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 much goodness in VCV Rack that covering the free stuff has me dizzy. Here’s your June update, with some sound examples.

“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-source Max external and UI, you can play the weird world of neural audio codecs like an instrument, transforming your own sounds into new textures.

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 architecture, and lush effects. I’ve been testing it and got some behind-the-scenes details from the devs. It’s such a total pleasure to bring that Sequential sound into the box.

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 Bessel membrane resonator model, a modal synthesis method that produces realistic, varied percussion sounds. And it’s free.

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 grab the beta and start extending. I’ll round up some of the best early resources.

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 a wormhole to warped realms of sound.

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 Charge Synplant will help you precisely define the ear-bending alien sounds you want to create in words. CDM got an early look.

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).

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-hour fundraiser bridging Beirut and the world, with DJ Haram, Hyper Gal, Marylou, Metro Al Madina, Model/Actriz, Moor Mother, Nabihah Iqbal, Snakeskin, Yasmine Hamdan, and Ziad Nawfal.

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 language that’s fully rooted and simultaneously all his own. The Primitivist by ABADIR We don’t get a lot […]