Tabla de contenidos para January 2026 en Sound On Sound UK

AutoTune Pro 11 (reviewed in SOS June 2025: https://sosm.ag/antares-autotune-pro-11) remains Antares’ flagship product, offering both graphical/manual pitch correction and harmony generation alongside automatic pitch correction. But they’ve long offered more affordable versions that concentrate on the automatic correction side of things, and replacing AutoTune Artist is the new AutoTune 2026. The most obvious change is a GUI redesign, though the controls and settings are largely familiar from earlier versions. Simplicity You can pick from two modes, Modern and Classic, the former promising more natural results and the latter offering the older AutoTune 5 algorithm, which apparently remains popular. Other than that, the main control set has been streamlined to just three parameters: Speed, Humanize and Flex Tune. The retuning Speed should be self-explanatory, while Humanize allows AutoTune to pitch-correct sustained…

With a background in aviation electronics, Pete Hamstead came to the guitar world with different ideas from most designers, but arguably his most important was to design analogue amps that boast much better noise performance than the classics, and his recipe works: I’ve played through a couple of their amps and as well as kicking out a great tone, they’re whisper-quiet in terms of noise — to the extent that when not playing through it, you really wouldn’t know the amp was on! Red Lines This is all achieved through component choice and skilled circuit design (as opposed, for example, to any noise-supression processing such as expansion). Naturally, Hamstead soon went on to bring his expertise to bear on analogue stompbox design, and we’ve already been impressed by a couple…

With most of Electro-Harmonix’s effects pedals, you use just a few intuitive controls to perform a specific task. But Oceans Abyss goes way beyond this remit. While it isn’t exactly a budget unit, you get a lot of processing power for your money, and I’d say it finds itself in the rarefied company of pedals such as Strymon’s Big Sky, Source Audio’s Collider, Boss’ RV-500 and IK’s AmpliTube X-Space. With dual stereo reverb engines and additional effects blocks, you could argue that the Oceans Abyss is in fact a dual-engine multi-effects pedal. Its main focus, though — at least where the 128 presets are concerned — is very much on reverbs, with the other effects generally playing a supporting role. It can create reverb effects that go way beyond the…

Very occasionally, a new product creates a real buzz within the industry. Word spreads in trade-show corridors and dealer showrooms, and suddenly everyone is clamouring to hear this new phenomenon. Sometimes it turns out to be a damp squib. Sometimes, as in the case of Celemony’s Melodyne all those years ago, it’s the start of something very special. It’s been a while since anything else had that sort of impact, but the jungle telegraph has definitely been sounding about Sony’s 360 Virtual Monitoring Environment. On the face of it, that might seem odd. After all, isn’t Sony 360 Reality the ‘other’ immersive format in a market dominated by Dolby Atmos? And aren’t there plenty of other products on the market already that promise to deliver immersive virtual control room environments…

Nashville-based producer and engineer Jeff Balding has worked with huge artists such as the Eagles, Faith Hill, Morgan Wallen, Blake Shelton, Taylor Swift, Shania Twain and Megadeth, to name but a few. Asked to nominate a favourite sound from his vast back catalogue, he zeroes in on the drum recording for Shania Twain’s 1997 hit ‘Man! I Feel Like A Woman’. Jeff Balding: “Mutt mentioned he’d always loved the sound of drums on a riser, so we kept that concept for Shania’s tracks.” The Luxury Of Time “On most tracking sessions in Nashville, you might spend an hour dialling in drum sounds. ‘Man! I Feel Like a Woman!’ got the benefit of three full days of auditioning drums, trying different placements, and fine-tuning sounds for the album. We went through…

Audio interfaces mostly connect to computers over Universal Serial Bus, or USB. Back in the day, computers used the rectangular Type-A USB socket, while peripherals used the house-shaped Type-B socket. Today, both computers and interfaces use the smaller Type-C socket. Depending on how recent your computer is, you might find your Type C sockets labelled USB 3.1, USB 3.2, USB 4 or Thunderbolt. But delve into the specifications of your audio interface, and the chances are you’ll find it’s actually a USB 2.0 device. How can this work? And why are interface manufacturers apparently stuck in the past? What’s The Difference Between Type‑C And USB 3? The lettered connector type and the numbered USB standard refer to related but different things. The connector type determines how electrical links are made…

