Yamaha is the one giant name that has mostly shied away from revisiting its past synth glory – but all that could soon be set to change.
Music
303 Day: the freaky CDM Megaroundup
DIY + Unusual Gaming Gear Music Music tech Tech March 3, 2025
A multi-city hybrid experimental livestream event for Ukraine is on now
Music Tech February 24, 2025
Automated techno: Eternal Flow generates dance music for you
Techno, without all those pesky human producers? Petr Serkin’s Eternal Flow is a generative radio station – and even a portable device – able to make endless techno and deep house variations automatically.
Surge is free, deep synth for every platform, with MPE support
Surge is a deep multi-engine digital soft synth – beloved, then lost, then brought back to life as an open source project. And now it’s in a beta that’s usable and powerful and ready on every OS.
Late Mike McGrath (Muffwiggler) in video interview for I Dream of Wires
The makers of the film I Dream of Wires have memorialized Mike McGrath, the legendary forum hosted and modular community builder whom we lost this week, releasing their full interview with him.
Moog Matriarch puts all your analog sound shaping in one keyboard
Moog has taken the elements of their semi-modular line and given it a flagship – a patchable, calico-colored keyboard with sequencer, 4-voice paraphonic synth, and effects in one keyboard.
AUM is perfect iOS music hub, now with Ableton Link and MIDI updates
Speaking of tools to glue together your gear and serve as the heartbeat of your studio – AUM. This iOS super-tool can serve as an essential hub for combining apps and hardware in any combination – and now it’s even more savvy with Ableton Link and MIDI.
Pioneer Squid is a monster standalone sequencer for your gear
Forget for a second that Pioneer is the CDJ and DJM company. Their latest TORAIZ goes a radical new direction – making what might be the biggest mainstream hardware sequencer since the MPC and Octatrack.
Founder of music tech forum has died; outpourings of support for Mike McGrath
One of the largest forums for music tech nerd-kind this week reports the loss of its founder: Muff Wiggler’s creator, Mike McGrath, has died. The Internet responds.
Now ‘AI’ takes on writing death metal, country music hits, more
Machine learning is synthesizing death metal. It might make your death metal radio DJ nervous – but it could also mean music software works with timbre and time in new ways. That news – plus some comical abuse of neural networks for writing genre-specific lyrics in genres like country – next.
Behringer update: TC-Helicon hardware mimics IK Multimedia products
The Behringer effect: TC-Helicon, once known for its high-end gear for vocalists, is now a badge on a line of products copying the layout and design of existing IK Multimedia products.