In the age of the VST, dance music synths and synth patches are a dime a dozen. With all of the free (or rather unfortunately free-to-pirate) options out there, I mean that quite literally! For a hardware synth to capture the attention of today’s producer, it often must be stylish, [...]
Drum machines have played an important role in the history of modern dance music. Originally designed to accompany practicing musicians or to replace session drummers in the studio, the drum machine was adopted by electronic dance music in its early years and has been a staple of the genre ever [...]
Ableton Live 9’s release was a big deal, but rocking new features that the community has wanted for quite some time apparently wasn’t enough. Alongside with the release of the software came a brand new piece of hardware called Push, which works hand-in-hand with Live 9 almost flawlessly to create [...]
The long-awaited Bitwig Studio has finally come out of its beta stages and into its first official release, but does this cross-platform digital audio workstation offer enough features to jump ship? For Linux users it most certainly does. Gone are the days of getting a DAW to run in an [...]
KRK continues to take its ROKIT line of active studio monitors up a notch with Generation 3, or simply G3. Crossfadr reviewed the G2 in June 2012, finding this then-boundary-pushing line a high-quality product for the price. Ideal for DJing and studio work, the ROKIT 8 G3 retains the same [...]
As much attention as the electronic music world gives DJs and producers these days, instrumental-based groups continue to thrive – and not just those that have been around for decades, like the Pet Shop Boys and Depeche Mode. One such act is Suntalk. Based in New York City, the group [...]
If you ask DJs what they like most about any given DJ software, one of the responses you’re likely to get is the way their software manages a vast library of music. Whether this is via simple iTunes integration or more complex library managing features (such as Serato’s crates or [...]
Only a few short years ago, touchAble came onto the market and blew us all away. The idea of controlling Ableton Live from across the room without a hard-wired MIDI controller was brand new at the time, and the elegance with which touchAble packed so much content into a compact [...]
PreSonus is no stranger to the studio gear market, having maintained lines of mixers, audio interfaces, and monitor controllers for a number of years. So, including studio monitors in with that variety – as PreSonus did officially at NAMM in January 2013 – makes sense. At the time, two product [...]
If music throughout the 2000's and 2010's – and that’s pop, rock, and EDM specifically – had any specific characteristic, it’s this strange affinity for the old. It’s almost as if those late ‘90s disco compilations, somewhat tongue-in-cheek and somewhat attempting to disco-ize the Eurodance craze of the time, become [...]