Some years ago, Hammond tonewheel organ emulators — often called ‘clonewheels’ — achieved such a degree of realism that (by and large) only those who played them could hear any significant difference between the original instruments and the emulations. Nowadays, you can stick the likes of a Nord C2D or Hammond SKX Pro in a fake wooden case, and nobody in the audience will be able to tell whether you’re playing a fistful of zeros and ones or a menagerie of rotating thru’penny bits. But as players, we always want something new, something improved, something that woos us to hand over large wodges of cash for the promise of sounding better than ever before, and it’s this as much as anything that forces manufacturers to carry on developing existing product…

/* Vibe *//* Coding */ 1 How Anyone Can Create Plug-ins 2 Got an idea for a plug-in, but no idea how to code? Read on... If you make music with computers then you surely use plug-ins. They’re everywhere: sequencers, samplers, instruments, inserts, effects, utilities such as spectrograms and MIDI filters, and more. But have you ever thought about making your own plug-in? Perhaps you have an idea for a plug-in that doesn’t yet exist, but you don’t know how to make it yourself? Until now, your chances of making your own VST, AU or AAX plug-in were limited unless you could write code, and had the time to invest in building your idea, or you could afford to pay someone else to do it, or you were famous enough…

The KeyStep and its derivatives have become almost ubiquitous in the synth community. You see them everywhere at synthesizer shows and on YouTube videos and they’re clearly a perfect fit for anyone working with MIDI, software and hardware. And so, with a product so useful and successfully baked into our workflows, it takes quite a bit of gumption to attempt to improve it. This will be a story of losses and gains, and whether that’s a happy story depends on what you see as important in a multifunctional two-and-a-half octave compact MIDI controller. New Hardware My first impressions are that it’s the same form factor of the original but with the knobs removed. It’s fairly light, made of relatively robust plastic, and shallow in depth. The plastic knobs and squishy…

Smooth, real-time polyphonic pitch-shifting remains a real technical challenge, and with most pitch-shift pedals processing artefacts are generally audible when shifting chords. Boss’ latest attempts to rise to this challenge are the compact XS-1 and the larger, more controllable XS-100, both based on the same underlying pitch-shifting technology. Adopting the familiar Boss compact pedal format, the XS-1 Poly Shifter is the more straightforward of the two new Boss pitch pedals, furnished with a Balance knob to blend between the dry and shifted signal, and a Shift Value rotary switch that determines how far the pitch is moved up or down. The first seven positions are semitones and the last three are octaves, with the choice of one-, two- or three-octave shifts. I found the numbers around the Shift Value control…

Of all the great German microphone manufacturers, Schoeps seem to maintain the lowest profile. Most people who are serious about recording classical music will have extensive experience with Schoeps mics, but in the rock and pop world, they can fly a little under the radar. That’s partly because, unlike Sennheiser, Neumann or beyerdynamic, Schoeps are not generalists. They do not make dynamic mics, or large-diaphragm models, and they don’t offer a range to suit every budget. Their entire product line is based around small-diaphragm capsules, of uncompromising quality. Historically, moreover, there has been no obvious Schoeps counterpart to the U67 or MD441: no iconic, instantly identifiable object that is ever-present in studio photos or documentaries about classic albums. Apart from the vocal-oriented V4U, Schoeps mics are deliberately made to be…

Regular readers may recall, last year I found a set of custom-moulded ACS Emotion Dynamic hybrid IEMs to be the perfect solution to the challenge of playing bass in a silent-stage setting. These just-launched models employed a setup of twin balanced armatures for midrange and highs, plus a balanced-armature super-tweeter, combined with a custom-made dynamic driver to give the impression of more ‘weight’ in the lows courtesy of the dynamic driver’s ability to ‘move more air’ than balanced armatures. Of course, given that we are talking about a dynamic driver small enough to fit inside an IEM along with all the other drivers, the vent tunnels and tuning filters, we are not talking about moving very much air... But a little goes along way when it is coupled directly to…

