some noise and change your life. Three weeks later, it's blended in with everything else you own, is covered in dust, and is about as appealing to play as, well... just about every other keyboard you own.

So here's how to keep your synths and keyboards as new and as fresh as the day you bought them, to keep them inspirational, approachable and fun enough to play and compose with, and – most importantly – to keep those musical ambitions alive.

Dust for life

As the famous synth-player Moby once said 'we are all made of stars', but what he probably really meant was that 'we are all made of dust', and that it gets everywhere, not least on, in and around your keyboards.

Dust is your basically your worst enemy. Not only will it become the biggest removal chore you face when you come to sell your 'board – your camera will enhance any spec of dust you don't remove in your eBay/Reverb photos – but dust has a habit of building up inside any electrical device to the point where mild heating will become a basic issue, or further, more serious damage can become a possibility. If you feel confident enough to open up your 'board without infringing the warranty (unlikely) then a good vacuum never goes amiss.

Of course the best way to avoid constant dusting is to avoid constant dust in the first place. Aside from keeping your keyboard room completely dust-free – perhaps by turning it into some kind of germ-free hospital ward – you could simply invest in some keyboard covers.

These can range from free – we once used the polythene that our keyboard arrived in as a 'better than you might think' dust cover scenario – to 'logo-branded' (especially useful if you like showing off your synth collection while simultaneously keeping is safe from dust), to Decksaver-style see-through moulded plastic covers. This latter option varies in cost – from around $20 to $150 – but, importantly, lets you see those appealing keyboard knobs and sliders that draw you into actually lifting the case and playing the damn keyboards in the first place.

Get atmospheric... or not

There's nothing a keyboard – acoustic or electronic – likes less than a varying atmosphere, both in terms of temperature and humidity. Avoid damp environments, then, and try to keep the temperature constant and temperate – around 18-22 degrees is good, although this will obviously depend on where you live.

If you reside in a damp house, consider a dehumidifier for your studio, even if you only use it occasionally. You'll be surprised at how much damp can build up, especially older buildings, and how much such a machine can help. If you live outside, or on the North or South Pole, consider another hobby.

Dealing with yellow keys

Yellowing keyboard keys can make a keyboard look older than it really is. For ivory keys, yellowing is a natural process, while for plastic keys, it is often caused by direct sunlight reacting with the bromine in the keys.

It's a good idea, then, to keep your plastic keyboard keys out of direct sunlight, but conversely, and slightly confusingly, keeping your ivory keys in indirect sunlight can reduce yellowing. Confused? Just keep the lid (or fallboard) down or your keyboard if you have one, or use the aforementioned dust cover – always good advice for protection against both yellowing and dust.

However, if you find yourself with a keyboard with yellowed keys, there are a number of ways of reducing the colouration. Most rely on using a chemical reaction, either using hydrogen peroxide-based beauty salon gel (the same stuff that is used to bleach hair) to remove any yellow in plastic, or using other acidic – but less dramatic-sounding – solutions. Try anything from lemon juice to toothpaste to milk to provide a gentler cleaning experience for both plastic and ivory.

Whatever you choose, take care with acidic pH levels (you're looking at around a pH of no less than 3), so obviously don't use anything too strong. Be very careful as you clean, and try whatever solution you opt for on a single key first to test the effect.

Constant cleaning

Avoiding dust and yellowing keys shouldn't be one-off issues you deal with when looking after your keyboards. Giving a keyboard a regular clean is also a must – it's a task most of us can't be bothered with, but it'll pay off in the long run.

Using a not-too-damp cloth on the outside and a compressed air canister for the electronic guts will pay dividends and stop the dreaded dust build-up, while also reducing other, inevitable dirt build-up – yes, food and a lot more – that comes from hands making physical contact with keys.

And talking of physical contact, again this is obvious, but don't play your keyboards too heavily or aggressively. Basically treat your keyboard as you would an expensive item of furniture and you won't go far wrong. (In terms of cleaning it, rather than sitting on it, that is.)

Tune up

For acoustic pianos, regular tuning is wise and, like a car service, needn't be a one-off expensive nightmare if you do it regularly. Yes, there's something vaguely honky and characterful about a piano going gently doolally in the tuning department, but if you wish to record your acoustic and mix it in with any other instruments, getting it in tune within the mix will be easier dealt with before you press record and by a tuning expert.

Tuning isn't just reserved for acoustic pianos. In this day and age, especially with the proliferation of newer analogue synths, tuning is almost as important as it was when the synth was first born back in the '60s. Fortunately, most analogue synths that need an occasional tune have it built-in as a quick 30-second or so function, or even do it automatically on boot up. Check your synth tuning regularly by comparing note-for-note with your DAW instruments, if you can – you'll be surprised by how much some analogue synths do drift, and just how often.

