Beat Connection: Footwork
Welcome to zZounds Beat Connection. Beat Connection is a series dedicated to promoting modern and vintage dance styles the only way we know how. We do so by providing you a musical starting point to get you going in that direction. Today we focus on a style unique to our fair city of Chicago: Footwork. Feb […]
Interview With Summering
Building layered songs out of equal parts grunge, post-rock, and psychedelic materials, Vancouver’s Summering is best enjoyed when you have time set aside to listen. Each track on the band’s debut album S/T takes its time developing into a lo-fi aural scene awash in reverb and echoes. Singer Paul Stewart’s voice sits at the top of it all — […]
Maurice White of Earth, Wind, and Fire Dead at 74
Maurice White’s battle with Parkinson’s may have ended on Feb. 4th, but something vastly important will live on in the legacy of his music. Turn on the radio, maybe to that side of the dial you tend to neglect, or listen to more voraciously than others, and before today you’d be bound to hear something […]
Fret-King’s Trev Wilkinson
Whether or not you’re familiar with Trev Wilkinson’s name, you’ve likely encountered his work in a guitar or bass you’ve played at some point. Whether it was a Wilkinson tremolo system, a Roller Nut, or a set of his pickups, Wilkinson has left his mark on the guitar industry as a prolific and innovative designer of […]
The 16 Coolest Things We Saw at Winter NAMM 2016
Our crew is back from NAMM 2016 and still buzzing from all the awesome stuff we saw. There were so many photos from our coverage of the show that we wanted to condense it all into the best of the best. So here (in no particular order) are the 16 coolest things we saw at NAMM […]
Three Guitar Pedals That are Great for Bass
It’s not so much that there aren’t a good amount of bass-specific pedals that get the job done — I’m a big fan of the Boss ODB-3 and Dunlop’s bass wah, for instance. But there are certainly more made-for-guitar effects out there that are more readily available. For that reason I took a handful of guitar pedals we […]
Arturia MatrixBrute: The “most powerful analog synthesizer ever?”
“When was the last time you met an instrument that truly inspired pleasure and creativity?” Here at zZounds, we’re no strangers to marketing hype or brand-new, exciting analog synthesizers, but the above quote from Arturia’s website may be completely justified when it comes to their mind-boggling new creation released at the 2016 NAMM show — […]
JBL at NAMM 2016
The last few months have seen JBL breathe some fresh air into some of their classic speaker series, and with good results. Their newest models show clear improvements to functionality and aesthetics; the speakers just look better and are easier to use. Improvements haven’t just been skin-deep though — new and improved waveguides inside the speaker enclosures are […]
Arturia MatrixBrute: An Avant-garde Analog Synth
The MatrixBrute’s product description opens up with plenty of questions: When was the last time you felt your heart beating faster? When was the last time you heard sounds you had never heard before? When was the last time you met an instrument that truly inspired pleasure and creativity? The only question I have is how. How […]
