Live 12 is here, including Performance Pack and new tuning site

Ableton Live 12 is now out of beta – plus both the Performance Pack and a tuning site available to everyone (with or without Live). Here’s a review of everything to know.

303 day: minisite, Roland and Serato 303, 606 control vinyl and music

There’s no new hardware from Roland for 303 Day, but what we get instead is music – a minisite, a mix, a vinyl pressing (really), and records that double as control vinyl for Serato. It comes with sounds courtesy artists J. Rocc, Fast Eddie, Shadow Child and DJ Haus. And if you just want to have your own 303 party right now, there’s a mix from J. Rocc.

Arturia Pigments 5 audio input: video tutorial, tips and tricks, free presets

Pigments 5 from Arturia adds the ability to route audio input into soft synth, opening up new sound design possibilities and turning Pigments into a multi-effects plug-in for any source. Here’s a detailed guide on how to use it, with notes – and some presets to get you going.

Submerge and Underground Resistance mini-doc: techno from the source

The musical revolution led by underground Black artists in Detroit has brought Roland back to the source. An editorial team from the Japanese gear giant goes inside the story of Submerge and Underground Resistance.

Noise Engineering Legio grows again; Sinc Legio is Bride of Sinc Iter

Noise Engineering continues to revive beloved and now-unavailable modules from their back catalog, thanks to their updateable firmware platforms. But Sinc Legio is more like a sequel, with internal modulation, new algorithms, and stereo chorus atop the original’s formula of phase modulation, hard sync, and wavefolding.

Listen: Falyakon, between Berlin and Ramallah, with an urgent music mix

Palestinian multi-instrumentalist and experimental DJ Falyakon has long been an inspiration to anyone who’s met her – for her energy, her vision, and the depth of feeling and activism threaded into her music mixes. We were fortunate to have her in the Refuge Worldwide studio over the weekend, in a mix that says what no opinion piece or social media post can.

Polyphonic patching, chords in cords: Tiptop Audio’s ART arrives

Imagine polyphonic modular patches – but now imagine that with polyphonic patch cables. Announced in May, Tiptop Audio’s ART system and patching approach arrives now as modules, a system, and a whole mess of videos exploring patching with this paradigm for polyphony and integrated expressive data, all via analog connections.

Spike Jonze meeting Björk, in a free zine with photos and … wontons

Turn the clock back to 1995. It’s the era of Bjork’s “It’s Oh So Quiet.” Detour Magazine asks Spike Jonez to photograph Björk, and he’s as smitten as all of us with her creative imagination. Now we get to see still more photos of that day, plus words and a complete chifa wonton recipe – for free.

MachineRoom in Kyiv has a new 16-step trigger/gate sequencer module

The STP16 is a 16-step trigger/gate sequencer for Eurorack, with a twist – hocketing! It’s on preorder now for worldwide shipping, coming directly from Kyiv, Ukraine, where MachineRoom remains a haven for sound.

Sampleslicer MKIII is an all-new version of realtime Eurorack sampler-slicer

It samples! It slices! It dices! The legendary Sampleslicer was due for reinvention with current-generation chips. Now the MKIII is up on crowdfunding site IndieGogo, with a load of new features and an all-new USB keyboard companion.