Get protection

If you are a gigging musician in particular, then a keyboard carry case is an essential purchase and there are many and varied shapes and sizes out there for you to choose from. The more gigging you do – especially if your keyboard will be stowed in a plane or coach storage – the more protection you will need, so while padded material protective cases might seem like a cheap and lightweight option, they will be 'lightweight' in protection in any aircraft storage situation, so consider an aluminium or a solid moulded case for this scenario.

One other big consideration – aside from protection – is weight. Your ideal combination is light and durable, so that's probably an aluminium, moulded plastic case or combination of the two. We once owned the most protective keyboard case ever built – honestly, it would have protected Indiana Jones in any kind of fridge/nuclear situation – but it weighed thrice as much as the keyboard. It meant every gig was a chore and we ended up with one arm five inches longer than the other. A common top weight limit for a keyboard/case combination is around 40lbs/18kg. Any more and your lust for a live keyboard life might quickly diminish.

There’s been an incalculable number of words printed that venerate the Strokes’ seismic 2001 debut, Is This It And, with good reason. That turn of the millennium album both re-directed the course of guitar music and established the Strokes as the reigning kings of back-to-basics rock n' roll across the ensuing decade.

As the years wore on, a troupe of similarly minded, leather-clad guitar-toters tried to recapture the early Strokes' natural cool. From Arctic Monkeys to The Libertines and The Killers to Bloc Party, a truckload of bands were inspired to attempt to re-bottle the same magic they’d been consumed by back in 2001.

We sat down with the Strokes' pivotal first producer, Gordon Raphael, to find out more about helming the desk for the Strokes most important early work. From their first EP to Is This It to 2003's searing follow-up Room on Fire and swathes of 2005’s First Impressions of Earth, Gordon was the band's trusted studio godfather.

Surprisingly, as Gordon remembers, he wasn’t looking to work with the Julian Casablancas-fronted outfit at all when he first heard their music…

“When I first saw the Strokes performing in New York, I was much more interested in the band that opened up for them,” Gordon remembers. “Then a couple of days after I handed the Strokes my business card, Albert [Hammond Jr - the Strokes’ guitarist] came over to my studio to suss me out.”

It proved to be a fateful meeting for both parties and the ensuing history of guitar music was forever changed. The Strokes subsequently spent a weekend recording in Gordon’s Transporterraum studio in New York City, the result was a riveting three-track debut EP, The Modern Age. This fruitful first collaboration would cement a solid working relationship ahead of making their debut album proper with Gordon.

“I gave the Strokes a three-day, three song deal,” Gordon says of his initial connection with the band. “So come in on Friday, leave on Sunday night with three songs in your hands - and that was it. It was the music from that weekend that turned into The Modern Age EP. I thought it was just going to be a little demo and never even expected it would be heard by the public.”

As a teenager growing up in Seattle, Gordon fell in love with music from an early age, embracing the hammond organ, synths, string ensembles and any other sounds or pieces of kit he could collect. It was joining a band called Medusa towards the end of his teens in the seventies that ignited his interest in studio intricacies.

“The leader of the band had recorded incredible symphonic rock music with a four track reel to reel tape recorder, an Echoplex, a phase shifter and a bunch of instruments,” Gordon says.

“It sounded really good and inspired me to start hacking away at expanding my own understanding of tape recorders and synths. I wanted to write my own music and record it with no one watching me so I was free to do anything.”

Gordon used borrowed gear from Seattle’s music community to help him evolve his craft, recording any would-be collaborators he could find.

“It was a four track reel to reel for many years, later a MXR digital delay unit, then an Oberheim DMX drum machine and digital reverb,” he says.

“I learned a lot and recorded hundreds of songs as part of this community of extremely creative weird people,” Gordon continues. “Many artists in Seattle were a strange bunch, you could see the oddness in the grunge bands like Mudhoney, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains. It’s the Pacific North West so it rains all the time, there’s nothing to do other than stay in and practice music.”

From the beginning of Gordon’s musical journey, the ARP Odyssey synth has been a particular favourite, and an instrument he dedicated himself to understanding.

“I was pretty hit or miss with it to begin with, then I started getting the idea, and within two years I could make any sound that came to my imagination,” he says. “I love it because it doesn’t have any memory, or digital parts, it’s all about making sounds by hand with sliders. You can change all these audio parameters randomly at will which is hard to do with digital equipment.”

While growing up in Seattle, Gordon remembers having a realisation that although he’d learned a lot in the city, the only way to get further ahead in the music industry was to move to either LA or New York.

“I didn’t see myself surfing or hanging out on the beach, I saw myself grinding away in the East Village with the other weirdos so that’s where I ended up,” he laughs.

He initially tried to move to New York in the eighties, then returned to Seattle and enjoyed some success with his grunge band, Sky Cries Mary. After the city’s scene collapsed in on itself, he headed to the East Coast again and this time stayed and started to make a name for himself.