Lauten Audio’s Kick Mic is an end-fire capacitor microphone, designed specifically for use with bass drums. In contrast to some conventional kick-miking practices, this mic is intended always to be placed inside the drum, via a hole cut in the resonant head. According to Lauten Audio, this approach addresses common issues such as low-frequency build-up, phase problems from reflections within the drum shell, and unwanted bleed from other kit components. Physically, the Kick Mic is robust and compact, suitable for both studio and live use. The mic body measures 125 × 50mm and it weighs 290g. An included swivel-mount collar with a thread adaptor (for compatibility with both EU and USA mic-stand threads) allows precise positioning inside a kick-drum port. Unlike some swivel mounts, this one locks in place very…

The benefits of using EQ to flatten the response of a monitoring system are now widely accepted, and competition is hotting up. In 2024, IK Multimedia introduced ARC Studio, a hardware device that can load room correction profiles created in their ARC software. In 2025, Audient countered with the ORIA Mini, the first dedicated, standalone solution for hosting profiles created in Sonarworks’ widely used SoundID. ARC and SoundID will both improve the in-room response of a speaker system. SoundID is also designed to correct the frequency response of headphones, but the ORIA Mini can’t host these headphone curves. There are a handful of audio interfaces that can do so, but there’s never been a dedicated hardware counterpart to the ARC Studio or ORIA Mini targeted at headphone listening. If you…

Founded in California in the mid-1960s, Audio Engineering Associates are more familiarly known by their initials AEA, and best known for their range of high-quality, handcrafted ribbon microphones and preamplifiers. Their involvement in this area dates back to 1976, when they took over the repair of RCA’s ribbon mic range. 1998 saw the release of the first AEA mic, the R44C, and 27 years on AEA still produce it — but their range has grown considerably since then, to include 10 ribbon mics, five mic preamps, and two phantom-powered, active DI boxes. Now, the company have moved further along the signal chain, with the recent release of the AEA 1029, a stereo VCA compressor. First Look The AEA 1029 takes the form of a 1U half-rackmount device, and shares the…

If you’re mixing in multiple studios, working on location, or dealing with an untreated room, monitoring consistency becomes your biggest challenge. Most engineers reach for headphones as the go‑to alternative, but there’s another solution that’s been hiding in plain sight: the same in‑ear monitors that revolutionised live sound. IEMs offer something that neither headphones nor most rooms can deliver — absolute consistency. While they might seem like stage gear, they’re solving monitoring problems that working engineers face daily, from mobile recording setups to critical listening in less‑than‑ideal spaces. A Shifting Landscape The way we monitor has changed dramatically over the past decade. Where once you might have worked primarily in a single, well‑treated control room, today’s reality often involves bouncing between project studios, hotel rooms during touring work, and home…

4MS MetaModule Eurorack Module The literature accompanying Expert Sleepers’ Disting NT multifunctional module includes a section titled “What is it not?”, which reads, “The Disting NT is not a ‘virtual modular’. There are no virtual cables flying around.” It continues: “It is not a ‘patch player’. It is not the intention that you do all the complex setup on a computer and then copy it over to the module.” What could Expert Sleepers possibly be referring to here, I wonder? Surely not the MetaModule from Portland’s 4MS, with its computer-programmable virtual modular environment and potential scores of virtual patch cables? Needless to say, as a doting user of the Disting NT, I was intrigued to find out. The MetaModule does indeed present a virtual modular environment that can accept patches…

In the previous part of this series, I introduced the concept of hybrid stereo mic arrays, and explored some of the initial practical processes you can undertake to choose either an established named array — all of which are defined precisely — or to adapt the idea to tailor your own to the recording task in hand. This time, I want to dive a little deeper into the subject, and we’ll start with some useful tools that can inform your choice. Visualisation In Part 4, I mentioned the advantages of visualisation tools for optimising the SRA and capsule configurations, and the increased parameter interaction when tweaking hybrid arrays means good visualisation tools become even more helpful. However, there’s another way of looking at these things that I’ve found very educational…

