From Friday January 27 – Thursday February 2, the excellent Saffron music tech programming is offering seven days of online workshops, ranging from running a label to vocal production to mastering. It’s pay-what-you-will, exclusively for women, non-binary, and trans folks worldwide. And with this faculty, if you identify with one of those groups, you might want to check your calendar.

How do you know analog and patch cords are really back? It’s the return of the patch book. The beloved SOMA PULSAR•23 just got an 80-odd-page tome full of patches for this unique “organismic” instrument, from community members and friends of SOMA.

You’ve got piano keyboards, you’ve got various grids. But whole new worlds of melodic playing and rapid-fire melodies become possible when you go relative. ReBoard does just that, and it makes even playing from your QWERTY keyboard “awesomely simple” — and enjoyable.

Calling Bandcamp addicts who DJ: this clever browser extension adds a DJ-style tempo slider to Bandcamp’s Web interface. It’s already feature-packed, with more coming, and a great way to preview tempo changes before you buy.

It’s a keyboard, with elements of a hammer-style action. But it’s also gestural, with per-note articulations. And now, it’s more than just a preorder concept. Expressive E’s Osmose is here, complete with artist backing from Paris to LA to Chennai India, Jean-Michel Jarre to Flying Lotus to AR Rahman.

Going on the grid is way more interesting when you compose the grid. Click Tracker, João Pais’ free and open-source click track generation for tons of platforms (even Max and Pd), keeps getting more functionality.

It’s just the piano for Ten Forward or the recreation deck of Heart of Gold. It’s made of a single piece of molded Japanese oak. It’s paired with floating drone speakers for real immersive sound. (You read that right. Flying drones.) It’s the instrument money can’t buy: Roland’s 50th Anniversary Concept Piano.

There’s a new way for AI and 3D. Instead of just feeding us a more automated version of what we now have, it starts to make immersive graphics production more like music production – complete with live jamming with others. NVIDIA’s offerings still lean heavily toward specialized use, but it’s fascinating to watch that playful thread woven into their announcements.

It’s exactly as you might expect: sample libraries are at the point of being able to convincingly recreate entire symphony orchestras, close to original recordings. Composer Simon Passmore has done that with Star Wars and Apple’s Logic Pro.

Everyone else might sign up for a gym or make some self-improvement lists. Music lovers reorganize their playlists – and what a joy to do so. So resident music lover David Abravanel is back and joins your dear edito. It’s a look back at music from 2022 that we can’t stop playing right into 2023.