“I had just been very successful in Sky Cries Mary, we’d toured, made videos, been on late night television, so when I got to New York I was feeling confident,” he says. “I found this digital/analogue space hybrid that was a brand new concept when I moved there.

“All of the weird things I’d done at home in little dusty four-track studios, that was all the information and sounds I had in my head that I could apply in New York, from using spacey effects to more aggressive sounds. Everything I applied I had learned from my earlier formative years.”

During the late '90s and the start of the 2000s, Gordon remembers how guitars had started to feel a tad out of fashion. Instead, cooler kids were into jungle, drum and bass and hip-hop rather than the now tired cliches of rock n’ roll. Still, he was determined to immerse himself in New York’s band scene with his studio handily located in the middle of the East Village.

“Where I lived was maybe a seven minute walk from Ludlow Street where all the clubs were, so places like the Mercury Lounge, Lunar Lounge, Maxfish and the Pink Pony coffee shop,” he says. “Whenever I needed to work, I’d go to these clubs and hand out my business card to any band that seemed cool.”

The Strokes ended up in Gordon’s basement recording via such a meeting. After a few failed studio attempts with other producers, it was his eccentric space and creative flair that appealed to the five-piece garage rock outfit.

“When Albert saw how strange and artistic my basement studio was with its silver walls, dark lights, old antique equipment and strange dolls hanging from the ceiling, he loved it,” Gordon states. “When the Strokes came in to record, I was so impressed by them, how seriously they were taking the music and how they let zero mistakes go by.”

The three songs that became The Modern Age were the title track, the soon to be ubiquitous Last Nite and Barely Legal. It was released in January 2001 without any edits from Gordon’s session.

Even though the band and their label Rough Trade loved the demos, they initially chose to enter the album sessions for their full-length debut, Is This It with a different producer. But these recording attempts never came to anything. Remembering how easy working with Raphael on their EP was, the band returned to work with Gordon and his signature lo-fi basement sound.

“Rough Trade and the band came back to me and we went on to make their debut album,” Gordon says. “My personal favourites from the record have changed over the years. When I heard Take it Or Leave It during recording, I was sure that it was a masterpiece and we’d captured something unbelievable in terms of its impact and aggression. Now I like Trying Your Luck, which is more subtle but magical in its rhythm.”

Is This It was an instant classic, and had a colossal footprint following its launch in the summer of 2001.

As a result of its popularity, Gordon found himself in London as one of the most in-demand indie rock producers. With his photo on the record’s sleeve, he was constantly recognised and being pulled in different directions to work with bands and artists.

“Everywhere I went in London, I was being asked to produce so many acts,” he recalls. “Then a big difference was every studio I was using, one of the ones was called The Garden in Shoreditch. It was a phenomenal studio with these giant SSL boards, they had great microphone collections and tape machines. Every band that came through, I recorded to tape.”

While working at The Garden, Gordon recorded Skunk Anansie’s Skin on her solo material and also parts of Regina Spektor’s critically acclaimed album Soviet Kitsch. Gordon’s nomadic lifestyle continued with another relocation, this time to Berlin courtesy of a connection with the German producer Moses Schneider.

“I just thought I could leave my UK rock and roll fantasy and start the European classical painting era of my life,” Gordon laughs. “But when I went there, no one was really introduced in rock music. In the mid-2000s, it was all about minimal techno and Ableton. Everything was needed except for me. I still enjoyed my time living there but I was flying around the world to South Africa, Belgium, Iceland, Mexico and Argentina to record bands.”

For Gordon, these globe-trotting adventures working with creatives, bands and musicians were what his younger self had always dreamed of doing

“Everywhere I went, no matter what language people would be speaking, I’d be talking in music,” he says. “Kick drums, guitar amps, distortion, vocals, mixing, speakers, every individual wants something slightly different but the currency is equal around the world.”

Fast forward to today and Gordon, now based in Hebden Bridge in the English county of Yorkshire, is busier than ever looking for new talent. He’s worked with The Abomic Toms and Widows of the Night, either from Leeds-based Eiger Studios or jetting off to different countries to record and produce. From his perspective, guitar music has never been healthier. A social media call on Instagram to work with new artists saw him inundated with production requests.

“I said, 'Hey, does anyone want to work?' I did this on Instagram and I got 60 bands in New York who all wanted to work with me,” Gordon says. “I wound up recording 20 of them, then I went six months later and ended up recording 20 more. There are so many amazing bands out there at the moment.”

Raphael feels new generations of music lovers are also discovering some sounds and styles for the first time.

“Some of these kids are so young, they think the new album from the the Strokes is like discovering a new band. It’s really weird that this is happening,” he says.

