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XLR MAG

Signal of the week

Electric guitars & amps · 104 stories, +63 vs last week

Electric guitars & amps: 104 stories in seven days, +63 on the week before.

GuitarsPlaying Fretless Guitar Is 'Really Difficult' But 'That's What's Exciting' For Alek Darson: His Survival Guide For New Players [News] Ultimate Guitar

EuropeFender Tone Master ’59 Twin-Amp JB Edition: Neuer Gitarrenverstärker mit klassischem Tweed-Sound delamar

Latest

DJ MagLive & DJDaMetalMessiah announces FABRICLIVE. compilation featuring Novelist, Manga Saint Hilaire, Tailor Jae, more The LP is a portrait of grime in 2026, featuring "handpicked producers" and a spread of era-spanning MCs

DJ MagLive & DJThe Avalanches - No Bad Memories Music Reviews A L B U M S Release date: 16 October 2026 | Kristan J Caryl The Avalanches No Bad Memories Modular Recordings Corporate dream-pop

DJ MagLive & DJListen to Mia Koden’s new Ilian Tape EP, ‘Decode Vol.2’ The UK DJ and producer's second EP for the Munich-based label

Ultimate GuitarGuitarsPlaying Fretless Guitar Is 'Really Difficult' But 'That's What's Exciting' For Alek Darson: His Survival Guide For New Players [News] Features : The prog guitarist has been playing fretless since he pried the frets off an old Ovation with a screwdriver. Ahead of his new record, he walked us through what it really takes.

MatrixSynthSynthsCinematic-ish Chaos (SOMA RoAT + Cloudburst) video upload by Tibor Synth Explorations "This time, I’m using Cloudburst to add atmosphere to my SOMA Rumble of Ancient Times.

Bedroom Producers BlogDAW & pluginsRiverFlux Audio adds RF-E FREE channel strip to the Relic bundle RiverFlux Audio has released RF-E, a free channel strip plugin for macOS, Windows, and Linux, as the latest addition to its Relic collection.

No TrebleGuitarsWatch Victor Wooten Create a Song From Scratch with Carl Verheyen and Nick D’Virgilio Victor Wooten joins Carl Verheyen and Nick D’Virgilio to build a song from scratch, creating and arranging the music together in real time at Sweetwater.

GearnewsGearIs The Humanity of Instruments Under Threat from AI? The surge in vibe-coded instrument plugins has been overwhelming, but do we risk losing the most important feature, humanity?

UK Jazz NewsEuropeFive Points x Jam For Life This coming Saturday, October 24, musicians from across London’s thriving improvised-music scene will gather at The Social, Little Portland Street, W1 to raise money for, and awareness of…

Premier GuitarGuitarsTonewood Teardown: Polishing the Frets Hello, and welcome back to Mod Garage. We are almost done with our Harley Benton project—after working on the neck last month, there’s only one final step left before the neck is completely finished…

Guitar WorldGuitarsHow Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett’s $100 million royalty lawsuit ended with a $3 million legal bill What would reggae be without Bob Marley, and what would Marley’s music be without Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett’s rock-solid basslines ?

StereogumIndustryBob Dylan Kicks Off Tour With Live Debuts, Rarities, And Yet Another New Guitarist Last night (Oct. 17) in Oslo, Bob Dylan kicked off the Lights Of Autumn tour. At Oslo Spektrum, Dylan performed a 19-track set, playing the electric keyboard the entire night, with live debuts…

On the calendar

· Trade shows and launch events, this week's stories from each corner of the industry, and what its press is covering.

On view

This week, from that corner the newest stories from the corner of the industry you picked

The wire their own posts, translated

How records get made in 2026 from the industry's own reports

Sources

Fetched every six hours, linked to the original

About

Three pins, and nearly every signal in this business passes through them.

The magazine is named after the cable: the microphone in the booth, the line to the desk, the DMX run that fires the lights. Studio, stage and rig share the same cable. Most magazines pick one of the three. This one covers all of it, because the people we read do too — the engineer mixing a record on Tuesday is on front of house by Saturday.

Around a hundred and sixty sources, in English, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Chinese and Italian: makers and their release notes, reviewers who put a hand on the thing, studios and touring crews, the producers and collectives surfacing this month and the scenes they came out of. Synths and modular, plugins and DAWs, guitars and drums, microphones, monitors, PA and lighting. What the trade is talking about is counted and plotted. The editor's letter has just started; it will find its rhythm.

For each story: a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link out. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the maker or the photographer. A German review appears in German and a Japanese one in Japanese, as the writer published it; the link goes to the original.

Nothing is sold on this site. When a link leads to a shop, it is the maker's shop, not ours.