The weekend has taken it's tole on my poor little fingers. A little box was to arrive on my doorstep on the Friday to enlighten the technological world we are living in. An upgrade of the mobility persuasion. Yes that's right, a Blackberry. These things are unreal, you can do pretty much anything with them. Most importantly you can keep on top of the latest exclusive News, Reviews, Features, Interviews, Competitions & Much more on the fastest growing music site, Altsounds.com.

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Altsounds.com is quickly becoming the most trusted musical taste-making resource. Think of us as a musical sieve. We make sure the shit music goes down the drain ensuring only the most quality bands get noticed. Our review team are not scared to knock a band off their pedestal whilst at the same time they are equally not afraid of elevating a band to super stardom. This is where you come in.

‘Curiouser’ is the follow up album from Kate Miller-Heidke, after the success of her debut album titled ‘Little Eve’, released in 2007. This time Kate and her band have created a brilliant blend of rock, pop and folk that seems to push brink of musical insanity to a new level. ...

Barry White is back! and this time, he's white. Now that I've got your attention by using the worst introduction ever, let's talk about Mayer Hawthorne. A 29 year old singer born close to soul city Detroit, the capital of soul ballads that inevitably had an undeniable influence on the young Hawthorne ...

Anyone who's taken the time to delight themselves with Grammatics self-titled debut album will no doubt be aware that it is a delicious slab of disorientation that perceives to get under the skin and with 'Murderer' it's very much a case of mission accomplished.

To start this off I'm going to talk about Arjen Lucassen and the Ayeron project but with very good reason as you shall see. Ever since the concept came to being with 1995's 'The Final Experiment' Arjen's always has had vision to push the boundaries with albums containing artists such as Fish from Marillion, Devin Townsend ...

See, here's the thing. Up in those tall glass buildings, the marketing men look out from behind their Gucci shades and plot how to sex up everything. Their preference is to get us as early as possible; the logic is that the sooner we get it on with each other ....

"Naked And Fearless" is the most recent surge of music from Jacoby Shaddix and Co., that is trying desperately to breakaway from the Nu-Metal label that Papa Roach have carried around with them since the release of 2000’s “Infest”. 2009’s “Metamorphosis” is their least nu-metal album to date and now ....

The received wisdom is that certain labels can do no wrong. Factory, Creation, Warp, Sub-Pop: these were / are surely more cultural bastions than commercial enterprises, forging ahead on the good ship of impeccable taste, never failing to spot genius in the making and doing it all for us so we don't have to..

"There will always be a well, you just have to go digging in different parts of the yard. The music will be a reflection of my divining. These days, having a label is a real challenge. The industry is changing and you have to think of ways to present artists in an arena where people are really going to 'get' the music …"

1 copy of Crash Kings' self-titled debut, 1 Crash Kings USB Bracelet, 1 Crash Kings Puzzle, 1 band poster


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MIDI drums and getting them to sound both good and real has always been a hard task for most people, particularly when it came to things like Rock and Metal music where authentic sounding drums are of the utmost important. The benefits of using a V-KIT coupled with some form of digital drum module that can be called from your computer are vast, the main being the ability to quantize each individual drum hit- something that is just not possible using audio. Imagine if you will the minor inconsistencies you would experience in a blast of double kick drum pedaling over a 16 bar break. With MIDI you could easily quantize each of these hits to their exact timings i.e. 1/16ths ensuring that every hit of every drum is technically perfect from a timing perspective ...