“Also, this generation were so impacted by the pandemic, actually, we’re over computer and internet stuff, instead let’s get out there and play electric guitar, start bands and do shows.”

For now, Gordon is content capturing raw energy and guitars in his Leeds studio. He’s been utilising the space for more than five years.

“It’s nothing super fancy but I have a lot of my gear there, there’s a very comfortable room where it feels good to make sounds and we get great recordings,” he states. “I’ve had bands from all over coming out to Leeds to work with me. As long as I can carry on meeting artists and new bands, then I’m going to be in good spirits.”

For more information on Gordon's studio works, career and current activities, head to his official website.

Al Jardine and Mike Love are the last two surviving founder members of The Beach Boys. But in a new interview, Jardine says he is deeply concerned for Love’s health after footage of Love’s recent onstage appearances went viral.

On 11 October, both Jardine and Love performed shows with their respective bands.

Al Jardine & The Pet Sounds Band played in Cerrito, California, with Jardine, 84, joined on stage by two other former members of The Beach Boys, Bruce Johnston and David Marks.

Meanwhile, on the same night, Mike Love, 85, appeared on stage with The Beach Boys in Nashville.

In footage from The Beach Boys’ show in Cincinnati show on 10 October, Love was seated throughout the performance and singing backing vocals which were limited and barely audible.

In a brief address to the audience in Cincinnati, Love explained that he had been “going through some health issues for quite a while”.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Jardine said that he has seen footage of Love on stage with The Beach Boys in Nashville.

“It’s shocking and I was really depressed,” Jardine revealed. “I had to really shake myself out of it just to get on stage. Just the optics of it were just awful and I’m speechless.”

Jardine said of Love’s decision to continue performing in his condition: “That’s just not right, that I can see. Obviously, he’s a total pro. He wants to be on stage, but he just doesn’t know how not to do it. He doesn’t know what else to do, so I think he’s trapped.”

In June 2026, Love had commented on his health struggles via Instagram, revealing that he had contracted bronchitis and COVID while mourning the loss of his sister.

“I feel stronger every day physically,” he stated, “but I am heartbroken emotionally.”

He added: “I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else than with our audience. For me, our audience is the medicine, and the music is the cure. Thank you all for your outpouring of love, well wishes, and healing prayers. I am deeply humbled and grateful.”

Past tensions between Al Jardine and Mike Love are well documented, and came to a head in 2025 following the funeral of The Beach Boys’ chief songwriter and visionary Brian Wilson.

During the ceremony, both Jardine and Love gave speeches honouring Wilson, but Jardine felt that Love’s comments about the classic hit song Good Vibrations were in poor taste.

Jardine told Rolling Stone: “Mike wanted everybody to know that he wrote every single word of Good Vibrations. I didn’t feel the compassion, let’s put it that way.”

RECORDING WEEK 2026: When it comes to making music, there are a lot of elements to consider – each of which have their own separate claim to being the ‘most important part’ of the whole deal.

Microphones? Acoustic treatment? Sixty-year-old microphone preamps? Sure, but today’s democratised recording rigs are all nothing without the humble audio interface.

From the pokiest of bedrooms to the most expensive of cutting-edge recording studios, audio interfaces are pulling serious weight – and now you got to lean on one to carry the load of your own music-making. So, how do you connect your audio interface to your computer? Here, we’ll take you through the process from start to finish – for both Windows PCs and Mac laptops.

1. Familiarise yourself with your interface

Before you start plugging anything into anything, let’s get familiar with the ins and outs of your interface. Not only will this make getting started with it more intuitive, but it’ll also tell you some important things about how to get started at all. Familiarity is particularly important from a connectivity standpoint, as audio interfaces have enjoyed a number of different connection standards over the years.

On older interfaces that still have some form of support from their manufacturers, you can expect to find a square. boxy USB-B port – meaning it’ll connect via USB-A or USB-C to your computer at the other end with the right cable.

Today, most interfaces have adopted USB-C as the standard. This is because USB-C is significantly better equipped than its predecessors to transmit both data and power. You'll find a standard USB-C cable (with the same plug at both ends) does the job here.

2. Plug the interface into your computer

Whichever connection your interface uses, it’s time to make it. Use the cable that came with your interface (assuming the manufacturer isn't so stingy to miss one out) and plug one end into the interface and the other into a corresponding port on your computer.

In the above example, my Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 connects to my computer via its USB-B port; a USB-B to USB-A cable is used to mate the interface with a spare USB socket on my laptop.

3. Complete your audio connections

Your next step is to start making audio connections between your equipment and your audio.

Some of you will have a simple songwriting setup in mind, involving little more than a microphone, an electric guitar, and some headphones. All set to be plugged into your simple 2-in, 2-out interface.

Some of you will have a studio room groaning under the weight of all the synths and hardware waiting to be hooked up to your new rack-mounted multi-Apollo interface megalith.

