#electronic-instruments

#electronic-instruments

Before achieving fame, John Summit was known as John Schuster, a CPA at Ernst and Young, who made music on the side.

AMØK has undergone major improvements ahead of the new season, including enhanced VIP areas, a fully renewed lighting system and upgraded D&B audiotechnik sound system that all underline its reputation for immersive, high-spec production.

The vocoder was never supposed to be a revolution in music. Its development began a century ago, when an engineer at Bell Labs was looking for a simpler way to send phone calls across copper telephone lines.

The unit can run on three AA batteries (a set is included) or on the included USB-A to DC adapter (you'll need your own wall charger). The included instruction manual helps you make sense of what the heck all the knobs, levers, buttons, and lights mean.

This release is about connection. Not in a strategic sense, but in terms of feeling part of a scene rather than orbiting around it. There's a lot of really strong music coming out of Australia right now, especially in the underground, and this felt like the right moment to place something there.

The Phase8 uses a new form of "acoustic synthesis" that combines acoustic sound generation with electronic control. Takahashi says the synthesizer is "beyond analog vs. digital" and "beyond electronics" altogether. It features chromatically tuned steel resonators, which creates an acoustic sound similar to that of a kalimba. These signals can be manipulated via onboard effects and sequenced like a traditional synthesizer. Here's a video of the synth in action.

First of all, it offers four times the processing power of previous MPCs, which is enough to load up to 32 virtual instruments at the same time. This is assisted by a full 16GB of RAM, which is a whole lot in this era of AI tomfoolery. The XL can handle 16 audio tracks simultaneously. In my experience with previous units, this is more than enough for a full song.

We started from a very silly place,

We tend to think AI music tools are just gimmicks for social media creators, or that they're limited to basic beats. But it's hard to dismiss them when companies like Google, Meta and Stability AI are pouring resources into generative audio models that can produce full compositions in seconds.

Pitch Shifter-910 is based on the iconic Eventide H910 Harmonizer from 1974, an early digital pitchshifter and delay with a very unique character. Arturia does an admirable job preserving its glitchy quirks. Pitch Shifter-910 is not a transparent effect that lets you create natural-sounding harmonies with yourself. Instead, it relishes in its weirdness, delivering chipmunk vocals at the higher ranges. There is also a more modern mode that cleans up some artifacts while preserving what makes the 910 so special.

Junho Park's graduation concept borrows all the right cues from TE's playbook, that modular control layout, the single bold color, the mix of knobs and buttons that practically beg to be touched, but redirects them toward a gap in the market. Where Teenage Engineering designs for people who already understand synthesis and sampling, the T.M-4 targets people who have ideas but no vocabulary to express them.

Roland now offers a more capable audio mixer for phones and tablets with the launch of the Go:Mixer Studio. The Go:Mixer audio interface lineup has always been a bit limited, better suited for scrappy live streams and capturing quick demos on their phones than professional recording. The Go:Mixer Studio is an attempt to actually reach that lofty goal, with more inputs and outputs, built-in effects, and up to 24-bit / 192kHz audio.

Casio showed up to NAMM (CES for music gear nerds) this year with a prototype sampler called the SX-C1 that looks every bit the lovechild of a Game Boy and an SP-404. The top has a directional pad and four buttons just like you'd find on a game controller, flanking a 1.3-inch OLED screen. But at the bottom, there are 16 rubberized pads for triggering samples with crunchy pixelated number labels on them.

But to anyone tracking the data over the past few years, it was inevitable. In 2022, Bad Bunny's Un Verano Sin Ti redefined the market, driving Latin music's streaming growth to new heights. It later became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Grammy Album of the Year. The takeaway is simple: When you have accurate, real-time data, you don't guess where culture is going, you know.

Listening to music has mostly collapsed into phones and streaming apps, buried between notifications and multitasking. Some people still crave a single-purpose device that treats listening as the main event, not background noise. The MP-1 is an independent concept study that asks what a modern Walkman could look like if it borrowed Teenage Engineering's design language, without being affiliated with the company or trying to become an official product at all.