Why I Love...

Our ears are so used to hearing music made in recording studios that it can sound quite different to hear something that was recorded with an ambience...

If you were to ask me which electric guitar I most pick up when I play for pleasure, not work, I do have an answer, absolutely and definitively.

The Nagra VI is a visually stunning, operationally simple, and a technologically versatile 8‑track digital audio recorder, derived from a long genealogy of superb‑sounding and beautifully engineered machines...

When Catherine Marks asked me to be a part of this special issue of SOS, I was honoured to be included among this awesome community of women.

I believe SOS still stands out. If you look at its coverage of events like Superbooth, I think you can see that difference.

One of my favourite musical sounds ever is the unscripted, unplanned, impossible‑to‑replicate sound of an orchestra setting up for a session.

There’s a running gag in modular circles about how someone has just completed their system. But in a few days, maybe a week, other modules will start popping up out of drawers and things will change.

As an immature, financially irresponsible man‑child with lingering delusions of rockstardom, I have a modest collection of guitars...

Not all hardware loopers are created equal. This is quickly discovered when you dive deeper into creating sonic architectures...

Multitrack recording at home, a decade before the Portastudio...

While ambient music can be stereotyped as meditative or calming, it bridges the gaps between noise and silence, helping us find solace.

I bought my first CD player in 1984. I had been lusting for one since I first saw/heard the new format three years earlier,...

My first experience with distortion was with guitar pedals. There was something amazing about physically stomping on a device...

Could live streaming open up fresh worlds for your music?

The electric guitar — has there ever been an instrument so identified with rebellion, with danger, with transgression?

Sometimes you need to free yourself from the reign of the click track and headphones...

Live sound has been a fascination of mine ever since I did my first live sound job at a pub in Cambridge back when I was at college and around 18 years old.

The state of flow is a term used in different practices ranging from sports to the creative arts, but what does the state...

When I started my musical career in 1968, playing live was all there was. My first band Uriel lived for the moment when...

Modern, computer‑based music technology has revolutionised home production. For all the positives, though, one downside...

My school attendance was, ahem, erratic to say the least. The only place I felt I was any good at anything was hitting drums...

How a setback forced the writer to question and freshen the way he had been doing things...

Should arranging play a role in music education?

With your laptop to hand, have a go at performing a rough mix on your headphones whilst the sun is shining. You might be surprised how inspiring it can be!

SOS reader Ashley Pomeroy celebrates the creative power of gates.

Isn't 'the future' meant to be all about user convenience?

The lovely thing about electric guitars is that you can tweak them to your own preferences in terms of both how they feel to play and in what features you add to them.

Not long ago, I learned a sobering lesson about pet hates and how they can trip you up. I initially dismissed the 1010music...

When I was but a wee lad, I loved things that were noisy. But as I got older, I started to appreciate moments of calm...

Good photography, like a good recording, comes from a mix of experience and pragmatism...

With the live music industry on pause, artists have had to find new ways to connect with their fans. Cue Tim’s Twitter Listening Parties...

Great‑sounding gear with big feature sets — what’s not to like? Well, for one, user interfaces that are so obscure you forget how they work the moment you put down the manual...

Sam Inglis’s leader regarding vintage gear got me thinking about similar myths which surround vintage saxophones...

If you care about sound but have previously considered video games a distraction, do yourself a favour: pick a title you like the look of, don your favourite studio headphones, and get immersed.

I’m addicted to YouTube. A couple of weeks ago, its slightly scary algorithms coughed up a video clip from the BBC’s 1980s ‘...

If regular open mic nights aren’t quite right for the emerging army of knob‑twiddlers, loopers and beatmakers, where do we go to perform?

There’s an element of art in the design of passive speakers that’s somehow diluted, lost even, once you put the crossover upstream of multiple power amplifiers...

The EBow is a small plastic‑cased gadget, powered by a 9V battery, and when it’s hovered over a guitar string, it causes it to vibrate...

When a studio also has helpful staff, talented engineers and clued-up assistants, the whole experience is a joy.

JBL Control Ones with dented grilles, sticky with fake blood, painted bright yellow for some forgotten scenery reason, are the unsung heroes of theatre audio delivery.

It's fair to say that keytars have had bad press over the years. It's my view that this malicious campaign was started by...

My confidence grew to the point that tackling surface-mounted components was not the horror I was led to believe...

When you use chance operations correctly, you end up challenging yourself constantly...

Even if some people who hear it loathe your music, there will always be some who adore it. Whether you care about either camp, or just decide to make music to please yourself, is entirely up to you.

Steve gave me his time that day, he was good-humoured and made it fun. He showed me how synthesizers work and how to create sounds... it was magical.

Almost no cell service reaches my home studio. People come here to record, and within moments of arrival, they inform me that they have zero bars... Then a wonderful thing happens: they put away their phones and we get to work.

For all the headaches it's caused my mechanic, my car has been of huge value to my musical life. My mobile disco lets me indulge my guiltiest musical pleasures without fear of judgement...

My name is Simon and I have Gear Acquisition Syndrome....

I am a bit older than most Sound On Sound readers. I was in high school when I watched the Beatles get introduced...

It wasn't until life dragged me by the scruff of the neck out of bed at an unfathomably early hour that I began to learn the value of being up before everyone else.

Verticality has been such a revelation that I now no longer own a beanbag!

Don't get me wrong, I still love my tube amp. But the quality–of–life improvements that this device has brought to the table (or stage) is undeniable.

Fretless bass: the instrument that dare not speak its name. It had its 15 minutes of fame in the '80s, when almost every bass player who'd caught a glorious moment of Jaco Pastorius in Weather Report or in Joni Mitchell's band had a go at fretless...

"Teaching this stuff has empowered me to really learn to master the studio so that I can teach it better."

“Garage band sessions, where the drums have been mixed on a single microphone, embody honesty and humanity.”

"I love the fact that recording and production has become so cheap."

"Tracks in the context of an album can have a totally different effect in comparison to hearing those tracks in isolation..."

"With its unique voice and rich timbre, the acoustic guitar in the hands of a creative mind has unlimited possibilities."

"It's a harrowing journey trying to turn a cube-shaped room in an apartment building into a listening room suitable for mixing a quality record."

"I have resisted the explosion in modular, monosynths, polysynths and gizmos... because of the lack of focus they inflict."

“I’ve loved standalone sequenced synths and grooveboxes since coming late to the Roland MC202 and Korg’s Electribes. But the computer always seemed the way forward...”

“...in a big band arrangement the goal is not simply to play the song with a big band, it’s to imagine something unique with it.”

“Nothing, to my mind, represents the harmonious marriage between the creative and the technical quite like a patchbay.”

Over the last few years, while so many musicians are bemoaning the death of their own CD sales and the singular lack of income...

I love music. Of course I love music. Why else would I make it and record it and listen to it and write about it? But I also love silence...