Buyers’ Guide

In Time for the Holidays

Happy Holidays, and welcome to the fun and festive December issue of RECORDING Magazine. December means it is time for our annual Holiday Buyers’ Guide, and whether you are looking for that perfect gift for someone special or to treat yourself, we’ve got you covered.

Reviews

We kick off the fun with nine new product reviews––I would feel lucky to find any or all of them under my tree this year. We start with a great new set of portable, great-sounding studio monitors as we listen to the iLoud Micro Monitor Pro from IK Multimedia.

Also, for your listening pleasure, we bring you the just-released H200 headphones from Adam Audio.

Next on our list to up your recording game, we have the new PRO Channel III from ART.

Who doesn’t love new “toys” to play with over the holidays? To that end, we bring you a pair of new synthesizers. First, we have the polyphonic analog e7 Synth from GS Music, as well as the small, mighty SEQTrak from Yamaha.

Although you can’t unwrap them, plugins and sound libraries always make a great gift. We check out the latest update to the Benjamin Wallfisch Strings Collections from Orchestral Tools. In plugins we have the new Curves Equator from Waves and the UnFairchild 670M mkII plugin from UnderToneAudio.

Our final review this month is a book report on The Mini Moog Book from Bjooks.

Interview

Our interview for December is none other than Curt Smith and Roland Orzabal, better known as Tears For Fears. Our editor, Paul Vnuk Jr, sits down with Curt and Roland to discuss recording the band’s latest release, Songs For A Nervous Planet––their first-ever live album and concert film, which also contains four brand new studio recordings. [GET IT HERE]

2024 Holiday Buyers’ Guide

2024 has been a busy year packed with tons of new gear. Over the past eighteen months, our team has reviewed 216 new products. In this year’s Buyers’ Guide, our editorial staff rounds up 42 of our favorite interfaces, microphones, monitors, headphones, and more, which we think would make perfect gifts this season. [GET IT HERE]

Features

iles Reaves wraps up his first year of RECORDING Field Notes with his thoughts on New Year’s resolutions for you and your studio, along with a few non-music studio tools that improved his workflow in 2024 [GET IT HERE]. Mark Hornsby is back with Inside the Studio—Crossway Studio to be exact where he re-records two classic Whitney Houston tracks in Whitney’s old studio [GET IT HERE]. In Studio 101, Joe Albano brings us his final entry in a year-long look at audio processors and processing with a look at stem separations, AI assistance and other cutting-edge tools [GET IT HERE].

Dave Martin is back with his advice in another Readers’ Tracks and more in our festive, fun and Holiday-tastic December issue of RECORDING.