Miss the days of flipping through paper pages and dreaming of electronic music and synths? Stuck in Victoria’s COVID lockdown, Modul8’s co-founders decided to bring that era back.

Plenty of classic moments in modular have been remade or cloned. This project goes further, and expands on the original – and the results can be used for evil as well as good. Just listen to this:

Start with visuals made from images or 3D shader code, then wire them up and modulate them in a Eurorack for VJing and jamming. It’s the new open-source Slimshader, built on Raspberry Pi.

It all starts with a lounge track and field recordings of hermit crabs. Each track in this new outing by Tomer Baruch comes with gorgeous shots from underwater, so go full Jacques Costeau and fire up the hi-fi and a nice screen.

Make Noise, the analog synth makers out of North Carolina, have always had a certain hankering for wild and wooly voltage-generated mayhem. And their new oscillator has all the modulatin’, wavefoldin’, complex toppings. But now, as with their latest filter module, those sounds fill your stereo field, too. It’s almost like we’ve got two ears instead of one.

This summer is bringing a slew of motion graphics updates. Late last week, we got a first preview of the latest in visual effects powerhouse SideFX Houdini – another studio-grade tool now available for a song. Houdini 19.5 should get a full reveal this week, but here it is in all its liquid-y, firey goodness: […]

You deserve a summer break. Here’s a dark disco love ode to a moustache, made by Greek-Argentinian partnership of Local Suicide and Skelesys, with a cheeky video by Lebanese-born video artist Zaher JR. Come for that silliness, stick around for a who’s-who of music artists redefining queer identity and the harp, acid to post-punk and beyond.

It’s got all the basic elements of the BBC Symphonic Orchestra in plug-in form, it sounds great, it’s easy to use, and it’s all in a tiny 200MB. And now it’s free instantly, no strings attached. (No pun intended.)

Sequencer Electronics keeps giving us musical, inventive gadgets for Max for Live, from two of our favorite artists, Gooooose and ayrtbh. This one just records knob movements, which in Device form is both more visual and accessible for improvised parameter tweaks than traditional Automation.

It’s incredible this package is free – a full set of fifteen carefully crafted, native-feeling add-ons for Ableton Live that add everything from bread-and-butter modulation to dub-style effects. It’s a chance to dial in human expression and bring those sessions to life, all driven by probability.