When you get it, you'll see a SongDNA card 'on supported tracks'. If you tap this, you can explore the writers, producers, and collaborators behind a song, see samples and interpolations that shaped its sound, and browse the covers it inspired.
The company says it designed Tembo to "enable everyone to create music from the very first touch." Co-founder David Davidov that most instruments take "so long to get to the fun part" and that Musical Beings wanted to "help people experience music as something they do, not just something they listen to."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.