Some of Teenage Engineering’s high-end design offerings sometimes seem made for design showcases as much as actual music making. But behold the CM-15: this is a gorgeous concept in an area that rarely sees genuinely new design. If it works as advertised, it seems like a new product category.

In the mountains of West Papua, a new electronic sound is emerging. It’s fusing traditional sounds with jaunty synthesized beats in a rapid-fire, high-energy dancefloor brew. And just try to listen without your whole body set in motion.

Effects maker Baby Audio debuted their first synth plug-in this week. It’s modeled on Yamaha’s CS01, the analog monosynth that came before better-known rival Roland SH-101. And packed with cute extras and effects, it’s simply irresistible.

Roland updated their Roland Cloud software recreations of the JUPITER-8, JUPITER-4, and JUNO-106. That includes new UIs, and finally a usable preset manager. Here’s a look, including one terrific sound feature.

Elisabeth Homeland’s wrappers let you use popular effects plug-ins as if they were native Ableton Live device UIs – saving you from opening floating windows. The latest collection is the most ambitious yet, with the skeuomorphic Arturia effect interfaces.

Intertwined threads of color and timbre become a flowing, organic visual trip – like flowing through endorphin-flooded neurons. Visualist Defasten has teamed up with Danish composer SØS Gunver Ryberg in a perfect illustration of the glowing optimism of her new album, SPINE. Patrick Defasten and Gunver Ryberg talk about the project as they premiere it […]

It’s the other West Coast – but one that until recently got far less play in the broader modular world. Now, the folks at Random*Source are shipping years of work (including the involvement of creator Serge Tcherepnin himself) in a Eurorack module. It’s called the GTO, and behind a simple panel lurks a wild amount of possibilities. Real Serge in Euro. GTFO.

It reads like a “vintage” drifting oscillator, but it’s way more than that. KORG prologue, minilogue xd, and even the stupidly-affordable NTS-1 get a deep, lush 4-oscillator virtual analog gift in the form of Sinevibes’ new Dense.

You’ve seen various Max Devices for Ableton Live; ever wanted to try building your own? Ableton has just released a complete step-by-step tutorial with examples. And there are some 90 free Devices in there to play with and start to tweak, too.

Teenage Engineering and Magnus Lindstrom created the innovation of using a cow to illustrate a frequency-shifting delay. Now you can get that free in Ableton Live if you don’t own an OP-1 – and now is a good time to mention all the shifter-delay action around in general. First, there’s Johny Maandag’s own CWO clone. […]