Donner’s $199 Essential B1 Bass Synth just got a serious new firmware update. This love child of a 303, a Casio, and a BeatStep now adds song mode and a performance-friendly feature called Live Random. Here’s a look.

Sequential’s monster Trigon-6 just got smaller and more accessible. You get all of the features of the keyboard Trigon-6, but BYO controller and this three-oscillator, analog beauty is more accessible. And more welcome news: both Trigons get global MIDI Polyphonic Expression support in an update. (There’s a reason you see the Trigon desktop posing with an Expressive E Osmose.)

You can’t stop Ukrainian music – or music tech. Straight out of Kyiv, Ukraine, Sitka Instruments is an upcoming Eurorack modular line from the artist of the same name. And the first module planned looks fantastic: a 6-channel clock and trigger source that makes loads of sense.

Patch sheets and synth overlays too often assume sighted users – so how do you make them accessible for people with low vision or blindness? Geert Bevin and Tim Burgess have tried 3D-printed patch sheets for the Moog DFAM and Mavis. They’re open source and could be a starting point for more; we’d love to hear from people with different levels of sight about whether this works for you.

Moog already brought their Moogerfooger effects to a powerful, patchable desktop edition. Now, it’s the iPad’s and iPhone’s turn, making these perfectly pocketable effects for your mobile rig. And that continues a legacy Moog app developers started some 13 years ago with Filtatron.

This is the way: SynapseRack is a fully customizable, layer-based live visual tool, complete with modular nodes and HAP and MIDI support. Now in beta, it costs ¥12,000 for a full version – just over US$80 – plus a very workable free version with no watermarks.

Choosing an original is always rewarding. One of the reasons we’ve grown to love loopop is that he’s not an “influencer” – his video reviews are manuals, tutorials, and sound design guides come to life. So it’s worth watching the full Oberheim OB-X8 video even if you’re not in the market – because it’s full of sound design tips you can apply to other instruments, even free software modulars and synths.

As expected, media tech giant Avid is ending its life as a NASDAQ-listed public company and selling to private equity, in a $1.4 billion all-cash acquisition by STG.

“Piano” is bookended by sketches on a partly-ruined piano in a war zone – messages over an army radio heard crackling in the background. In between, there is the warmth of a 1920s German instrument in the artist’s Kyiv flat and grandmother’s house before the war. Ukrainian artist John Object is now living mainly as PFC Timur Dzhafarov, deployed to the front. In sounds, images, and words, he has opened up about what that reality means.

“You’re gonna need a bigger boat?” This should qualify – a whopping 208HP with 4 zones, ready-to-run (just add modules), 7U, with the 1U rail containing a bunch of utility goodies preinstalled. It’ll cost you, of course, but Make Noise has made a case to eat Chicago. And it still has a handle and a cover that fits over cables, so you can patch up and lug it to the gig in Chicago, too.