Roland has one more announcement — a 1.5 update for its flagship TR-1000 drum machine. That includes note sequencing, a must-requested keyboard mode for playing bass and melodic parts on the gear, the ability to swap patterns and kits with effects on without a hitch, and a lot of tweaks and UI improvements.

It’s the size of a standard guitar pedal. It needs no power It’s… covered in jacks. It’s Mulch Box, the first hardware from Go Outside, and it’s a stunningly simple idea for signal routing any of your gear, minijack and full-sized jack alike.

It’s not just some extra keys or minor feature tweaks. Arturia’s MiniFreak 49 has evolved the range into a synthesizer you can freely explore just by playing, not programming. It’s a fusion of tactile experience and sound, right when we need that. Here’s a full hands-on test.

The kawaii look of the mini Rolands in the Boutique series has returned. There’s one vintage remake — the JUPITER-08, this time with full polyphony and then some (up to 32 voices). And there’s something new: the n/vision wavetable synth.

20-year-old Palestinian producer Abed Eyad is making beats from the rubble, surviving amidst genocide. He talks to us about what that’s like, what drives his productions, and how to support his music.

The myth of Drexciya is getting its moment at the Toronto Biennial, as retold by Underground Resistance. That’s free through December 20th if you’re in Ontario, but let’s kick off a watery weekend with the accompanying playlist, too, courtesy UR and Sumberge label manager Cornelius Harris.

teenage engineering, the company that made news for slipping in an interview that it isn’t making new synths (maybe), might also make news for making its synths do new things. There’s an official (not hacked!) firmware update for the op-xy flagship, and it adds a new drum synth, multichannel audio, dynamic filter, and detune. The […]

No, we do not all want to be reduced to brains in a jar. Music has always been about gesture, whether embodied in the breath or touch. So now is the perfect time for the LinnStrument, the human-scaled expressive grid from Roger Linn. Roger writes to point us to some of the latest musical examples […]

Okay, class: today’s reading includes a short but inspiring passage by Estevan Carlos Benson, who has lately been suggesting we treat our musical listening biome in the same way that we do our gut. Along the way, we get birdsongs and whistle bottles from Ecuador millennia ago and Peru today.

Cycling ’74 has a surprisingly packed Max 9.2 update out now, with improvements and additions for Jitter, the Web, V8 (JavaScript), buffers, video on Windows, Gen, and the Ableton abl collection. It’s a slew of nice stuff for patchers.