You’ve watched in awe as artists dazzle on hardware like Ableton Push, Maschine, and the MPC. But maybe your fingers just haven’t been as nimble, haven’t been as quick. Now, that might change. In a love child of Guitar Hero and a drum lesson, Melodics is here to save your pad-drumming chops.

I have two words for you: multiple playheads. Oh sure, you’ve got your piano rolls and your step sequencers and your arpeggiators. But can you roll like Johann Sebastian (or Arnold… as in Schoenberg)? Can you take a single melody, and make more complex patterns by echoing them, turning them upside down? That’s the idea […]

Yes, it’s the end of the week. Time to chill out. Time to let our friend Erika from Detroit help us to drift like a cosmic butterfly into some nice solar drift, held aloft by the delicate siren song of that new Moog semi-modular thing we’re all kinda eyeing lustfully. Oops, sorry, lost my train […]

If you’ve been wanting to let your freak flag fly with keyboards, this may be some good news. Future Retro have teased a touchplate keyboard on their Facebook channel. It’s dubbed the FR-512, and comes equipped with both MIDI and CV out (with lots of separate patch points) – so fans of digital and modular […]

Are you in a warranty-voiding mood? Have you got a soldering iron? The KORG volca bass is already a nice enough little synth. But mix in a modification that adds frequency modulation to the filter, and you get some delicious, acid good times. Skip ahead to the end of the video above to hear what […]

“I’m the operator with my pocket calculator.” No — like, actually. HoustonTracker 2 runs on the TI-82/83/83+/84+ Texas Instruments graphing pocket calculators – the kind you probably had to buy for your high school math class. And it doesn’t just make the calculator into a sequencer. All the sounds come straight out of the calculator […]

MPC lovers, you finally get a piece of hardware with everything in one place: touch, color displays, pads, buttons for workflow access. There’s just one catch: you will still need the computer. Ever looked at those beautiful color waveforms on Native Instruments’ Traktor and Maschine controller and wished you could touch the screen? Imagined pinching […]

We’ve seen apps made exclusively for touch devices like the iPad. And we’ve seen very basic touch support in desktop apps. But Bitwig Studio 1.3 is both. So, on the same day we find out about a proper touch laptop, we also get a DAW that’s ready, today, to take advantage of it. (See also […]

Apple’s strategy is clear: make one line of things that are laptops (running OS X), make another line of things that are touch-based (running iOS). That strategy has served them – and musicians and other creatives – well. You can certainly have a lot of fun with a fairly inexpensive iPad full of apps, and […]

If you’ve never heard of UK producer Powell, it’s maybe even more important that you watch this video now. There’s a lot I want to say, but I’d give away the ending. Let’s keep it to this: an adventurous electronic producer, making a raucously stuttering, intense, punk-digital record, talked to his rock idol Steve Albini. […]