Getting booked to play a nice club night or party and playing a banging DJ set is great but is it enough to make a real impression on your clients? As a DJ, how do you make sure that you always come across as professional and make sure that you’ll be recommended by every booker you work for? Guestblogger, Amar Amlani (AKA DiceDJ) shares some of his hard-won experience.

Michael Jordan has already passed the 60 year mark, and with that height comes plenty of wisdom. That he’s a legendary figure within basketball is undeniable, but his popularity stretches far beyond the court, and in the age of memes, Jordan has dropped some pretty inspiring one-liners. Can musicians and producers learn something from the GOAT of all GOATs? Definitely. Here, Guestblogger Rutger Steenbergen puts seven of Jordan’s best quotes in a more musical context.

Sampling has been a part of the music-sphere since the eighties, where snippets of forgotten gems or stone-cold classics are spliced into new tracks. Whether it’s a snatched bit of the vocals, melody, bass line or drum beat, sampling has boosted the feel of some pretty big hits. Some purists see it as stealing, but our Guestblogger Marlies sees it as a smart and creative way of recycling fragments of music and even introducing old smashers to a new audience. Here, she presents the top 10 most sampled songs of all time and lines up her own sample-heavy favourites.

Flipping back through the tomes of music history, the so-called ‘British invasion’ has happened more than once. In the ‘60s, of course, we exported the likes of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. In the early 2000s, it was names like Coldplay, Adele and Sam Smith who managed to break beyond the shores of our wee islands. But in the ‘90s, emerging from buzz-words like ‘Cool Britannia’, we had Britpop – which, if you believed the music rags of the time, was dominated by two giants of guitar-driven pop: Blur and Oasis. Here, Guestbloggers Nick and Martin have a quick look at the short-lived but oh-so impacting phenomenon that was Britpop.

DJ equipment is constantly changing and advancing, and since you can’t DJ without the equipment, the gear involved plays a big role in how DJ’s perform and produce. In this blog, we take a wide overview of the history of DJ gear as we know it and how various technological leaps have accelerated its evolution. Here, we’re going to focus on the main game-changers: the technology that caused the biggest shift within the DJ-verse. Where did it all start? Back in 1971, with the introduction of the audio mixer.

The number of audio interfaces on the market right now goes through the roof. Many audio gear manufacturers have their own line-up that includes everything from budget-friendly to high-end models. If you’re thinking about getting into music production or recording, you might be looking to pick up an audio interface. Read on to learn whether you really need one and how much money you should fork out.

What would you say if I told you twenty years? Granted, most manufacturers ‘only’ offer a few years of warranty, but anyone who’s ever owned a digital piano from one of the big-name brands will know that a fifteen to twenty year lifespan isn’t unusual. What about maintenance, you ask?

Podcasts have long transcended their status as being nothing more than roughly 30 minutes of chitchat at a roundtable. They’re big business these days, with big-name PR agencies launching one after the other. Thankfully, not every podcast has to be a huge project that involves years of research.

An extensive hardware-based set-up versus a laptop-and-DAW rig: what’s better when it comes producing tracks? It’s an endless discussion and guest-blogger Michiel Buisman knows that he couldn’t possibly settle it once and for all here. But, like he says, he’s smug enough to think he has something to add to the debate. Here goes.

Done recording your podcast? Then it’s time for the editing phase. If you prefer to keep things vanilla, this won’t take too long, but if you’re looking for a more professional radio-sound complete with jingles and background music, then you’ve got your work cut out for you. Read on for a step-by-step guide!

As a band, whether it’s conscious or not, you develop your own unique character and image, which not only gives your music some colour and identity but your gigs as well. Some well styled photos can do wonders when it comes to putting your band in the spotlight and presenting the right image, but how do you go about making a good set of photos?

Busy making music on a computer in your living room or bedroom simply because there’s nowhere else you can do it? Why not make something that’s more in keeping with the interior design and build yourself a stylish production studio? Here, Guestblogger Michiel Buisman takes an old and battered upright acoustic piano, empties it out and adds some extreme mods to turn it into a fully equipped studio workstation.