Music Production

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. ...

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. This is a six-month review of the Yamaha Montage M, the M8X variant specifically, from the perspective of someone using it as the centrepiece of a hybrid hardware rig rather than a stage instrument or a sound-design lab. The conclusions are mine, the use case is specific, and your mileage will genuinely vary, but the patterns I have noticed are likely to repeat across other working setups. ...

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. This is physical modeling: mathematics as an instrument, not just a sampler or synth engine. ...

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. ...

TL;DR - Suno v5.5 (March 2026) is the most expressive model yet, and three personalisation features finally make the platform usable as a real workflow: Voices (clone your own verified singing voice), Custom Models (fine-tune v5.5 on your own catalogue), and My Taste (lightweight preference learning for everyone). The Warner Music deal is now visible in the product - older models are being deprecated, free accounts have lost commercial download rights, and the ownership language has softened from “you own this” to “you have commercial rights.” Best used for demos, stem libraries, and personal sound signatures; still risky for releases that need clean copyright provenance. ...