When news leaked last week that synth legend Dave Smith was collaborating with Pioneer, a few eyebrows were raised. Today, it all made sense: Pioneer wanted the sound of Dave Smith Instruments’ superb analog filters on their new sampler. Since it’s a key selling point, I was curious to know more about those filters.

For many, many DJs, Pioneer simply owns the DJ booth. The ability to work with Recordbox on the computer, drop a USB stick in a bag, and then just plug into the ubiquitous CDJ is a level of convenience no one else can match. (Seriously, what other gig can you play with something you can […]

It’s genuinely hard to describe the Superbooth in words. The synthesizer lovefest dreamt up by Andreas Schneider and team in Berlin was a collision between a festival and a trade show, scattered in impromptu fashion through the chambers of the former East Germany radio facility. Visitors wandered from knob-twiddling displays into quadraphonic concerts, from combined […]

The media landscape is changing, from Apple moving to streaming and adding content on Apple Music and Apple TV, to SoundCloud adding paid subscriptions and signing deals with majors. Meanwhile, the biggest player in dance music, Beatport, is about to be untethered from the EDM conglomerate that bought it.

SX are the embodiment of just how dynamic DIY music can be. The Belgian duo, now in their second outing, make music that’s unmistakably pop, but with plenty of raw power humming under the hood. And Benjamin and Stefanie are fully invested in their collaboration in every last detail of production, from studio to music […]

The hyperactive genius force that is Jakob Haq is back to show you why the iPad can make a great music tool. This time, it seems KORG have updated their deep Gadget app with some advanced MIDI routing features. Okay, MIDI channel may not be the most sophisticated thing ever. But watch what happens when […]

At last, the world of modular meets the world of stompboxes. It’s a no brainer: after all, a modular rack already has a lot in common with a crowded pedalboard. I expected that our friends at Bastl Instruments from Czech would come up with something for this week’s Superbooth synth gathering here in Berlin, and […]

Call it music for Internets. Brian Eno has a new album coming, and you can listen to 21 minutes of gently undulating sonic seas, a weary plodding deep melody bobbing atop it, in the stream of “The Ship.”

Yesterday was Piano Day – a day recently christened by composer/pianist Nils Frahm in order to celebrate that ubiquitous keyboard instrument. (It’s held on the eighty-eighth day of the year.) There are concerts, marathons, project, releases – and unlike Record Store Day, this event won’t clog the ability to produce piano music. With that day […]

Forget sterile, corporate convention halls. Instead, this week the Communist-chic East German radio facility Funkhaus will be transformed into the sort of synthesizer summit only Andreas Schneider and his crew could imagine. It’s called, somewhat confusingly, the “Superbooth” – a reference to what had been a jam-packed exhibition stand at Frankfurt’s Musikmesse. Now, instead of […]