However, in all cases, you’ll have three things to think about: your inputs, your headphones, and your studio monitors.

Start with the speakers, by plugging your speaker cables into the dedicated monitor outputs at the rear of your interface.

Chances are your interface will feature familiar, quarter-inch, 'guitar lead'-style sockets. Meanwhile your monitors (the posh studio word for 'speakers') can have anything from small red and white RCA sockets through to multi-pinned XLRs. Whatever the choice of ins and outs you'll find the lead you need at your local freindly music store, or, failing that Amazon.

With your speakers connected things are even simpler with your headphones. Pluge them in (be it stereo quarter inch socket or 3.5mm mini) into your interface's headphone out – most likely right there on the front.

Now it's time to plug in your instruments and, most likely, the choice of interface you made was purely determined by how many instruments you have and therefore how many inputs you need.

Got more instruments than inputs? No problem. Very often a home studio mixer can be the central source of all your sound. Plug in all your gear into the mixer then take the left and right output from it into the in and out on your interface.

Thus a simple (affordable) 2-in, 2-out interface can record the sound of an entire band, or expansive keyboard rig.

You can easily unplug the mixer if you want to record with a microphone. Commit a simple guide track (or full finished production) to audio, then unplug your mixer and plug in your mic ready for your vocals or acoustic instrument performance.

4. Turn on your computer

Now, it’s time to turn your computer on. If your interface has a power switch, leave it off until your computer is booted up. Indeed, it’s good to form something of a habit here about this; your computer should come on first, then your interface, then your speakers.

Never turn on your interface with connected speakers powered up already. The electronic 'pop' the speakers receive could damage them. And sounds awful.

Similarly, keep the gain down (on your mixer, or on your interface) on any channels until after you’ve plugged in a mic, turned on phantom power, or switched on a synth or pedalboard.

5. Download the relevant software

Some interfaces come with additional software, which enables access to functions you otherwise can’t access on the interface itself. In my case, my trusty Focusrite Clarett 4Pre has an analogue ‘Air’ circuit that aims to ape Focusrite’s ISA 110 mic pre – and which can only be toggled on and off for each of the four front-panel channels via Focusrite's own software, Focusrite Control.

Other brands make extensive use of software for switching and routing too, including Universal Audio with its UA Connect software.

Your own interface’s manual will undoubtedly hold the keys to any specific information about the software you might need, but either way, you’ll need to go to the manufacturer’s website to get it downloaded.

6. Make your interface the default audio device

At this point, you’re ready to finish up your audio interface’s setup. Make sure your interface is plugged in and powered on (some interfaces, even if powered via USB, still have a power switch on the rear), and then go to your OS’ sound settings or Preferences.

In Windows, this is found in the Sound section of the Settings menu. Click on the Windows logo, then click the cog that appears in the menu. Next, you'll need to click on system, then sound, or you can just type in 'sound' if you like. Under the 'Choose your output device select your interface.

For Mac users, you'll need to start by clicking on the Apple logo. Click on 'System Settings', then click 'Sound' in the column on the left and at the bottom you'll see a section titled 'Output Input'. Provided your computer connection above has been made successfully (and your computer is running the right driver software that came with your interface) you should see your audio interface on the list in both the Output and Input sections.

Make sure you select it in both sections.

As a very quick check at this point, fire up YouTube or a music app and try playing something that you know makes audio. You should hear the sound through your interface, playing on your monitors.

That's the hard part done!

7. Set up the interface in your DAW

Now for the the final step. Open up your favoured DAW and select your audio interface as the primary device for audio input and output. This will menu will be named different things in different DAWs. If you don't see your DAW below then a quick Google search will point you in the right direction.

In Reaper, for instance, you’ll find this option under the Device subsection of Preferences, accessed either at the bottom of the Options tab or by clicking the audio device information at the top-right of the screen. For my Focusrite, I need to select ‘ASIO’ and then ‘Focusrite USB ASIO’ from the sub-menu.

In Logic, you’ll also find this option under Settings > Audio > Devices… Just use the drop-down menus for Input and Output to select your interface, then click Apply.

In Pro Tools, this menu can be found in Setup > Playback Engine. If you're changing your audio device in Pro Tools and a project is open, you will need to save and relaunch so bear that in mind if you don't want to save any recent progress or need to go back on something.

8: Remember - Order is important

Important bit. It's very easy for your computer and DAW to get confused (and thus confuse you) if it can't find the hardware you've connected.

Start your DAW before turning on your interface and it's likely that it simply won't 'see' it no matter what you do.

Worse still, your entire project could default to using an audio option that it CAN see, requiring you to do all kinds of undoing and resetting and saving to get things back right again.

So always turn on your computer first. Then your audio interface. Then your speakers (and perhaps have a little test of whether you can hear anything). THEN start your DAW.

