Takuma Matsui’s Petal is an expressive 8-tap stereo delay with shaping, pitch shifting, and a separate feedback loop, Max for Live (or Ableton Live Suite). Takuma has created something really special here, from the poetic interface design to elegant control of sound.

Danish artist SØS Gunver Ryberg’s SPINE was an early highlight of this year – a richly-textured world of interconnected sensorial experience. She’s now building audiovisual immersion around that work, and Defasten’s visual imagination makes the pitch-perfect complement to the release’s gently-flowing synthetic dreamworlds.

It’s the never-ending question: can we rebound from the setbacks and challenges the pandemic has brought? In the case of Superbooth Berlin, the answer is a resounding yes, thanks to a resilient synth community — that’ll be you. Here’s the news, plus some videos featuring highlights of performances and gear. (Getting to play was definitely a highlight for me!)

What’s better than a waveshaper? How about a waveshaper with a bucket full of different wavetables, dual filters, modulation, and motion sequencer that runs on mobile and desktop?

There’s a horrible myth that difficult times produce great music – the sort of thing said by people in privileged positions romanticizing crisis. Ukraine’s experimental and leftfield scene deserved more attention long before the full-scale invasion – like so many marginalized scenes. And from the experimental edges of this scene, our friends and colleagues continue producing wonderful sounds that you simply won’t want to miss. Ganna Bryzhata and Svitlana Nianio are here with music across two generations that all ambient and experimental lovers will be happy to enjoy. Here’s to Ukrainian Independence Day – and to the successful end of the war and hope for this scene gathering freely again.

It’s sampling and stem separation in one. It’s interface has some DJ deck-style simplicity, but it’s for serious production. It’s Serato Sample 2.0, now with the company’s machine learning-powered stem separation. And it could make Sample worth another look.  Serato’s history To those stumbling around with other tools, Sample might simply be off your radar. […]

Social media is boring; news is depressing. Open up a browser tab and distract yourself from work with this acid bassline generator instead. It’s free, you can store patches online, and you can even download MIDI files for use with your DAW, plug-in, or hardware bass synth of choice.

Ableton Live Auto-Warp now finally works the way you wanted it to work. Not Warp and Pray, not Warp and Spend Some Minutes or Hours Fixing the Warp Markers – like, automatic Auto-Warp, in 11.3.10 building on 11.3.x’s changes. There are other enhancements in here, too, for both Live and the new Push. Let’s break it down.

As a follow up to that review, here are two one-take looks at how Acid V sounds in use – four etudes, plus one workflow video.

An Arturia emulation of the classic Roland TB-303 was all but inevitable. But with plenty of bassline plug-ins out there, can this one bring something new to the table? Let’s get our hands on the new Arturia Acid V.