HexDrums is a collaboration between Hexinverter Électronique, a Canadian Eurorack modular company that closed its doors in 2022 due to post-pandemic supply chain issues, and Erica Synths, who subsequently acquired the rights and continued manufacturing, selling, and supporting some of Hexinverter’s most popular modules. Amongst those modules were the Mutant Drum series, a collection of x0x-inspired drum voices that have become the core of this analogue drum machine. There are 10 drum voices comprising two bass drums, a flexible percussion engine called Machine, snare, clap, rimshot, hi-hat (open and closed), and two sample-based cymbals. The most obvious equivalence is with the mighty TR-909. The HexDrums wears the influence proudly, but is not shy about deviating from established norms and treading its own path. Hex Appeal The HexDrums is a chunky…

Just when I thought Bristol’s Future Sound Systems were getting ‘serious’ with the Cric, they put a cartoon frog in its manual with a speech bubble saying, “Hi there! My name’s Francis and I’ll be popping up here and there to guide you towards certain things to look out for when using Cric.” Francis Crick was, of course, one of the great British scientists, and such in-jokes would be incredibly annoying if they didn’t somehow align with Future Sound Systems’ design ethos perfectly. From their filters to their oscillators to their modular guitar preamps, the company’s philosophy combines solid pragmatism, labcoat-worthy experimentalism and a certain light-hearted — surreal, even — creativity. I say all of this because, in many ways, the Cric is the ultimate expression of this philosophy, which…

Neural DSP’s guitar‑rig modelling plug‑in range caters for almost every style of guitar tone you care to think of, but the company have won a particularly loyal fan base in the modern metal and rock community. Their latest release, Archetype: Misha Mansoor X, will certainly to appeal to that audience, as Mansoor’s innovative guitar playing, and his writing and production work with bands such as Periphery and Animals As Leaders, have influenced a whole generation of modern metal guitar players. Perhaps best known for using down‑tuned and extended‑range guitars (his endorsements include a signature seven‑string guitar with Jackson), Misha has tailored his rig to work in that context and, of course, that’s reflected here within Neural’s virtual recreation. I’ve explored the GUI of the Archetype plug‑ins in previous Neural plug‑in…

When we first launched SOS For Artists (SOSFA), it wasn’t all that easy to try before you buy. Now, thankfully, you have a number of options. Not only do we have two subscription tiers available — Essentials and Pro (of which more another time) — but so that you can get a good taste of what’s possible before you commit to a sub, you can now sign up to a free version of SOSFA, and test-drive a more feature-rich seven-day trial version. Obviously there are plenty of features you can only find in the main subs — we couldn’t give away everyone’s plug-ins for free forever, for example! — but you should find that there’s more than enough in the free and trial versions to allow you to experiment with…

Universal Audio have built up an incredibly strong brand by marrying vintage and modern sensibilities. In part by cultivating relationships with other big names from the analogue world, they’ve generated a strong association with the golden age of tape-based recording — yet, since the late ’90s, the products on which they’ve built this reputation have been digital. The UAD-2 Powered Plug-in platform, the Apollo range of Thunderbolt audio interfaces and the Sphere modelling mics all major on traditional values, but they realise those values through DSP. An all-UA recording system can thus mimic the sonic qualities of tracking to tape, on vintage mics, through a classic console and outboard, but it does so within a modern computer-based environment. The cost of such a system is a tiny fraction of the…

Available in two versions, Lite and Pro, Eventide’s Temperance takes reverb plug-in design in a new direction, not only allowing its simulations to emulate realistic spaces as you might expect, but also to function almost as part of an active, musical instrument. Traditional reverbs replicate how sound diffuses in air and bounces off walls, either by capturing IRs, or with synthetic reverb algorithms based on FIR filters (multi-tapped delays), using a mixture of comb and all-pass filters to recirculate the sound. By contrast, Temperance operates in what Eventide call “the modal domain”, where each space is represented by a very large number of differently tuned resonators. Eventide describe the process as the resonators behaving rather like tuning forks, each one tuned to a specific frequency. This suggests some parallels with…

