Having at least one really great 3-band EQ in your arsenal is a very good idea. Pulsar’s w495 looks like a must whether you’re a fan of the classic Neumann original – or you’re still a novice (but more on why I think that shortly). Now through October, this plug-in is free for macOS and Windows.

“We evolve. Whatever I’m doing, I’m evolving – I’m learning more and more every time I do the passage.” Egyptian-American experimental legend and composer Halim El-Dabh is an essential part of the early history of electronic music – and is poised to see his works receive much-needed reissues.

From the wonderful Jogging House – the producer behind Seil Records (Hainbach, etc.) – don’t miss Sonic Beds for Ableton Live (or WAV download). It’s a fuzzy, analog, modular and vintage and broken cassette analog pack so good, you could noodle with it like it’s a never-ending album and use it to lower your blood pressure.

Arturia has a big update for their flagship polysynth, the PolyBrute. V3 adds 7 types of distortion, expanded effects routing and tuning, a new stereo layer mode, and more. Also, I’m sorry, you’ll again be hit with the Arturia drinking game – it’s another Arturia news item that mentions “Germanium.” (Maybe we should play a […]

One of the big features of Ableton Push is its standalone mode and upgradeability, enabled by the Intel-developed NUC platform. Over the summer, Intel discontinued that platform, raising some questions about where NUC was headed. Now, with Asus officially taking over NUC, here’s a look at the platform and what it could mean for Push 3’s future, with Ableton’s head of hardware weighing in.

What if you could take the essence of a melodic 808 kick, a wavetable synth, the thick supersaw from a JP8000, and an edgy percussive synth and mash them all together into one magical lead-kick-synth? And then what if you made that free? Well, that’s just what Toybox has done with the Thump One. It’s the deluxe banana split covered in whipped cream dessert treat of synthesizers – and you deserve it.

We are awash with various dynamics tools these days, but don’t sleep on this. GMaudio is a deceptively simple upward compressor that you’ll want in your Ableton Live arsenal, as it can scale effortlessly from nuance to extreme. And it’s remarkable that it’s free; it almost feels like it fell out of an Ableton Live upgrade from a parallel universe.

Sektor is a beautiful Ableton Live freebie, a graphical tool for capturing bands of a sound’s spectrum and then looping and sampling them. Here’s a quick play.

In fragmented materials and process-based performance interventions, this year’s Atonal exhibition seems to breathe life into debris, a deconstruction of ruined objects. But most striking of all is the work of sound artist Rabon Aibo. With mechanical constructions, he makes the cavernous Kraftwerk power plant into an instrument – and makes use of gas canisters that resonate with dark moments in Kurdish and European histories.

This month has brought unimaginable suffering atop thousands of deaths in both Morocco and Libya. To readers whose communities and loved ones have been directly impacted, we’re thinking of you. As music makers and instrument makers, I hope we continue to connect to remain tuned in and responsive. News can be overwhelming, but we live in a world where connections – and action – is never far away.