Music Production

TL;DR - The last month gave producers three things worth paying attention to. Superbooth 2026 in Berlin put neural audio processing into a hardware pedal for the first time and handed Buchla a $999 entry point. The AI music legal picture kept moving, with a fresh lawsuit against Suno and a still-pending Sony ruling expected this summer. And the tooling caught up quietly, with Ableton Live 12.4 and REAPER 7.73 shipping solid point releases. Here is what actually changed - and what is just noise. ...

TL;DR The Yamaha Montage M and Roland MC-707 are each complete instruments, but paired they become something neither is alone - this has been my main writing rig for the past year The logic of the pairing: the Montage is a sound design instrument (deep, evolving voices that reward programming), the MC-707 is a song construction instrument (a four-bar idea playing in two minutes) The architecture that works: MC-707 as sequencer and clock master, Montage as a multitimbral sound module, with careful MIDI channel layout and audio routing Clocking and audio routing are where hybrid rigs live or die - decide the master early and keep it If you are considering the setup, buy the workflow, not the spec sheets: the value is in how the two instruments cover each other’s weaknesses The Yamaha Montage M and the Roland MC-707 are both, on paper, complete instruments. The Montage is a flagship synth workstation with three distinct sound engines and the kind of polyphony and DSP headroom that makes most studio plugins look slow. The MC-707 is a compact groovebox with eight tracks, an internal sequencer, sample playback, and the kind of immediate hands-on workflow that makes laptop production feel laborious by comparison. ...

TL;DR Six months in, the Yamaha Montage M (M8X) is the most musically rewarding synth I have owned - and I use maybe twenty percent of what it can do That is not a complaint: it is a flagship trying to be a stage piano, sample workstation, FM synth, virtual analogue, and controller all at once, and no working musician uses all of it The question that matters is whether the things it does brilliantly map onto the things you actually do; for my hybrid-rig use case the answer is yes Some showroom features were quietly abandoned, while features I initially overlooked became indispensable - the six-month view is very different from release day Your mileage will genuinely vary with your use case; this review is from a hybrid hardware rig perspective, not a stage or sound-design one A six-month review is a different beast from a release-day one. The honeymoon is over. The early enthusiasm has cooled. The features that demoed well in the showroom have either earned their place in your daily workflow or quietly been abandoned, and the features you initially overlooked have either continued to be irrelevant or become indispensable. ...

TL;DR Physical modeling recreates the physics of how an instrument produces sound - string tension, resonant cavities, bowing and striking - rather than storing samples or shaping waveforms The payoff is responsiveness: modelled instruments react to how you play in ways a sample library structurally cannot The practical advantage is scale without bloat - a full modelled piano is megabytes, not the hundreds of gigabytes of a flagship sample library Pianoteq and Audio Modeling’s SWAM line lead the space in 2026, with the main barrier to adoption being that modelled instruments must be played, not just triggered My take: as processing power keeps rising and expressive controllers spread, physical modeling is where expressive digital instruments are heading If you’ve spent any time with Pianoteq or the Audio Modeling SWAM instruments, you’ve felt something different. Not the crisp accuracy of a sampled library, not the flexibility of wavetable synthesis - but something that responds like an instrument. Strings that vibrate with sympathetic resonance. Piano keys with wooden resistance. A cello that sings differently when you bow it hard versus soft. ...

TL;DR MPE (MIDI Polyphonic Expression) gives every sounding note its own continuous pitch, pressure, and timbre control, where standard MIDI shares those controls across the whole channel The trick is channel rotation: a master channel carries global messages while each note gets its own channel, making per-voice expression a first-class citizen Hardware and synth must both participate - an MPE controller into a non-MPE synth gets you nothing It is genuinely worth the cost for solo lines, expressive pads, and modelled acoustic instruments; it is overkill for step-sequenced and quantised material Once you have spent serious time on an MPE instrument, a fixed-velocity keyboard feels like trading a touch screen for a number pad If you have spent any time around electronic music in the last decade, you have probably seen the letters MPE written on the side of a controller and not thought too much about them. The acronym sounds like a feature bullet. It is not. It is a quiet but fundamental reframing of what an electronic instrument can do, and once you have spent serious time playing one, going back to a fixed-velocity keyboard feels like trading a touch screen for a number pad. ...

By mid-2026, the “in-the-box” vs “out-of-the-box” debate has fundamentally shifted. We no longer argue about analog warmth or filter aliasing - neural synthesis has made those distinctions almost invisible to the ear. The new battleground is cognitive load, and that is where dedicated hardware sequencers are quietly winning ground back. As I argued in The Automation Paradox, once AI can generate a passable 16-bar loop in seconds, the human’s job shifts to curation and intent. A hardware sequencer is the most direct tool we have for enforcing that intent. ...

About iOS has quietly become one of the most interesting platforms for music making. The combination of multi-touch, low-latency audio, AUv3 plug-in hosting, and instant-on hardware means an iPad can sit somewhere between a notebook for ideas and a fully credible studio instrument. The list below is what I keep installed and reach for - synths I actually open, grooveboxes that have made it into finished tracks, and a couple of learning tools that are genuinely useful. Apps are grouped by developer so you can find related instruments quickly. Where an app is iPhone-only or particularly suited to one device, I’ve called that out. ...

About MIDI Polyphonic Expression (MPE) is an extension of MIDI that gives every note its own continuous control over pitch, pressure, and timbre. Where standard MIDI shares pitch bend and aftertouch across the whole channel, MPE spreads notes across multiple channels so each voice in a chord can be bent, swelled, or shaped independently. In practice this means you can hold a chord and bend a single note up, slide between voicings without re-triggering, add vibrato to the top line of a phrase while the rest sustains cleanly, and play electronic instruments with the kind of per-note nuance that string and wind players have always taken for granted. ...

A selection of my music production work from April 2026. I move freely between funky house, chillsynth, ballads, techno, hard house and instrumental soundscapes. I build tracks around rhythm, mood and tiny sparks of emotion that grow into something bigger. Some tunes hit hard, some float, some just wander in and make themselves at home. Many of the tracks have been remastered and almost all album art has been updated, so the tracks have been republished. ...

On 28 April 2026 Anthropic shipped a batch of nine creative-tool connectors for Claude, and one of them is the Ableton Knowledge connector. It is a small thing on the surface and a big thing underneath. Here is what it does, what it does not do, and why it matters if you spend your evenings inside Live or staring at a Push. What the Connector Actually Does The official Ableton connector grounds Claude’s answers in Ableton’s own product documentation for Live and Push. That is the whole pitch, and it is more useful than it sounds. ...