The Panel at the Back Knows Where Everything Goes

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XLR is a magazine, a radar and a diary about music gear and the making of music — for the people who make records and put on shows, wherever they do it.

The name is the three-pin connector that every signal in the business passes through: the microphone on stage and in the booth, the line to the desk, the DMX cable that runs the lights. Studio, stage and lighting rig share it, and so does this magazine. Every few hours XLR collects what the makers shipped, what the reviewers heard, what the studios and the touring crews are doing, which producers and collectives are surfacing and what they are saying — synths and modular, plugins and DAWs, guitars and drums, microphones, monitors, PA and lights, the rooms and the people — from a few hundred sources in English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese and more, then plots what is moving. The editor writes a letter every few days. Nothing is sold here; when a link leads to a shop, that is the maker's shop, not ours.

September 16, 2026Jonah Reyes

At six this morning the only light in my room in Echo Park was the row of amber LEDs on the patchbay, forty-eight of them, and the one that matters was off: the return from the bus compressor, the point I had forgotten to normal back after Tuesday's session, which is why last night's mix came out of the monitors a hair too clean and I could not hear why.

A patchbay is the dullest object in a studio. Two rows of quarter-inch sockets, a strip of label tape, no sound of its own. It exists so that every signal in the room — the microphone, the preamp it meets, the compressor it goes through, the converter that turns it into a file — has one place where you can see the whole chain and change your mind about it with a cable. Producers talk about instruments and plugins. Engineers talk about the patchbay, because the patchbay is where the decisions live.

That is what this magazine is for. Every few hours it reads a few hundred sources — the makers' own announcements, the reviewers who actually put a signal through the thing, the studios, the forums where the engineers argue, the channels where someone spends twenty minutes on one filter, the pages where a new producer or a new collective first shows up — from Los Angeles and Berlin and Tokyo and Lagos and São Paulo, in whatever language they were written, and lays them out on one wall so you can see the chain. What shipped this week. What it sounds like, according to people who have heard it. What the industry is quietly doing behind the launch videos. Which room a record you love was made in, and with what. Who is making the next one.

I will not tell you what to buy. I have spent twelve years in rooms full of gear that was bought instead of decided on, and the records that came out of them were not better for it. A synth is a decision about how you want to spend an afternoon. A microphone is a decision about how much of the room you are willing to keep. The best studio I ever worked in had one good compressor and a chair nobody was allowed to move.

I will write a letter every few days about one thing — one box, one room, one habit, one name you have not heard yet — and the radar will do the rest.

The compressor return is patched now. The mix sounds like a mix again: a little dirtier, a little more like the band. The LED came on with the small click a patch cable makes when it lands, which is still, after all these years, my favourite sound in the building.

Jonah Reyes was born in Daly City to Filipino parents, learned to solder before he learned to drive, and spent twelve years in Los Angeles rooms: a runner in Burbank, then an assistant, then mixing records nobody has heard of and a few everyone has. He now mixes from a small room in Echo Park and from whichever studio the work is in that month — Berlin, London, Tokyo, São Paulo — with one pair of monitors he trusts and a wall of pedals he does not need. He plays bass badly and on purpose. He will not write about a piece of gear he has not put a signal through.