A NEWSLETTER BY SOUNDX : BASE · SOUNDXBASE.COM
Check 1, 2, 3
Issue 006 · October 2026 · Monthly · Dubai, UAE
Check 1, 2, 3 is SoundX : Base's monthly dispatch — the signal from inside our world. One artist you should know, two things worth your time, and three things straight from the studio. This month we came first, and the first thing we built got better.
— The SoundX : Base Team
SIGNAL CHECK · COMPANY UPDATES
What's happening at SoundX : Base
SOUNDX : BASE · FIRST PLACE
First place at AQCEC.
On 30 October 2026, SoundX : Base won first place at the Al Quoz Creative Entrepreneurship Competition, run by Dubai Culture. Thank you to Dubai Culture. More on what the win makes possible in the next issue.
SOUNDX : CODE · UPDATE
Control 1.0.2 is live.
Three things are new: a faster start, automatic camera selection, and support for more Macs. If you have Control, download 1.0.2 and install it; the update takes the place of the version you have.
New here: your laptop camera is a controller. Your hands move the faders, the effects and the transport, in any VST3/AU plugin host on macOS. No hardware. Free for 14 days from first use, $49 to keep.
SOUNDX : WORKSHOPS · FIRST TAKE
The first record is on its way.
The first First Take group wrote, produced and recorded at Dr. Head over four Saturdays. The song that will open First Take Records is mixed and on its way out. The next group opens once the record is out. Five places.
1
SEGMENT ONE
Artist you should be following
Nils Frahm
BERLIN · PIANO / ELECTRONICS
Nils Frahm plays the piano like someone who also builds them. He had one made to his own idea: the Una Corda, built by David Klavins, one string per key instead of three, so quiet you hear the felt. His studio is Saal 3 in the Funkhaus, the old East German radio house in Berlin, where he recorded All Melody in 2018 with the room as much a part of the record as the keys. On stage he moves between a grand piano, an upright, the Una Corda and a bank of synthesisers inside a single piece, and the sound comes from the physical act of getting from one to the next. In 2019 he left social media and did not come back. You find him at nilsfrahm.com, or in a room.
SEE IT LIVE
Tripping with Nils Frahm
The concert film, shot over four nights at the Funkhaus in December 2018. A good first show to watch because the camera stays on the hands: the pedal work, the reach between instruments, the moments when he waits.
START WITH: ALL MELODY · NILSFRAHM.COM
2
SEGMENT TWO
Things worth your time
Read. Watch. Think.
01 OF 02 · LIVE PERFORMANCE
The live show is the last thing that cannot be copied.
A song can now be written, sung and mastered by software before lunch, in a voice that belongs to nobody. It can be split into stems, sped up and reposted by anyone with a phone. Recorded music has, for most purposes, become infinite. The show has not. Two hundred people, one night, a band slightly too loud, a singer who changes the second verse because of something she felt in the first. That difference also explains a strange pair of numbers: tickets cost more every year, and a stream pays roughly what it did ten years ago. People have worked out which one is scarce. For anyone making music now that is less a warning than a relief. The thing nobody can copy is the thing you already do when you turn up and play.
02 OF 02 · MUSIC CULTURE
Half the people buying vinyl do not own a turntable.
Luminate asked 3,900 Americans about their listening in 2023. Of the ones who had bought a record in the past year, half owned something to play it on. Among listeners in general it was fifteen percent. So a great many twelve-inch sleeves are going from the shop to the shelf and never meeting a needle. Nothing about this is a mistake. People are buying the artwork at a size a phone cannot show, a lyric sheet, a colour of wax, a thing to hold from a night they were at. The record spent a century being the way you heard the music. It has gone back to being the way you keep it. Streaming did not kill the object; it turned it into a souvenir, and souvenirs sell. The pressing plants, with their waiting lists, would agree.
3
SEGMENT THREE
From the studio
Three things we're working on right now
PROCESS · 01 OF 03
Print the effects.
When a reverb, a delay or a whole chain is doing its job, bounce it to audio and switch the plugins off. The official reason is the computer: fewer plugins, fewer dropouts, a session that still opens in five years when the plugin does not. The quieter reason is that a live effect is a question left open, and open questions get reopened every time the session loads. Printed, the reverb is simply part of the recording, the way an amp is part of a guitar track.
LISTENING · 02 OF 03
Screen off.
Play the mix from the top with the display asleep and a pen in hand. The waveform shows where the loud parts are and where the drop lands before a single bar has played, and the eyes tend to win. Without the picture, the intro is suddenly as long as it is for someone on a train. A verse sags that looked fine while the arrangement filled in on screen. A vocal line turns out to be unclear once the lyric is not there to read along with. Each time attention drifts, a note goes on the paper. Afterwards the list is usually short, and it is usually right.
LIVE · 03 OF 03
Soundcheck the quietest song.
The loud song gets checked because it feels like a soundcheck. The quiet one is where the problems live: the dimmer hum, the hiss from a direct box, bleed from the drum monitor, a vocal reverb tail that is all at once the loudest thing on stage. None of it shows at full volume. All of it shows the moment the band drops to one guitar and a voice, which is also the moment the room stops talking. Checking that song first means the noise floor, the bare vocal and the monitor levels get set for the whisper. The loud one tends to look after itself. It rarely works the other way round.
SoundX : Check 1, 2, 3
ISSUE 006 · OCTOBER 2026
© 2026 SoundX : Base. All rights reserved. Dubai, UAE.