Australia’s Innerclock Systems have been around for 20 years, but you may never have heard of them. They specialise in a niche corner of the music technology market: MIDI timing and synchronisation. They obsess over jitter, port alignment and sample accuracy, and create tools that work to eliminate the timing problems inherent in music production. Until now, they have mainly focused on MIDI clock generators. The GridLock II promises a lot more: it is their new flagship MIDI interface. In fact, Innerclock Systems are billing it as the first ever “professional” MIDI interface. Why? Well, there are certainly a lot of ports, both USB and 5-pin. It supports 5-pin MIDI, USB MIDI, Din-Sync and CV/Gate. There are also some very impressive specs on timing, which promise event, clock and port-to-port…

“I’m categorised as a songwriter and a producer. But I also feel an artist in how I create sounds, and help bring an artist’s vision to life. What I do is not about me. It’s not about making a name for myself. It’s about the music that comes out of collaboration. I don’t care if it takes one person or five or 10, the question is always: how can we make music that gives us and other people the chills? “Out of all the things I’ve worked on, I don’t think there was one time that we thought, ‘We need to make a hit today.’ Instead, you land on an idea, it becomes a thing, and eventually hits sometimes happen. The question in that situation is always, ‘How can I…

Released in 1995, the DPA 4060 and 4061 not only propelled Danish Pro Audio (as DPA Microphones were known back then) onto the world stage, but also redefined expectations of what miniature microphones were capable of. By combining measurement microphone and hearing aid technology, DPA created a capsule for those microphones that became the foundation of their miniature microphones for many years. The 4099 supercardioid instrument microphone, released in 2009, married a 4060‑type capsule with an interference tube to produce the world’s first miniature shotgun microphone. In 2018, DPA introduced their Core technology, with the aim of reducing harmonic distortion at higher sound pressure levels. That was incorporated in the d:screet 4060 and the d:vote 4099, which were released later that year. Most recently, in January 2025, DPA announced their…

The Aum Guitar Prana Pedal is outwardly identical in connections and features to the pedal that came with the company’s original Vibraslide, the brainchild of Aum Guitar’s Gareth Whittock. Bearing some comparison with devices such as the Ebow and Sustainer guitars, the original Vibraslide used a hand-blown glass slide that connected to the pedal via a thin and flexible mini-jack cable. Whereas an Ebow houses both the pickup and string drive transducers, the Vibraslide used the output from the guitar’s own pickups as the source, amplified the signal within the pedal, and then fed it back to the strings via a transducer within the slide. Like a Sustainer guitar, the Vibraslide was able to drive all the guitar strings at once. This new system sees the pedal in a new…

The last time we looked at control surfaces, the focus was on single-fader units. And whilst many people are perfectly happy with just the one fader (or indeed, none at all!), others prefer working with something that feels a little more like a traditional console. At the top end of the market you have the likes of Avid’s S4/S6 and Yamaha’s Nuage — big, modular beasts designed to take the place of large-format analogue mixers in commercial mixing and post-production studios — but there’s now a healthy selection of products aimed at home and project studios that still offer a useful amount of hands-on control, but in smaller, far more affordable packages. This month, we’re rounding up a selection of eight-fader surfaces that offer DAW control either over protocols…

Q How do I stop my USB mixer feeding back to my DAW? I’m an experienced computer user, but have relatively little experience using Windows with a DAW. I had a configuration that was working well a year or so ago, but recently started using it again and now have a problem that has defeated me! I use a Windows 10 (version 22H2) computer with a Mackie ProFX6v3 USB mixer, with Reaper as my DAW. I have the latest Mackie driver installed and the latest Reaper version. The problem is that everything going to the Mackie over USB (on channels 3+4) is coming back on the computer input channels 1+2, whether it’s the metronome or playback of other tracks. Even general computer audio (also set to use ProFX channels 3+4) shows…

I think it’s important to have open ears when you’re a music-maker. I like to listen to everything, because it’s all got musical potential in some form or other. I feel like the sounds of nature, a bustling city, or even devices such as dishwashers and cars are just as interesting as acoustic or electronic instruments. I wonder if other musicians feel the same? We often focus on craft when we’re producing music. It requires a huge time investment to acquire the skill to play an instrument well. It also takes time to develop our own style and taste. Songwriting is a craft that needs constant effort too, and engineers and producers need to learn to get results from equipment that often resembles NASA mission control... and then you also…