And it's a good idea to have your DAW start up with a simple test project – something that you know plays audio or hits MIDI notes on your keyboards – so you can start up, press play, hear it, and know that everything is working fine.

Conclusion

And there you have it. Hopefully, you should be up and running with your brand new interface and ready to record.

Still labouring in unexpected silence? Don't worry. We have a troubleshooting guide that solves loads of common issues.

Good luck!

The only real cure for grief is time and in a moving interview with Rolling Stone, Sharon Osbourne has been explaining how she feels about Ozzy’s passing and his farewell at the Back to the Beginning show, now more than a year has gone by.

The occasion for the interview is the release of the concert film of the event, something she admits she found “very hard” to watch. “It’s bittersweet. It’s amazing,” she says of it. “Everything about the show was amazing and just a joyous occasion and one that will go down in music history. I’m proud of that and that it was for my husband, and I’m so thankful to everyone that took part in it, for their time, their effort, their giving.”

She reveals that Ozzy did the gig against no less than six doctors’ advice. “They advised us not to do the show. They said it would kill him. We were all together and Ozzy said, ‘It’s not an option. It’s what I want.’ He said, ‘I know I’m dying. If I miss a few months of my life, I want to go this way. This is what I want.’ It was his wishes and we went through it. He said to me, ‘Another six months, what’s it going to do for me?’”

“He was very, very emotional,” she explains. “But you know what? It was beautiful too. It was amazing. How lucky was he to go out that way? I say he went out like a Viking. It was the way he wanted.”

“If we all have a chance to pick the way we go out … Do you know what I’m saying? It was a triumph to be surrounded by your friends, your family, your fans that adore you and what you are doing that day. It’s just amazing. It’s not sad. He was blessed to be able to choose the way you die.”

When asked if she felt Ozzy was still with her when she watched the film, she simply said: “He ain’t left me for a minute. I go to sleep wearing his T-shirts. I wake up wearing his glasses. I’m surrounded by him always.”

“That’s why there’s nothing to be sad. I was blessed to have him in my life, and nothing is forever. It’ll be my time soon, and it’s the circle. That’s what happens with everyone. It was just my time to lose the love of my life, but you go on.”

Ozzy and Black Sabbath: Back To The Beginning opens at cinemas around the world on October 28.

A while back, John 5 took to Instagram to post an explainer on how he was able to play Mötley Crüe songs without needing his right hand. Guitar players knew what was what. But it was interesting all the same.

It was in response to online accusations that Mötley Crüe had been using backing tapes in their performances. This controversy, in and of itself, invites further questioning; who among us is sober enough at a Mötley Crüe concert to notice such details?

Nonetheless, the accusations had clearly stung John 5, a player who is ridiculously gifted to the point where it is hard to imagine any piece giving him difficulty.

But nowadays, John 5 takes the opposite view. He sees these accusations as a sign that he and Mötley Crüe are doing something right. “It’s a compliment,” he tells MusicRadar. “It’s such a compliment. Like, it makes me so happy.”

In concert, John 5 plays a game with himself that is probably unhealthy but nonetheless keeps him honest; whether performing his solo material or tearing through Mötley Crüe’s back catalogue, he dares himself to play it as close to perfect as possible.

He is joining us to talk about the Fender John 5 Telecaster Collection, which was launched last week, and how his Custom Shop Phantom is so on-point that the prototype he has been touring with these past few years makes nailing the little nuances in former Mötley Crüe guitarist Mick Mars’ parts that bit easier.

“In Home Sweet Home, the solo, there’s all these pinch harmonics, and they have to be just right,” he says. “You have to be just right. You can go online and watch [this]. Everybody records it! I just hit that pitch harmonic perfectly on that because those guitars are set up so nice and perfect.”

This drive for perfection might be part of the problem, like it’s too good to be true.

“This is so strange, but I don’t really talk about this,” he says. “I’ll play just a ton of shows, a ton of shows, and people are like, ‘Oh, don’t you ever get tired of it?’ And I say, ‘No.’ This is why. I’m such a perfectionist. I always say it’s like Steely Dan. Like when Steely Dan were in the studio, it took them six weeks just to pick out a chair. But that’s how I am live. What I do live is I try to make it so perfect.”

Not everyone appreciates this. Some people want to hear him mess things up, or to hear something different from the records. But remember when John 5 took the gig. He promised that he was going to play Mick Mars’ solos just as they were recorded, because they were part of the song.

People don’t really like this,” he admits. “They don’t! Like, ‘Oh, it’s not rock and roll.’ There’s gotta be [mistakes]. But I try to make it so perfect where everything’s on time, in pitch, hit correctly, and that’s what I do with my instrumental shows. And when I got into Mötley Crüe, same thing. I will see how perfect I can get it, and it’s so much fun. I mean, I love playing shows and playing concerts, but it’s so much fun to see how close you can get.”

