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 [...]
We reviewed LIVKONTROL favourably back in April when it was initially released for iPad. It has just received a fairly hefty update, and is additionally now available for iPhone and Android (it is in fact the first Live controller available on the Android platform). With this in mind, we decided [...]
String parts are used incredibly frequently in electronic music, yet they can prove infuriatingly difficult to get right. Often, even when using high quality samples, they can sound sterile and unrealistic. There are, thankfully, a number of techniques you can use that will increase the realism of your string parts [...]
At least among older keyboardists, monophonic, analog synths have gotten greater visibility in recent years. The Cure’s Rodger O’Donnell’s first solo album The Truth in Me (2006) involved the Moog Voyager, while Depeche Mode’s Sounds of the Universe, even as mediocre as the result was, featured some vintage Moogs. The [...]