Audio & music gear guides & articles

The Tony Maserati collection represents a meeting of industry titans. Waves, one of the earliest and most enduring audio plug-ins companies, has made its reputation on quality bundles of their own pl…

Sound is a wave, much like the ripples on a still body of water when a rock is dropped into it. The larger the wave, the lower the tone. Lower tones, known as bass frequencies, travel in wide long w…

Ableton's Live has been with us for some time now and since it’s initial release in 2001 it has proudly sported a simple one window interface and transparent ’no frills’ operation. This simplicity…

Nothing will work without electricity unless you're jamming at the local drum circles down on the beach. Electrical installation studio power is often overlooked. Studios will setup a “clean feed”…

Out of the blue, it just appeared in my office, like the megalith from Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. A cube: 7.5 cm long, as white and smooth as paraffin, with a pair of LEDs on four of its six…

The magic of the recording studio has often mystified even the most seasoned professionals. With all the knobs, switches and buttons on various gear and large format consoles, no wonder confusion set…

While there is a huge choice of filter effects available on the market today, it could be argued that many of them lack the character and warmth of some of their hardware counterparts and while so…

Well known for its guitar amp simulators, Line 6 has recently updated its Toneport range of audio interfaces, and renamed it POD Studio while they were at it. Let's take a look at the new UX2 and se…

Since the dawn of synthesizers, there have been many types of synthesis to emerge. But the same can not be said about their approaches to work flow or interfaces. With Synplant, Sonic Charge has take…

In the beginning, Leo created the Telecaster. Keith and Bruce were happy. On the second day, Leo created the Stratocaster. Jimi and Eric were in ecstasy. On the following days, Leo created the Jaz…

Integrating analog modeling, FM synthesis, digital waveforms, and sample playback, the Nord Wave positions itself as a versatile multi-synthesis specialist. Focusing on immediate programming as oppos…

A.I.R., Digidesign’s virtual instrument division, continues to provide creative tools for users of their Pro Tools software. This time, it’s a sequencer within a sequencer, dedicated to loops of all…

Universal Audio continues its arms race against other DSP card manufacturers, like TC Electronic (PowerCore) and SSL (Duende), by releasing the UAD-2, which comes in three models that dwarf the origi…

Before you’re ready for arenas and stadiums, where you’d no doubt call on the services of an experienced sound technician, you need to rehearse. And as long as you’re rehearsing you might as well do …

After releasing their POD X3 and X3 Live in 2008, worthy descendants in their own right of the Pod XT, Line 6 felt it necessary to update the POD Pro. So, it's no surprise they’ve come up with a POD …

In the world of electronic instruments, when you think innovation, the name Yamaha rarely comes to mind! Yet this Japanese company was the creator of the first FM synthesizer, the DX7. So just to sho…

The new Pro Tools has arrived armed with a bunch of new features: Elastic Pitch, thirty new plugins, five new virtual instruments - Boom (drum machine), Mini Grand (piano), DB-33 (tonewheel organ), V…

Though the concept may not be original, Zoom has come out with an interesting interface that provides guitarists and bassists with an intuitive software/hardware setup, but with a twist: an integrate…

After having updated its entire range of audio interfaces, M-Audio now looks to update its monitors, especially in the wake of their excellent high-level EXS66 monitors. These updates have had great …

Though there are many audio editors for PC, the Mac world looks mainly to DSP Quattro, soundBlade, Audacity, WaveBurner or Peak (a non-exhaustive list), whose features range from "very basic" to "ver…

Squier has been making low-cost guitars based on Fender designs since 1982. Because their early guitars have now become collector items for some, Squier is seeking to regain some of that magic with …

With no fewer than 26 inputs, 26 outputs, 8 integrated Octane microphone preamps, and ProTools M-Powered compatibility, the latest interface from M-Audio aims to find its niche in the category of int…

Unfortunately, we often realize too late that we should have recorded what we just played. How many times have you wished that you could go back in time and hit the record button right before inspira…

OK, here we go! This is the first of our comparative software tests on time-stretching and pitch-shifting. The competitors: 26 Mac and PC programs, from big sequencers to small applications, plug-ins…

Though not as well known for their pedals as they are for their guitars and basses, Fender has been making classic pedals for more than 50 years. Following the recent re-issue of the Fender Blender …