So, Algoriddim’s djay has been quietly morphing from “nifty entry-level Mac DJ tool” into “holy, crap, this is actually kind of better than the other DJ software.” And now, a ground-up rewrite for Windows 10 points to where music software might go on that platform – namely, touch and other novel input. I’ll review the […]

Wade in the water, indeed. Set the Irish duo Lakker loose in a Dutch film archive, and what you get is a dense, heavy experimental techno album and a live show exploring the Netherlands’ ongoing battle with the sea. It’s a 2016 album, but even if you caught it before, now we get some insight […]

So much of the idea of signal and the definition of an audio “mixer” is fixed, we’ve begun to take these concepts for granted. Microphones plus line level, into some faders — that’s what a mixer is. But why does it have to be that way? By creating a new instrument around connecting to contact […]

“Someone has introduced a new MIDI controller keyboard” ranks right up there with “an off-price mall big box retailer is now doing basic solid color tees.” It’s potentially still useful (as in, my luggage got lost in Dallas and I have no clean clothes), yet not exciting. But Arturia have deserve special mention here, because […]

Let someone else debate whether the Touch Bar is a useful innovation or not. If you’ve got a new MacBook Pro, why not put it to good use? And, in fact, if you think of the Touch Bar as akin to precisely what it replaces – a set of shortcuts above the keyboard – it’s […]

The original appeal of the iPad as a musical tool, for many, was just doing one thing at a time. Not using a DAW or advanced environment, but a single app. Now here’s the question: can it be just as appealing when using multiple apps? Audiobus 3 asks that very question. It certainly has a […]

The struggle to make an all-in-one computer production tool that’s different continues. Tracktion, a lesser-known “indie” DAW that has seen a rapid resurgence in recent builds, is now back in a new generation version dubbed Waveform. As usual, the challenge is to make something that kind of does everything, and necessarily needs to do all […]

Here are two quick takeaways about the TORAIZ AS-1 monosynth introduced by Pioneer DJ, in collaboration with Dave Smith. One, it sounds great – but we figured that, given it’s basically a single voice from Dave Smith’s Prophet-6. Two, it’s got a surprisingly powerful sequencer/arpeggiator, with some extras like alternative tunings. And it’s that second […]

Modular synthesizers present some beautiful possibilities for sound design and composition. For constructing certain kinds of sounds, and certain automated rhythmic and melodic structures, they’re beautiful – and endure for a reason. Now, that description could fit both software and hardware modulars. And of course, hardware has some inarguable, irreplaceable advantages. But the same things […]

April Fools may have become a wasteland of bad jokes and actually-misleading news items, but our ever-inventive music tech community has come up with some stuff that’s rather clever. And then some of that, in turn, is actually real. Here are our favorites from this year: Ableton Sax for Live easily wins April Fools 2017 […]