How to drive your tracks to the next level with customized virtual percussion So many of our favorite recordings would collapse without their own flavor of boom boom pow—the powerful percussion elements that propel a song at the drop of a beat. Whether you’re creating hip-hop, rock, jazz or R&B, your music will almost always benefit by integrating some form of percussion. But what if you don’t have access to Neil Peart, Lars Ulrich, Carter... 

MARCH/APRIL 2011 COVER STORY: FOO FIGHTERS FEATURES: MATCH GAME MUSICIAN: ALISON KRAUSS, JOE BONAMASSA PRODUCER: James Stroud Q&A’s: R.E.M., LUCINDA WILLIAMS, BOOTSY COLLINS, AVRIL LAVIGNE, NIKKI SIXX, JAMES STROUD, STEVE EARLE SPOTLIGHT: DENGUE FEVER, PANIC! AT THE DISCO, JOHN OATES, BAND OF HEATHENS, WANDA JACKSON, JASON ISBELL AND THE 400 UNIT, THE DUKE SPIRIT WHO’S NEXT: HENRY WOLFE, FRANCESCA BATTISTELLI, KINA GRANNIS INDIE SCENE:... 

Members of rock band Canned Heat shared a house on Lookout Mountain Avenue in the Laurel Canyon area of Los Angeles, right next door to Joni Mitchell’s place—until it burned down in 1969. Later that year the charred structure served as the setting for the cover of Steppenwolf’s At Your Birthday Party, shot by photographer Henry Diltz and designed by art director Gary Burden. “We just walked in there with a birthday cake, sat down and took...