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 all that wild 3D geometry you see in live shows and installations.

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 samples are ready for full voltage control.

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 free. Maybe we’re really good people or something.

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 modulation source.

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.

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.

Texas-born composer Maggi Payne has just quietly been busy being a legend over decade after decade. Well known to Mills College (as its Center for Contemporary Music co-director until 2018), if you don’t know her, you should. And this is just the kind of Sunday to gaze at some crystals and listen to her ethereal textures on the then already-vintage Moog modular Series III, in a tip straight from The Bob Moog Foundation.

It’s been running continuously, without a break, since 2012. Every Thursday morning, Disquiet’s Marc Weidenbaum posts a call to a community for a new compositional assignment. And this week, the project reaches the 750th (!) week. That means a call for something epic.

It might blur the line between VJ/animation tool and score generator. But SIGN/e lets you produce graphical scores that live inside an Ableton Live session, as abstract shapes appear and shift in time with the electronic music. And with the right players, it looks like a godsend — free, provided you can run Max for Live.

If you’re in high school, take note — and if you’re not, this may make you wish you were. Electronic music production gurus Dennis DeSantis and Erin Barra are hosting a week-long intensive at the storied Eastman School of Music. I wanted to know how Erin and Dennis would approach the program, so they’ve shared their ideas about music tools, creativity, and pedagogy with us.