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About

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.

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Strings MagazineGear

String Pioneers: Giovanni Bottesini—Master of the Double Bass

September 12

Known in his time as the "Paganini of the Double Bass," Bottesini changed people’s ideas about what the instrument could do.

Bass Orchestral & acoustic Special Focus Stories May-June 2026

Read at Strings Magazine ↗

One letter a week, in your inbox.

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String Pioneers: Giovanni Bottesini—Master of the Double Bass

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