#Cdm

Forget any associations you may have with additive synthesis. Monomono's Niseko takes that harmonic content and makes it accessible and expressive, via the UI or an input (including Push and MPE).

Something special happened when Unfiltered Audio untethered their effects section from their mind-blowing drum machine Battalion: this delay and reverb opened up to creative rhythmic use everywhere. And for some reason, they're giving it to us for free.…

The library for the free and open source VCV Rack has been on fire lately. But this one is a standout: 4ms has a sprawling library of ROMpler modules based on classic drum-machine samples.…

In a world that's definitely trying to make us dumber and more depressed, let's grow our brains instead. Our friends over at Derivative have a free course that finally makes it easy to start working with POPs -- the Point OPerators that enable all that…

Deep in the forest of Superbooth earlier this month, Korg showed off some up-and-coming gems, if you knew where to look. That included a compact NTS mixer, updated Sinevibes effects for Korg gear, and add-ons for the phase8 "acoustic synthesizer,"…

There's something magical about playing sounds with polyphonic expression. It means translating sound ideas directly to your hands and improvising live, rather than having to go back and edit those ideas in later or take your hands off the keyboard to…

It's Memorial Day in the USA, Whit Monday in Germany and other parts of the West, and since what's truly sacred is shopping, that means some deals running through the end of the day.

Piaman, aka half of RYOKO2000, formerly Pianoid (bio: "doesn't play piano at all") is turning himself into a human Vocaloid, with joysticks and fast reflexes. And this is what you need right now. Linkhole trail begins now:

It's an oscillator, a step sequencer, a modulation and envelope source, a quantizer (with custom tunings) -- even a scope, thanks to its interactive, animated visual interface.…

Kelli Cain and Brian Crabtree are celebrating the 20th anniversary of their monome company and project this week. For anyone moved by their creations over the years, there will be no escape from the feels in this gallery -- and, of course, I couldn't…

Kids today, with their 31 equal divisions of the octave. Yes, it's the music of Nicolà Vicentino, a Renaissance theorist and composer who built his own microtonal harpsichord to accommodate his experimental tunings.…

It seems like just yesterday we were ogling the launch of Akai's inexpensive, ultra-portable standalone MPC ...okay, three weeks. But Akai delivered some important updates in the 1.3 firmware, available today, on top of V1.2.1 (in case you blinked).…

By separating frequency spectrum emphasis from phase modulation, the “hybrid vibrato” Duality can create unique, clean, stereo-spinning pitch modulation. It’s one of Sinevibes’ most nuanced — but also most compelling — effects.…

Let's hear it for reverbs you can play, morph, squash, and swell -- not just set and forget. That's Intellijel Swells, the "Multi-Model Reverb Module with Swell Generator," or perhaps more aptly, "a lush reverb with a bunch of faders you can jam on." The…

UAD Explore is a surprise. This is no "intro" or limited pack; eight stand-out Universal Audio plug-ins are available for free. That's on top of the company's free Luna DAW — though the plug-ins will also work in your DAW of choice, no special hardware…

Skip the laptops and loads of proprietary hardware with an ultra-simple, portable, affordable add-on that turns any turntable into a digital vinyl turntable. That's the pitch from NAP Works for crowdfunded, compact hardware built on open-source tech.…

If you need an excuse to suit up for an extravehicular activity in the cosmos of sound, Absynth is back again. Native Instruments quietly dropped Absynth 6.1, with oft-requested LFO retrigger and undo/redo, plus a surprise: a new audio modulator.…

"Gramps, tell us the story again!" Well, young'n, before LLMs and generative AI, we were really excited about making big clouds of dots using statistical techniques for visualization.…

What if an integrated plug-in instrument could rival even full-blown modulars? That’s the question posed by u-he’s Zebra 3, out now at long last for macOS, Windows, and Linux.…

For over two decades, Rafael Anton Irisarri has been carving out a space that exists somewhere between the tectonic weight of modern classical and the vaporous drift of ambient music.…