Apple's Logic Pro for macOS and iOS just got some powerful new granular features for Alchemy and Sample Alchemy, plus new modes for the sequenced slicer/effect Beat Breaker. Once you do know where to find the new features, it opens up major sound d

Capital and private equity continue to fly in the music and music tech industries. CVC has acquired a majority stake in the music distribution giant DistroKid, with Insight VC keeping a significant share.

The post CVC private equity now has a ma

For my semi-regular program POST for Refuge Worldwide this week, I focused on new releases. This highlighted Lebanon in particular and still didn't cover the flurry of releases there, but it covered other places, too. It's all recommended, so h

EPROM, the West Coast experimental bass and production legend, meets Minimal Audio’s Current with Memory Rites. Here’s a guide to exploring those sounds, whether the full flagship synth or the new Current Expansion Player.

The post EPROM built a

School's out for summer. But Ableton's getting ready for back-to-school, soft-launching Ableton Learn with lessons for starting from the beginning with music and production. And there's a twist: its interactive features are powered by the s

You wake up. It’s the year 2003. Some upstart software developer called Audio Damage wants to let you patch a combo filter-delay however you like, including ways that will break your ears. Ronin is reborn as ShinRonin, from a time when software develop

Yeah, it's time for July-full moon in Capricorn-GAS shopping guide round-up. Ramageddon may have come for your game consoles and computers, but for now, your synths and drum machines and software have some discounts! Phew.

The post It’s a te

Kees Tazelaar's On the Threshold of Beauty is a wonderful plunge into the history of electronic music in the Netherlands, 1925-1965, including the Philips Pavilion and the World's Fair, but a whole lot more. It's free to download now -- the

iZotope is now coming to rest post-Native Instruments as the music software maker is acquired by Boris FX. And when they say founder-owned, they mean it: the guy's name is actually Boris (Yamnitsky). The pairing frankly makes more sense than either

Korg's NTS-3 is an absolute joy -- a cute, pocket-sized, inexpensive kit that you can load up with custom effects. But that gets even more interesting once you add Sinevibes' library of effects. And now you get one especially created for the X/

Using your iPhone (or iPad) as a camera continues to get easier and more flexible. Blackmagic Camera and Apple's own Final Cut Camera each got significant updates recently. Apple wins here either way, but the Blackmagic app in particular opens up a

Timed with the release of Clairvoyant Dimensions, his new album with saxophonist Jeff Hollie, the JuJu & Jordash and Magic Mountain High mainstay talked at length about pressing record and jamming, the lesser-known synths behind the album’s shimmer

Long before anyone was teetotaling screen time like it was some kind of vice, we once stared into our displays for no reason at all, as long as possible. Friends, I'm here to tell you that that dream is alive, and everything from your latest smartp

D16's kick plug-in PunchBox was already a legendary drum weapons development laboratory, full of layers of crunchy, cruel, wonderful sounds. The Polish developer isn't messing with that formula, but they've packed more than just a few extra

It's a portal into a wonderland of retro-inspired gear, all in Reason. Sweden's own Erik Karl Stephan Söderberg built EKSS as a one-man passion project, building Rack Extensions that ooze personality—that boutique hardware feeling, but all in t

Our friends from Venezuela are facing a horrific reality. Wednesday night, the country was hit by two back-to-back earthquakes, each among the strongest in a century. As I write this, the official confirmed death toll is well over 200 and rising, with

We live in dissonant, uncertain times, and maybe our consciousness struggles if we try to make it fit square corners and easy forms. So now is a perfect time to feature long-time favorite label Facade Electronics out of northern Mexico. Their opening r

I missed this when it dropped earlier this month -- Synthtopia was there! But now is a perfect time to chill out to the smoothly gliding sounds of this original Trautonium-inspired synthesizer design in progress. Flexur can cool down an overheated Euro

Sleepwalking? Unexplained seizures? Neighbors have a rodent and plague problem? Don't worry, and don't be spooked by what some nuns told you! You just need the handheld, open-source Scaepe - Noiseferatu DIY kit!

The post Noiseferatu: op

This has to be peak 2026 music tech. Across every feed, producers I follow are posting the same revelation: they’re finding their own music in training sets used by AI. Investigations by Alex Reisner at The Atlantic are making this more visible — and v

Juneteenth is about emancipation, and it's expressed in musical joy across the USA today. Here are our friends from Black Techno Matters with their community calendar of events today -- one might be near you -- plus two recent releases you should h

Your sequencing gets upgraded -- including cameos by Pac-Man and the LOGO turtle. You get even more secret weapons for drum synthesis. You get the hot new RANDOM8 collab from Befaco and Mylar Melodies, cloning their new hardware. There's just so mu

"I'm not particularly interested in typing prompts to make stuff, I'm interested in breaking them and dissecting them," writes Jasper Shuoyang Zheng as he introduces Latent Terrain. Now using an intuitive, elegantly designed open-sour

Following GForce's official renditions of Oberheim instruments, now we're treated to an official Sequential synth in plug-in form. This Prophet-5 combines painstaking recreations of the various revisions with new features like MPE, a dual-layer

The most exciting add-on for Ableton Live this spring for me is actually not an Ableton Extension. It's warpradius, a Max for Live device by Jon Doe One that transforms the entire grid into a single expressive percussion surface. It employs a Besse