It doesn’t always work. At Mötley Crüe’s show in Salt Lake City, Utah, disaster struck, technical difficulties, and John 5 had no idea where he was in the song.

“I won’t forget it. It was in Utah, and it just happened,” he says. “We were playing Take Me To The Top, and my battery pack died, and these stages are so big. I was way out to the front. Tommy [Lee], our drummer, is way in the back. ‘Cos there’s like this ego riser. Vince [Neil] and Nikki [Sixx] were all out in front, and my pack died, and when you have those in-ears in, you can’t hear anything when that thing dies. So I was like, ‘Oh my God!’”

He wasn’t alone. They were all out of whack. And John 5 insists the ensuing “train wreck” is material evidence that they’re not playing to a tape. There was no safety net.

“I got lost and Vince got lost, and I had to run back to Tommy to get back on, to hear the acoustic of his drums,” he says. “And if that doesn’t prove [it’s real]… Because I got off and it was a train wreck for 10, 15 seconds, 20 seconds!”

Mötley Crüe frontman Vince Neil has copped some flack online, too. His performances have been put in the dock. But John 5 leapt to his defence, arguing that the vocalist’s delivery would be impossible to sync up with a tape.

“Vince is singing so well now, and it just drives me crazy,” he says. “Because sometimes he’s behind the beat, or ahead of the beat, but do you know how, not even difficult, impossible it would be to lip-sync if something was behind the beat!? It would be impossible! [Laughs] But, I don’t know. I take it as a compliment when people say, ‘Oh, they’re playing to a track,’ because we work so hard now to make it sound as amazing as possible. So, it’s wonderful.”

That said, bassist Nikki Sixx admitted that Mötley Crüe has used backing tracks to recreate the sound from the albums, taking the lead from Queen, and using the tracks for other instrumentation that the four of them could not replicate.

“Since we saw Queen using some to help during the song Bohemian Rhapsody live, we understood that we could bring in elements that we could not do live like orchestras, saxophones, etc etc and sync them up with what we are playing and we do play 100 per cent live. And it’s better for the fans and we enjoy being able to do what we did in the studio live. It’s a win win for us.”

Sixx's point was that they were not miming along to backing tracks of their own performances. When asked why they don’t play 100 per cent live, Sixx replied, “We do. You were lied to. Sorry.”

John 5 marked the release of the Phantom Telecaster with an eponymous new instrumental track featuring Joey Aguirre on drums, a riff that’s kind of Jake E Lee-era Ozzy, and all kinds of blazing arpeggios and lead-guitar fireworks. He can play anything.

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!

There's a fine pop songwriting tradition of using the phrase ‘love song’ ironically. The Damned’s rumbustious punk-era hit Love Song was about as far removed from a traditional love song as it was possible to get in 1979.

Bon Jovi’s 1995 single This Ain’t A Love Song was – guess what? – actually very much a love song. And Sara Bareilles’ 2007 breakthrough hit? Well, reputedly, love was very far from the subject Bareilles had on her mind when she wrote it.

The singer-songwriter from Eureka, Northern California, had signed to Epic in 2005, and the story goes that during the year-long gestation period before the release of her major label debut Little Voice, Bareilles was being pressured by her new record company to come up with a hit.

Love Song, with its insistence of ‘I’m not going to write you a love song cause you asked for it, cause you need one,’ was her rebellious response. In 2007, Bareilles explained that “I got mad at myself for letting those doubts creep into my brain and swore I would write something totally honest, whatever it may be, good or bad. And I did. Love Song was my response to all that, my little stick it to 'em".

So a simple tale of a dastardly record company forcing an artist into a box they don’t want to go in, then? Well, the story is a little bit more complicated than that, though it took a few more years to emerge.

In a 2021 interview, Bareilles said that "The song wasn't a specific response to my record company. Nobody sat me down and said, 'I need this kind of song from you.' There was more of a subtle, nuanced… withholding. I was getting ready to release the first record, and I had a whole boatload of songs, so I was like, 'What's the deal? Let's get in the studio. Let's make the record.' There was a withholding of the green light."

It seems that Epic were unconvinced that Bareilles had the requisite songwriting chops and needed outside help. They set up some co-writing sessions, which the singer described as “a total disaster... devastating on every level. I felt invisible and unimportant and manipulated.”

“I was so stubborn, especially at that age. I was so protective of myself - I wasn't going to do what they asked me to do. I wasn't going to wear the sparkly dress, I wasn't going to wear the high heels. I was so concerned with losing myself, somehow, in the process."

In a 2015 Huffington Post interview, she was in a more reflective mood. Speaking of the co-writing sessions: “I think for me, they came at a time where I was still so unsure of my own edges. In a way, I was still sort of discovering who I was as an artist at that time. And while I don’t think that any of those collaborators had any bad intentions, I just don’t think I was ready to collaborate."

