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Industry News & Trends · · 5 min read

Week in Review – Monday, March 31, 2025

Pedals, plugins, Neil Young rants, and Spotify’s latest chaos machine. The March 31 edition of Sonic Odyssey’s Week in Review brings the gear heat — with just enough snark to keep it honest.

Photo by Techivation on Unsplash
Photo by Techivation on Unsplash

Another week in the wild and weird world of music production — where plugins keep multiplying, Neil Young is (still) right, and someone at Spotify decided we all needed algorithm-powered mashups. Fortunately, we’ve got just enough gear, gossip, and Gen X commentary to make it all bearable. Let’s get into it.

...oh, by the way, our new intern (who shall remain nameless for now) assembled this week's article. He's still learning on the job so we'll be correcting things as we go.

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We also revised our "Best Interfaces under $300" guide (check it out, yo!). We've also got a new guide on reverb and delay plugins. [11]

Keep an eye on the deals page! Plugin Boutique will be running their final deals of March and then launching their new April discounts on Tuesday. I can't recommend this strongly enough: buy the waves bundles when they're on sale. You can keep upgrading them and then one Black Friday you'll find yourself buying Mercury for $10, a cup of coffee and a ticket stub from an absolutely epic Skynyrd show from 1976 in Indianapolis. [12]

We’re keeping the DI hot, the opinions hotter, and the existential dread of your plugin folder at a rolling boil. Check back next Monday for another round of gear talk, plugin madness, and probably a couple more things that make us yell at clouds. Bonus points if you bring snacks.

If you enjoyed this roundup, share it with a fellow gearhead or subscribe to Sonic Odyssey so you never miss a Monday drop.

— The Sonic Odyssey Team

  1. I was always the "good with computers" kid. I, mean, I was and I still am "good with computers" but people start thinking that your Computer Science degree means you fix computers for a living. 🤦🏼‍♂️ ↩︎

  2. I don't typically feature guitar stuff here (Guitar Odyssey, anybody?) but as somebody who owned an Etch-a-Sketch as a child and absolutely loves Loves LOVES a good tremolo, I couldn't resist. ↩︎

  3. Seeing the complexity of these things kind of breaks my brain. It's probably for the best that I just opted to be a dumb metal guitarist ↩︎

  4. I was ready to start raging about our dear Moogseum not being featured, but it's there. Come see it, folks! Spend a weekend in Asheville this summer! We really need the tourism. plz & ty 🙏🏼 ↩︎

  5. FOLK ROCK LEGEND!? Jesus FUCK man. Okay, I don't give two shits about Mumford and Sons but calling Neil Young a FOLK ROCK LEGEND? Have you never heard his albums with Crazy Horse? Fuck, dude, go listen to "Weld" just for the walls of distortion and feedback. [13] ↩︎

  6. While I use Superior Drummer, EZBass and EZKeys for my writing and demoing I am EXTREMELY OFFENDED THAT PEOPLE THINK GUITARISTS CAN JUST BE REPLACED WITH SOFTWARE ↩︎

  7. I'm going to keep shouting this at clouds: YOU NEED A GOOD DI BOX. ↩︎

  8. So no, intern, it's not a multiband compressor. It's a project manager. Christ. [14] ↩︎

  9. I'm old enough to remember when "mash-ups" were called "medleys". WHY DO YOU DAMN KIDS KEEP CHANGING THE LANGUAGE? Don't you know English hit perfection in 1997? ↩︎

  10. Speaking of making beats on your gameboy, there was this melodeath band in Fort Lauderdale (or thereabouts) that had a singer that would "play" his game boy on stage. Had it hooked up into the mixer on a DI. I'm assuming he had some sort of synth cart on it. ↩︎

  11. reverb and delay plugins reverb and delay plugins reverb and delay plugins ↩︎

  12. I mean, I wasn't born yet but FUCK imagine seeing Skynyrd in 76, the lineup with Steve Gaines. Holy shit. I'm gonna go get my 75 LP Deluxe out and rip through a version of On The Hunt. ↩︎

  13. That's it, the intern is losing bathroom privileges for the week ↩︎

  14. Seriously, though, this is akin to bringing all the corporate joy of Jira into the creative world. Nice, can we just completely destroy music production by creating our own version of Slack? 😭 ↩︎

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