Per-grain processing, automatic pitch controls, drag-and-drop modulation, and audio-rate oscillations — Grainferno proves there are still unexplored frontiers in granular synthesis and hand-crafted DSP. It’s addictive to add the synth to projects, drag in sounds, and see what you can discover.

Bitwig Studio 6 has arrived after an extended public beta period. A lot of Bitwig users might barely notice, since you switched full time to this release for its polish and workflow improvements — but here’s a refresher, with tips. With all the nuances of little workflow, editing, automation, and interface interaction tweaks, you can […]

Steinberg’s Dorico is slowly realizing a dream of notation that has spanned decades of scoring software. How could you combine engraving precision (think Leland Smith’s SCORE) with graphical ease-of-use? That might sound easy, but it’s been one of the toughest challenges in music software. Dorico 6.2 is a free update that shows how much progress they’re making — before we look to the horizon and Dorico 7.

Unofficial screen reader support in Ableton Move may be new, but it’s already a revelation. Andre Louis, a visually impaired musician and technologist/artist extraordinaire, takes us on a tour of Move Everything. That’s must-watch material, I hope, for sighted users and developers, too, to understand how these features work for visually impaired users.

With an unprecedented minimum of 450,000 people displaced in Lebanon, community-led efforts are again working to provide basic aid. These often overlap with the very music and creative communities I’ve written about here, in the country and internationally. And they can benefit from your support.

Time to dust off that TI-82, TI-83, or TI-84. The graphic calculators that a lot of us used in school can become ingenious chip synths and even run trackers. And that translates to a surprisingly powerful graphing calculator-inspired synth — one that instantly became one of my favorite plug-ins.

LOBOTIX is another reason to have hope in musical imagination. Even without speaking a word of Japanese, these are instantly some of my favorite tutorials. Here, these cover the spectral synthesis modes in Serum 2 and the modular capabilities of Bitwig Grid (and Vital and PhasePlant and more). And thanks to 2020s tech, we get her in the form of an anime character.

The Digital Audio Workstation can never quite escape the timeline and its roots in multitrack tape. Tweakbench’s new Noemi, which entered alpha last month, starts from scratch. What if music in the DAW could constantly evolve and change? What if the DAW were non-deterministic?

People are not numbers, and so among the rising tide of wartime deaths around the world are some familiar faces from our communities. Soroush Khazaei was an audiovisual artist who gave generously to the Iranian scene. He was killed earlier this week in Tehran by US/Israeli airstrikes.

The best thing about Launch Control XL is that it has faders. The best thing about Launch Control is that it doesn’t — and fits into a small space. It really is that simple, if contradictory, thanks to intelligent features shared between the two.