Love Song was, then, a frustrated response to those sessions, composed in her rehearsal room, on her own. By this point, Epic had recruited producer Eric Rosse to the project – he and Bareilles started working together midway through 2005.

In her record company biography for that album, Bareilles wrote that: “Eric Rosse and I spent countless hours deliberating, fighting, and seeking compromise on what would make this music the best it could be. I'm not proud to say it, but I feel like in many ways I walked in with my dukes up.” Speaking to Sound On Sound in 2008, Rosse admits that it was difficult at first: "Yes, she did need a bit of convincing.”

For five months Rosse and Bareilles worked through stories of songs, arrangement ideas and song structures. “She came up with a lot of material,” he recalled, “And we would demo stuff, just piano and vocal, and send it off to Pete Giberga (the A&R on the album), who was getting excited about the project.”

Both artist and A&R knew that they needed a single to launch the album and, luckily, halfway through these sessions, Love Song landed.

"Sara came in one day with the initial musical idea which included the phrase 'I'm not going to write you a love song,' and the rest was sort of la-la-la,” remembered Rosse.

“Structurally it was a bit different from the final version: there might not have been a bridge and I can't quite remember how she did the pre-chorus. But there definitely was a basic structure to the song, with most of the music, the main hook line, and several verse ideas.”

“We discussed where the song could go, thematically and structurally, and she went away and came back with more or less the finished song. I think that for Sara the idea of a love song was synonymous with a commercial hit, so she was taking poetic licence with the term.”

Now they had a potential hit single, both Rosse and Bareilles put all their energies into making the track count. The pair recorded three different versions of the song, though each had the same lead vocal.

"The first step of recording the backing tracks for the album was that Sara and I drove around LA for a day, trying out pianos for her in four or five different studios,” Rosse explained in 2008.

“We felt that a Yamaha seven-foot grand at NRG studios suited her music the best, so we did the basic tracks - piano, drums and bass - at NRG. The remainder, Yamaha CP80 electric piano, Mellotron, guitars, backing vocals, were overdubbed at my own studio, Squawkbox.”

However, the initial overdubs for the song didn’t seem to fit with the main vocal, so artist and producer had to have a re-think. “The issue was mainly one of feel,” Rosse reasoned. “A four-to-the-floor feel can easily sound heavy and laboured, so I wanted to make sure that the rhythm had enough movement. It had to drive the song forward, and not feel plodding, but also not feel so happy or poppy that it would make the song sound silly.

"We used two drummers on the song, and the final drum take took place at Sunset Sound. The piano was tracked twice, because it had to match the new feel of that last drum overdub. We also did a number of different approaches with the guitars, and there's a very subtle drum loop, programmed by Jake Davies, that you sort of hear rather than feel, but that helped drive the song forward."

Once these issues were ironed out, the mixing was relatively straightforward. "I wanted to make the song as driving and aggressive as I could, and feature Sara's voice as much as possible, squeezing every ounce of energy out of it,” Rosse said. “By the time it came to mixing, the issues we had during tracking were entirely resolved, and I was only looking at minor things, like how many backing vocals to use, and how much of a vocal double there should be.”

“Sara associates lead vocal doubling with slick-sounding pop music, so we had to come to various levels of compromises on that. But in general the heavy lifting had been done on this song, and it was just a matter of making it sound and feel really good.”

The finished single was helped massively by its video, the sort of sumptuous creation that you rarely see in 2026. Installed in a Wes Anderson-esque fantasy world in which she is a performer in a jukebox-like machine that dispenses love songs, Bareilles (wearing a dress and heels, natch) sings to order whenever a punter places a coin in the machine. She rebels, wedging a coin in the wheels of the contraption to give herself a break. It’s a brilliant metaphor for the ‘official’ story of the song, and one that Epic seemed only too keen to greenlight.

It did the trick. Love Song made Number Four in both the US and – more surprisingly – the UK charts. Following this, the album Little Voice was a Top Ten hit in both territories and went double platinum in the States.

It set Bareilles on a trajectory that has seen Broadway success in the form of her Waitress show soundtrack, which led to a second career in film and musical theatre. And all but one of her four albums have reached the Billboard Top Ten.

Sneaking in just before the close of music’s physical era, you couldn’t imagine Love Song being a hit in 2026. Even at the time, with its attention to detail, melodic richness and refusal to descend to cynicism, there was something very old skool about it, which Bareilles picked up on in that 2015 Huffington Post interview, in which she revealed that actually it was a love song, after all.

"It was a love song to my craft,” she argued. “It was a love song to my intention, to my heart and soul. I was fighting for the essence of some truth inside of me, which to me is a beautiful love song. It just wasn’t a duet between Peter Cetera and Amy Grant.”