Ins & outs

AND THE WINNER IS...

Congrats to FabFilter, who recently scooped an Engineering Emmy Award from The Television Academy in the US. This was given to the company’s Pro-Q 3 plugin, which the academy said has “become the preferred equaliser for mixing pros around the world”.

OLD TOWN LOADED

Think you can’t make a big record on a budget? Lil Nas X has confirmed that mega hit Old Town Road cost him just $50: $20 for the studio time – he took advantage of a promo rate and was in there for under an hour – and $30 to lease the beat. Not a bad investment.

UNIQUE ACCESS

You might have some plugin emulations of classic studio hardware, but Access Analog takes things a step further by providing a plugin that actually controls real hardware remotely via the cloud so that you can use it in your DAW. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s real!

OH CATALINA

macOS 10.15 Catalina is here, but at the time of writing, most music software developers were still advising people not to upgrade as their products weren’t supported. Hopefully the situation will improve pretty quickly, but you have been warned.

BREXIT THE STAGE

Who knows how this will have played out by the time you read this, but there were warnings that a no-deal Brexit could make it “unviable” for UK acts to tour in the EU because of all the extra red tape involved.

POOR PRODUCERS

New research from the Music Producers Guild indicates that 88% of producers and sound engineers have been asked to work for free in the past three years, with 71% agreeing to do so. 5% said most of their work was unpaid, which is slightly alarming.