You know you’re at peak modular when Moog is reissuing 1970s synths for US$30,000. It wasn’t long ago that people were relegating modular synths to closets, selling them off, and even – really – throwing them in dumpsters. Now, the once-archaic racks of synthesizers connected with patch cords are suddenly cool. Moog rockstar chic aside, […]

One of last month’s more predictable NAMM announcements was, at long last, an update to Novation’s Launchpad line that adds RGB color support and pressure sensitivity. But that means that it’s easier to compare the new Launchpad Pro with the spendier (but also more powerful) Ableton Push. It’s been a few years since the original […]

Maybe it’s because people have started collecting lots of gear. Maybe it’s a shift in how people play live. Maybe it’s just that we’re getting more than enough mileage out of our laptop as the machine for mixing and tracking and recording and mastering and managing our tour and our social network. Whatever the reason, […]

What if any iOS app could talk to any gear, and any gear could talk to any app – none of this stumbling around with wireless, but over good, stable wires and plugs? What if, from your Mac, you could see any app or connected hardware on your iPad or iPhone? And what if on […]

Your iPad could be a perfect step sequencer. Could be, anyway. It’s portable. It’s easy to prop alongside other equipment – the digital equivalent of a music manuscript notebook. It has a long battery life. It can connect to MIDI. And above all, its interface means you can touch the interface directly, which is ideally […]

From a design standpoint, it was beautiful. Auxy already demonstrated that a stripped-down app could provide an elegant way to simply produce musical patterns. Using a clean, piano roll-style graphical interface, it was finally a demonstration that you could make a music app for editing notes that felt native to a touch environment. There was […]

Hidden in last month’s update to Logic and MainStage is a feature a lot of sampler lovers have been missing. You need the latest MainStage to access it, but it allows you to easily create sampled software versions of external instruments. Italian developer Redmatica had a host of technologies for transforming hardware instruments into software […]

The renaissance in modular synthesis has sent a strong message. Open-ended sound design, made by connecting sonic capabilities, can inspire musicians’ imagination. Now, part of the joy of racks of modular gear is the chance to feel these connections in your hand – plugging cables, turning knobs. But that doesn’t mean that the required hardware […]

MIDI is a magical lingua franca between, well, sort of everything. But that’s only if you get it connected. And then once you do have it connected, you might want to tame its messages so they accomplish what you want. Now, the buzz is wearing off following last week’s avalanche of new music gear announcements. […]

Never say never. Few would have imagined just a few short years ago that essentially all – not most, but all – the major 2015 electronic instrument news out of the annual NAMM trade show would come down to 70s-/early 80s-style analog synthesizers, in the form of keyboards and modular. Nor would you imagine two […]