Ableton Live 9.7 is right now in public beta – just days after the latest 9.6 release went final. Most of the functionality announced so far is related to Push and beat making; 9.7 brings features that let you play, record, and slice more easily from Ableton’s hardware. But that shouldn’t mean you should despair […]

Behringer continues to leak out teaser videos about its upcoming analog synth – and with the rest of the industry out on summer vacation, they’ve got pretty much everyone’s full attention. There’s a few things you can learn from their latest video – not least that I was dead wrong, and this is a polysynth, […]

Don’t like clicks or beeps or other sounds when using a metronome? Try some haptic feedback instead, with this free utility.

Time to start singing about how we’re the operator with our pocket calculator again. The ZONT Synthesizer is an upcoming handheld instrument. And it’s what one designer imagines for the synths of the future. Apart from being tiny, you can change its function by snapping cartridges in and out – Game Boy style. And whereas […]

Tresor has left a rich legacy to electronic music – one that has defined a lot of what “techno” means – and not least of all through the Tresor Records imprint. So as follow up to our preview of the Tresor 25 festival, we’ve partnered with Beatport to share a set of 25 tracks that […]

Soemtimes it’s the little things. I’ve struggled for some time to find a simple metronome I can recommend. But a lot have a bunch of features I don’t really care about – and then lack some basic flexibility. So this is a welcome and unexpected arrival. It’s a free metronome app from Steinberg for iOS, […]

Wheels were never as big as grids. Well – in this context, anyway. The arc was the spiritual successor to the monome from designer Brian Crabtree – ultra-high resolution encoders for turning, with lights, as continuous as the monome grid was binary. But despite some poetic, meditative videos the monome project produced, the arc was […]

Ableton’s Push hardware is making it onstage, but whether or not it suits that purpose for you, it’s an absolute godsend in the studio. Hands-on control of parameters, always-ready grid access to melodies and percussion, and tools for starting ideas from clips to sequences to playing live make it feel indispensable to those of us […]

In the march to fancy dedicated controllers and standalone hardware, something was lost – what if you just want a whole bunch of faders (and maybe some encoders with them)? German boutique maker Faderfox (the clue is in the name) seems to understand our craving. And they even appreciate our fantasy to show up at […]

Ableton Live 9.6.2 is here. Apart from a slew of bug fixes and some improvements to how the Link connection indicator works, there are a lot of improvements to Push, via software and firmware – even down to details like making the potentiometers more jitter free. That’s all well and good. But the important thing […]