About Us
Our Promise
Well that alliterates and rhymes. But what do we really do ? Our promise means that we ...
- We serve music producers, engineers, and musicians of all genres, from beginners to professionals,
- with news, reviews and opinions to help them make the best choices,
- covering all types of music making and production, with a bias towards software instrument and effect plug ins, DAWs, and related services.
Our Principles
We were founded on the following principles. These are our reasons for creating musicmanta. We always will try to stay true to them.
In-Depth
When we do our in-depth reviews, we try to go further, broader and deeper, and not just scrape the surface. We try out products in our reviews from a musician’s perspective, test each of them for countless hours. We always think about what else we as musicians would like to know, in order to ultimately help people make the right choices for them.
In-Dependent
Unlike most other news and review sites, we are not owned by a publication house, music retailer, education company, manufacturer, or other commercial entity. We are run by and for musicians. If we carry advertising, affiliate links, or receive any value-in-kind products, we will always declare this in our Clarity Commitment.
In-Clusive
We are always here to serve musicians. No matter your ability, whether you are a beginner or seasoned professionals, no matter what genre, or computer platform you use. We believe every person should be treated with respect, no matter their background. We are keen to working with like-minded people and welcome feedback.
In-Joyable
We think making music is one of most fun things to do. That’s why we want to make musicmanta “in-joyable”. (We know it’s actually spelled enjoyable :-). But we strive to be more than that. “In-Joyable” to us is when you forget about everything going on around you. When you forget about time because you are so “in” the moment.
Our Clarity Commitment
Have we used the product ?
We are musicians, and try to use as many products and services as possible ourselves. However, sometimes we are not able to. For example:
- The product may not be available yet.
- There is no free trial available and we have not received a free license from the creator.
- We have not yet had time to try out the product.
In those cases, we write our articles on the information available to us at the time, including press releases, videos, articles, and other public information.
We always declare when we have been able to try the product or service described, and when we haven't.
Have we received a free license or product loan?
Often, we use demo or trial versions to test software that anyone can get their hands on. At other times, we receive a free license. This enables us to review the full product or service. Occasionally, we give away such a license to our newsletter subscribers.
When it comes to hardware reviews, we receive products on loan to conduct the reviews. While this is obviously the only way to conduct reviews, we still declare this. We have never received any hardware products for free or at a discount.
We always declare this at the top of our articles.
Does the article contain affiliate links ?
Some of the links are affiliate links. This means when you buy a product or service after using an affiliate link within a certain period of time, musicmanta will receive a commission from the retailer or manufacturer.
Affiliate commission helps fund the running of musicmanta, such as software and website hosting.
Using affiliate links will never cost you any more than going to the website directly.
We always declare affiliate links by marking them with * at the end.
We always include the cheapest offers we can find, whether we receive a commission or not.
Our Team
Christof grew up in a musical family with his mother a music teacher in Germany. He learnt the piano from the age of 9, first classical piano, before learning into jazz piano. During those formative years he played in several big bands, pop and jazz combos, including performing regularly at local festivals and at regional jazz competitions winning prizes with his band.
At that time he also started to embrace the emerging home computers for making music, first using an Atari 1040 ST running Cubase 1.0. This computer even made it into the Science Museum on London together with Cubase 3.0. The Atari was controlling via its built-in MIDI several synths and drum computers such as Korg DW 8000 (which he still owns), Roland D110, Roland R-8m, and Yamaha TG 77. He devoured magazines such as Keyboards and Sound on Sound, collecting them over years. Christof now is excited to take this life-long passion into this new project musicmanta.
In the daytime Christof is Head of Brand Activation for Kleenex UK & Ireland, working for Kimberly-Clark. And in the evenings and on weekends he produces music under the moniker grainbow, and runs musicmanta.
Christof now lives in the United Kingdom (in West Kent, about 30 miles from London), with his wife and three teenage/ adult children and a cat called Missy. He loves not just music making, but also manta rays (having swam with them a few years ago - hence the name musicmanta).