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, precise curves. It’s more than just another do-everything module. Now you’re playing with Splines.

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:

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.

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 to turn a knob. Here’s a look at playing the presets I made for Elastic OSC using Expressive E’s excellent Osmose 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,” including effects you can 3D-print. I’ve done some digging on what it’s about.

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.