The Ableton Extension SDK has only just been launched to the public, but there are already plenty of useful and fun Extensions to try right away. And that means even before you try hand-coding or vibe-coding your own, you might already find a reason to

You press a button to set it in motion, and from there, it's anyone's guess. The screen just makes glitchy patterns at you. The knobs and buttons do... something. Pressing the screen resets. But once it's connected, the AW noise maker opens

It's the absolute opposite of "AI" as you've seen it. There's no online connection, no giant data set. And here, neural nets help you to escape generic presets and defaults -- not lead you into them. The new PhenoType for Sonic Ch

At attention! Unfiltered Audio has taken their deep drum synth and favorite effects and remade them as VCV Rack modules. This is instabuy territory ($10-20 a la carte or an intro pricing of $30 for the set, compatible with the free Rack).

The p

It's a tragic contradiction: as Lebanon's state of emergency worsens, support wanes. That means it's time for updates on Lebanese-organized music efforts we've covered, plus a new call to action. Today, you can tune in and support a 12-

Cairo-born producer ABADIR is back with a four-track gut-punch of Arab rhythm, a foot-stomping, belly-activating powerhouse of an EP. True to its label, The Primitivist is neither fetishized nor repurposed: it’s Rami speaking in a native musical langua

Imagine crossing vocal synthesis with a rungler, vocal circuits entangling with each other like they're "speaking in tongues." Or enveloped grooves that bend and twist with liquid controls, shaped with tuplets and polymeters. Creator Jell

Francisco Partners, the private equity firm, is now exiting Muse Group amid 2026's financial maneuvers. Muse Group is the Cyprus-based conglomerate that owns the publishing giant Hal Leonard, audio editor Audacity, notation software MuseScore and S

You run up against a limitation in Ableton Live, or you've got a creative idea. What if you could make it happen using code? That's the Ableton Extension SDK, out in public beta now (JavaScript, TypeScript, Node.js). And just like that, we'

Behind the headlines, there is the reality of living through war. Our friend in Kyiv, Kaximia, (part of Tembra Modular, “Let’s explore modular synthesis”) is back to talk about how music can be an outlet. The past days and hours have been horrifying, f

Epic layoffs in March cut deep into the audio and music teams. But there's hope that their work will live on in Unreal Engine and MetaSounds, via what is arguably the most innovative sound work built into any game engine. Unreal Engine 5.8, now in

Forget any associations you may have with additive synthesis. Monomono's Niseko takes that harmonic content and makes it accessible and expressive, via the UI or an input (including Push and MPE).

The post Niseko is a gorgeous, instant must-

Kids today, with their 31 equal divisions of the octave. Yes, it's the music of Nicolà Vicentino, a Renaissance theorist and composer who built his own microtonal harpsichord to accommodate his experimental tunings. But it's not just a theoreti

Kelli Cain and Brian Crabtree are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their monome company and project this week. For anyone moved by their creations over the years, there will be no escape from the feels in this gallery -- and, of course, I couldn'

It's an oscillator, a step sequencer, a modulation and envelope source, a quantizer (with custom tunings) -- even a scope, thanks to its interactive, animated visual interface. Thorn Audio's new Eurorack module can make anything from elegant, p

Piaman, aka half of RYOKO2000, formerly Pianoid (bio: "doesn't play piano at all") is turning himself into a human Vocaloid, with joysticks and fast reflexes. And this is what you need right now. Linkhole trail begins now:

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It's Memorial Day in the USA, Whit Monday in Germany and other parts of the West, and since what's truly sacred is shopping, that means some deals running through the end of the day.

The post The best long weekend music gear deals you ca

There's something magical about playing sounds with polyphonic expression. It means translating sound ideas directly to your hands and improvising live, rather than having to go back and edit those ideas in later or take your hands off the keyboard

Deep in the forest of Superbooth earlier this month, Korg showed off some up-and-coming gems, if you knew where to look. That included a compact NTS mixer, updated Sinevibes effects for Korg gear, and add-ons for the phase 8 "acoustic synthesizer,

In a world that's definitely trying to make us dumber and more depressed, let's grow our brains instead. Our friends over at Derivative have a free course that finally makes it easy to start working with POPs -- the Point OPerators that enable

The library for the free and open source VCV Rack has been on fire lately. But this one is a standout: 4ms has a sprawling library of ROMpler modules based on classic drum-machine samples. And don't let the "ROMpler" part fool you: those

Something special happened when Unfiltered Audio untethered their effects section from their mind-blowing drum machine Battalion: this delay and reverb opened up to creative rhythmic use everywhere. And for some reason, they're giving it to us for

Minimal Audio is celebrating its anniversary, and so we get the excellent Hybrid Filter for free for a limited time. And what a nice multi-mode filter this is, with a bunch of exotic modes, amplitude modulation, and a built-in envelope follower as a mo

It's not lost on me that the same week InMusic announced its acquisition of Native Instruments, NI's original founder, Stephan Schmitt was busy showing off new ideas about what a digital instrument can be.

The post C25, from Nonlinear L

Soundmaking and music can fill you with energy, so much so that you might miss out on the importance of a good night's sleep. jumango has engineered a solution: tuck this DIY synth into a blanket, and it falls asleep.

The post jumango made a