Angela Puxi on DG King - Nadir Saxwinds

Molly Tuttle Nominated for 3 IBMA Awards: Emerging Artist, Female Vocalist, and Guitar Player of the Year, the first female to ever receive this nomination

Nashville, TN -- July 28, 2017 -- Award-winning songwriter and virtuoso instrumentalist Molly Tuttle turns a new corner with Rise, her first release as a solo artist, which debuted at #2 on Billboard's Bluegrass Albums chart. Produced by Kai Welch, the seven-song EP was independently released on June 2nd, and celebrated with a sold-out release show at Nashville's Station Inn. On July 26th, the International Bluegrass Music Association announced the final nominees for their 2017 International Bluegrass Music Awards naming Molly Tuttle in three categories: Emerging Artist, Female Vocalist, and Guitar Player of the Year. The instrumentation nomination is especially weighted as Molly is the first female ever to be nominated in this category. Rolling Stone Country has the full list of nominees here. 

Already a familiar face in bluegrass circles and folk festivals, where she's been performing since the age of eleven, Tuttle widens her reach with Rise. "I wanted to push outside the box," she says of the EP, whose songs mix the fiery fretwork of her acoustic guitar with banjo, fiddle, drums, pump organ, electric guitar, and other flourishes. "It was a good step to finding my own sound, and not staying tied to the traditional bluegrass sound. I grew up playing bluegrass and I still love it, but I'm influenced by other styles of music, too. I really wanted to create something original."

Written during a period of intense change that found Tuttle moving from California to Boston to Nashville, Rise covers a wide swath of ground, showing the full range of its maker's abilities. She writes every song here, singing them in a voice that's both pure and pointed. On an album that also features appearances by several all-stars of the roots music world - including Kathy Kallick, Darrell Scott, The Milk Carton Kids, and Sarah Jarosz's longtime cellist, Nathaniel Smith - it's the 24 year-old Tuttle who shines the brightest.

With Rise, Molly Tuttle cements her place in the roots-music community. Recorded in engineer Erick Jaskowiack's studio outside of Nashville, the record is a tribute not only to her instrumental, vocal and songwriting chops, but her storytelling ability, too. Tuttle has never defined her ambitions so clearly, and with Rise, she's moving upward. 

"I took the title from a line in Walden from Thoreau, where he compares the human spirit to water," she says of the EP. "He writes, 'The life in us is like the water in the river. It may rise this year higher than man has ever known it.' That feels really relevant to me. It describes how I'm feeling with my music, and where I'm at with creating my own sound, and where we're at in the world right now. I knew it needed to be the title of the record."

For more information, please visit https://www.mollytuttlemusic.com/. For review copies, please reply to this email. 

Molly on the cover of Acoustic Guitar 

Molly x American Songwriter

Molly x Nashville's News Channel 5

Molly x NPR

Molly x Bluegrass Situation

On tour: 

Aug. 5 - Sugar Maple Festival - Madison, WI
Aug. 12 - Grand Targhee Bluegrass Festival - Alta, WY
Aug. 16 - West Whately Chapel - West Whately, MA

Aug. 17 - Town Crier Cafe - Beacon, NY
Aug. 18 - Rockwood Music Hall - New York, NY
Aug. 19 - Long Island Bluegrass Festival - Copiague, NY
Sept. 7 - Theatre On The Green - Cheraw, SC
Sept. 8 - Motorco Music Hall - Durham, NC
Sept. 9 - Mountain Song Festival - Brevard, NC

Sept. 15 - AmericanaFest - Nashville, TN
Sept. 22 - Watermelon Park Festival - Berryville, VA
Sept. 24 - Amesbury Music Festival - Amesbury, MA

Sept. 29 - IBMA Wide Open Bluegrass Festival - Raleigh, NC

Oct. 7 - 3 Sisters Music Festival - Chattanooga, TN
Oct. 19 - Blue Rock Studios - Wimberley, TX
Oct. 21 - Bloomin Bluegrass Festival - Farmers Branch, TX
Nov. 3 - Stoughton Opera House - Stoughton, WI 
Nov. 16 - Fingerlakes Live - Geneva, NY 
Nov. 17 - Hudson Valley Bluegrass Assoc. - Poughkeepsie, NY
Nov. 18 - Fire In The Kitchen Concert Series - Madison, CT

Jan. 20 - Calliope: Pittsburgh Folk Music Society - Pittsburgh, PA

Mar. 10 - DC Bluegrass Festival - Tyson's Corner, VA

Native Instruments releases MASCHINE Expansion BYTE RIOT

Berlin, July 24, 2017 – Native Instruments today releases BYTE RIOT, a new MASCHINE Expansion that charges MASCHINE with the lo-fi aesthetic of the chiptune scene. Packed with crunchy circuit-bent drum kits, warm 8-bit leads, and retro video game samples, it hacks into a world of modified music makers.

To some people, video game consoles and computers are useless once they are past their prime. To others, however, these bygone relics can be modified and hacked, transforming the obsolete hardware into instruments. Audio chips are electronically altered to become makeshift synths, emitting monophonic, 8-bit tones. Modified video-game gear gets repurposed, using special software, to turn the sounds often heard in 80s video games into notes that can then be played however the musician likes. While musical works using these techniques are often put into the chiptune genre, the influence of this DIY attitude can be found cross genre, with these lo-fi sounds showing up in pop, breakcore, hip hop, and grime

For BYTE RIOT, its latest release in the MASCHINE Expansion series, Native Instruments collaborated with artists Ivo Ivanov and Alex Retsis, lead sound designers at Glitchmachines to crack open early-gen computer and gaming systems to bring these primitive digital sound to MASCHINE users. Ivanov built custom units and tinkered with old-school oscillators, putting his circuit bending skills to use, while Retsis focused on essentials like 8-bit drum parts and arpeggiated chords. The result is a collection of kits that reproduce and reimagine the classic chiptune sound for any genre.

BYTE RIOT contains sounds meticulously sampled from old-school video game consoles and early-gen computer chips, including complex MIDI patterns based on classic arcade games. Various Game Boys were hacked using LSDJ and Nanoloop tracking software on custom cartridges. Fast arpeggiators were driven through Commodore 64 SID chips to sample chord variations. And Windows instruments were played through the Sega Mega Drive's FM YM2612 chip for primitive authenticity that anyone can use in their musical productions.

BYTE RIOT runs in the latest version of MASCHINE software on the entire MASCHINE hardware family, and is available exclusively at the NI Online Shop.

A compact version of BYTE RIOT is also available as an iMASCHINE 2 Expansion, for sketches on the go. Tracks can be exported to MASCHINE STUDIO, MASCHINE JAM, MASCHINE, and MASCHINE MIKRO for completion.

Pricing and availability
BYTE RIOT is available now at the NI Online Shop for $49 / 49 € / £44 / ¥ 6,280 / AU$ 79 and runs in the MASCHINE 2 software.

The iMASCHINE 2 expansion is available at the iMASCHINE 2 in-app store for $0.99 / 0,99 € / £0.79 / ¥ 120 / AU$ 1.29

Further product information and press material
Additional information on BYTE RIOT is available at:
www.native-instruments.com/byteriot