New gear is great, but how about new life from your existing gear? Arturia’s pint-sized wundersynth just got a huge update: load your own custom user samples, and work with a sampling or one of three different granular engines and random per-key modulation. It’s really about the most fun little synth around.

Synthstrom’s Deluge, a do-everything sequencer-sampler-synth instrument beneath a lit-up grid, is going open source. We’ve got the details from Synthstrom about how that will work.

Befaco’s new Fx Boy multi-effects module uses Game Boy cartridges as add-ons, and some of our favorite manufacturers are involved. Just remember, it’s a bad idea to blow on the carts.

The all-analog-signal path, classic OB-X8 is now a desktop module. It’s a perfect synth: OB-X, OB-Xa, and OB-8 in one instrument, with all the Page 2 extras, and the sounds that made 1999 by Prince, among others.

Apple this month is releasing native iPadOS versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro, with touch (and Pencil) interfaces, but desktop-style functionality. They’re available via subscription fee for the first time.

Expander MK2, the second-generation effects box from Black Corporation, packs loads of analog and classic digital effects into a single epic processor, covered in controls and with a dedicated routing matrix. Here’s a first look.

Chair Audio quietly launched a new plug-in, and it’s both free and wonderful. EXC!TE CYMBAL is, no exaggeration, realistic enough that you’ll do a double-take knowing this is a physical model and not in any way sampled.

Arturia has rounded out its Augmented line with Augmented BRASS. It’s like a hybrid brass plug-in even for people who don’t like brass plug-ins – more like the brass tool for synth lovers.

If you love sound, it’s impossible not to be enchanted by the work of Ben Burtt. His approach to sound design for Star Wars was inventive, surprising, organic — let’s let him talk about it. A lot. It’ll make you want to grab your mic. Jamming air hammers!

One of the most sought-after instruments of all time is back in the form of its complete, authentic recreation (“FS”). It’s a Reverb Shop-only sale for the USA, in a rare chance to grab this instrument – and another excuse to recall how it created iconic sounds from Herbie Hancock to, yes, R2D2. May the 4th be with you.