Mixdown

10 stories

MixdownGearFloodlights in Europe: Behind the scenes with engineer Stive Collins When did you first start working with Floodlights? I’ve been working with Floodlights as their live sound engineer since 2023.

11.02

MixdownGearHagerman’s Vulture Skull overdrive runs on a vintage TV tube Hagerman Amplification has dug up a vintage TV tube for its latest overdrive, and the Vulture Skull puts both halves of that tube to work as separate stages in a two-footswitch pedal.

11.02

MixdownGearOrbiton debuts an acoustic synth with vibrating reeds under every key Every key on the Orbiton One is attached to a thin steel reed that vibrates when you press it, and it’s those physical vibrations, rather than a velocity reading, that shape what the synth does next.

11.01

MixdownGearLEWITT Mic of the Month: LCT 640 TS Choose the wrong polar pattern at tracking and you usually live with it. Set a drum room mic to cardioid, realise in the mix it needed more of the room, and the only fix is a re-record.

11.01

MixdownGearEarthQuaker Devices shrinks the Plumes and Blumes for limited MOSFET editions EarthQuaker Devices has moved two of its best-known overdrives into smaller enclosures for a pair of limited-edition pedals, the Plumes Jr MOSFET Mod Small Signal Shredder and Blumes Jr MOSFET Mod…

10.30

MixdownGearGear Rundown: Fontaines D.C. Across five albums, Fontaines D.C. have moved from the clipped, wiry post-punk of 2019’s Dogrel into darker and more layered territory, and their latest record, Dopamine Chamber , pushes that shift…

10.30

MixdownGearWaldorf releases Crema, a compact string and pad synth built on the Streichfett Waldorf has taken the string machine engine from its Streichfett and pushed it into the digital pad era with Crema, a compact polyphonic synth built for ensemble strings, layered pads and slowly…

10.30

MixdownGearBOSS adds the compact Katana-25 to its amp range BOSS has added a 25-watt model to its Katana range, built for playing at home and pitched at people picking up a guitar for the first time as well as players coming back to one after a break.

10.30

MixdownGearPlanning a regional run? The Australian Music Touring Network is now live The Australian Music Industry Network (AMIN) has launched the Australian Music Touring Network (AMTN), a free national website that maps original live music venues across metropolitan, regional and…

10.29

MixdownGearMy Rig: Kate ‘Babyshakes’ Dillon Full Flower Moon Band are back with ‘Party Hard’, a song that started as a single line and grew into one of the heaviest things the shape-shifting Australian rock outfit have put to tape.

10.29

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.