In a time of crisis atop crisis, we’ve followed the diverse musical voices of Beirut artists as they found a way to keep making music. Here, as part of a larger project and assembled by musician and tuning champion Khyam Allami, is a sampling of music from this past year.

There’s a new monome, same as the old monome, pre-ordering this summer: “we’ve redesigned the grid, again. but this time almost everything is new, even though we added nothing.”

Black Corporation, makers of Deckard’s Dream and Kijimi, continue their run of ultra-luxe polysynths. Now the sought-after Jupiter-8 is in their sights, with some 2021 twists.

It makes beautiful, realistic… canyons. It makes games. It does incredible things with light. And oh yeah – surprise. This game engine also boasts a powerful, patchable DSP sound engine inside, blurring the line between game, graphics, and audio tool. It’s all positively Unreal. Um, 5. Early Access.

Feeling destructive? K-Devices’ Shaper2 is a fast route to digital edginess, it’s on discount now. And it is not mentally demanding – it’s a beautiful magical Thor’s hammer, in a good way. There are quite a lot of waveshapers about. But K-Devices has combined a number of harmonious (or rather intentionally disharmonious) modules for particularly […]

It’s consolidation season fo the industry. And Focusrite has just acquired legendary synth maker Sequential, alongside names like Adam Audio and Novation.

The Mark of the Unicorn shines brightly. MOTU are here with a ground-up redesign of their blowout hit audio interface UltraLite (now on revision mk5). Combine that with expanded support on Apple platforms and a still-great driverless line, and you have a MOTU interface for just about any job.

This year has kicked off with a renewed conversation about tuning in electronic music. Khyam Allami has helped ignite that interest with free online browser tools anyone can explore, plus performances showcasing them – and has been outspoken about the philosophy behind them and why they matter. Here’s a deep dive into that work.

Disclosure: I hate demos. Hate watching them. Hate doing them. Now, technically, this is a demo. But… uh, wow.

You’ve seen some feature lists – and this time Ableton is even doing a 90-day free trial. But how do you actually dig into what’s new in Live 11 and start working? Here’s a deep guide to all the essentials.