Reed Ghazala’s latest generation of instruments is here, gazing back at us with glass eyeballs and dubbed with names like “photon clarinet.” The father of circuit bending also espouses a new conceptual frame and philosophy – errism. And to err is human, but also is cat.

It’s Herb Deutsch’s birthday today – and what better way to celebrate than listen to him talk about music, sound, and synthesizers? The co-creator of the Moog modular is featured in a just-released video and is a great professor to all of us as always. Pull up a chair.

Momo Müller continues a tear through our favorite music gear, with companion plug-ins to capture and recall automation and integrate with DAWs. The OP-Z is next – and gives your desktop some love alongside what Teenage Engineering already built for your mobile device.

It’s like ripping some of the delicious goodness out of the Noise Engineering modules and adding them to your DAW of choice or Reason Rack, for free. And now the trio – distortion and two synths – have substantially enhanced modulation, control, and usability.

It’s the perfect follow-up to 1010’s ultra-compact blackbox sampler and bluebox mixer. Now nanobox adds pint-sized synthesis to the range, with ultra-portable granular and wavetable synths – and we’ve got a first review from resident 1010 expert Andreas Roman.

Here comes the twist – in a year in which so much of the adventurous end of the electronic music scene was stalled, that dynamism was alive in Köln by way of Iranian diaspora. Timcheh was a window into where electronic musical inventors can go next, together.

IK Multimedia are giving away a nice British channel strip model in January. It’s part of a larger download, but you get some free metering and extra EQ in the deal even if you pay nothing at all.

It’s a simple pitch to Windows and Linux users: so long as you have a compatible RTX GPU to render, NVIDIA is going to throw an insane amount of stuff at you for free to create and collaborate. That landscape is growing – and it’s now out of beta.

Sometimes the way out of darkness is hitting play – to reach deeper feelings in a way only music can. The challenge can be just getting the track queued. All due respect to algorithms, half the joy of doing that is finding someone you trust.

The new generation of MacBook Pro isn’t cheap – but without a doubt, it marks the return of the great Apple flagship notebook. It’s long-haul in every sense of the phrase.