Who said electronic musical bliss required deep pockets? We’ve seen a steady flow of budget-minded gear over the last few years. What makes this equipment special isn’t just that it’s cheaper. It also has personality and produces distinctive sounds, loads of hands-on control, and fits compactly into carry-on luggage, meaning it’s a no-brainer on the […]

Hey – don’t forget Yamaha. For all the buzz about Roland and KORG (and American makers like Moog), the titan Japanese maker surely deserves its own enormous claim to synthesizer history. This is the company that made one the most influential polyphonic synths of all time (the CS-80), and introduced the world to FM synthesis […]

Camel Audio have long been a favorite name in plug-in instruments and effects, as makers of CamelSpace, CamelPhat, the Alchemy sample manipulation instrument. But their software hasn’t seen updates in some time, and today customers were greeted with a bare-bones site that presented only basic support options and a login. Upon logging in, I read […]

It’s not quite clear what just happened at Casio’s Music Gear division. Last year, their XW DJ line included a pedestrian but perfectly innocuous-looking DJ/VJ controller in partnership with Vestax. Now, in an apparent attempt to corner the market of 12-year-old producers, they’ve made two crazy-looking things shaped like the Millennium Falcon. Not a little […]

What happens when you cross drones with music? Well – some seriously complex routings, for one. Stay with us: A touch-sensitive quadcopter that sends information to a Linux machine running ROS–the Robot Operating System–that then sends information over a network to a macbook running Ableton Live 9 and Max. Somewhere in this chain, the information […]

Erased Tapes was an endlessly inspiring label in 2014. With a singular, understated focus on quality and music orbiting the keyboard, the acoustic, and minimal post-classical introspection, they were a calming counterpart to the year’s steroid-pumped festival commercialism. And first and foremost, they were about records — not fancy design accessories, not “throw everything at […]

As the CD jewel box and compact cassette case and digital download have failed to inspire, the record sleeve has endured. Now, the LP album jacket isn’t just besting those formats in the physical realm. It’s proving it can outdo them in the age of digital and mobile, too. Digital controls can be printed directly […]

Synthesizers in the mass market are forever part of up and down swings – and we’re back in an up swing. At the same time as other musical instrument segments lag in sales, NAMM reports both more synths at their trade show and double-digit year-on-year sales growth. (In music, that’s just huge.) So, you can […]

The most sophisticated, most important music and sound instrument of 2014 is – your hearing. But the best hearing protection is simply the one you’ll always use. And that’s why DUBS are the best product of 2014. There are great hearing protection products out there, and for professional applications like touring, something spendy may well […]

Analog synthesizers are superior because of their pristine, high-fidelit — Oh, f*** it, who are we kidding? We want to wail on an ARP Odyssey with ridiculous modulation that turns it into a groovy, angry space alien, and then film it on VHS interspersed with some car chase, just because. Someone in Krakow, Poland agrees, […]