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On the calendar

· Trade shows and launch events, this week's stories from each corner of the industry, and what its press is covering.

On view

This week, from that corner the newest stories from the corner of the industry you picked

The wire their own posts, translated

How records get made in 2026 from the industry's own reports

Sources

Fetched every three hours, linked to the original

About

Three pins, and nearly every signal in this business passes through them.

The magazine is named after the cable: the microphone in the booth, the line to the desk, the DMX run that fires the lights. Studio, stage and rig share the same cable. Most magazines pick one of the three. This one covers all of it, because the people we read do too — the engineer mixing a record on Tuesday is on front of house by Saturday.

Around a hundred and sixty sources, in English, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Chinese and Italian: makers and their release notes, reviewers who put a hand on the thing, studios and touring crews, the producers and collectives surfacing this month and the scenes they came out of. Synths and modular, plugins and DAWs, guitars and drums, microphones, monitors, PA and lighting. What the trade is talking about is counted and plotted. The editor's letter has just started; it will find its rhythm.

For each story: a headline, a short excerpt, one picture and the link out. We never reprint the article, and the picture belongs to the maker or the photographer. A German review appears in German and a Japanese one in Japanese, as the writer published it; the link goes to the original.

Nothing is sold on this site. When a link leads to a shop, it is the maker's shop, not ours.

Learn / Instruments / The synthesizer

SYNTH

An instrument that makes its sound from electricity, not from a string or a column of air, and lets you shape that sound with knobs.

How it makes a sound

01 Oscillator
Makes the raw tone. Its speed sets the pitch; its wave shape sets how bright it starts.
→
02 Filter
Takes some of it away, shaping the colour. Turn the cutoff down and the sound gets darker.
→
03 Amplifier
Sets how loud it is. An envelope opens it when you press a key and closes it after you let go.

Envelope
Moves a setting once each time a key is pressed, in four stages: attack, decay, sustain, release.
LFO
A low-frequency oscillator. Moves a setting up and down, over and over, usually too slowly to hear as a note: vibrato, tremolo, a slow filter sweep.

This is subtractive synthesis, the classic analogue layout · others below

Five ways to make a sound

Lesson soon
Start with a bright, rich wave and filter part of it away.
Subtractive
Lesson soon
One oscillator bends the pitch of another very fast, which adds new overtones.
FM
Lesson soon
Steps or sweeps through a table of stored single-cycle waves.
Wavetable
Lesson soon
Cuts a recording into tiny grains and plays them back, layered and reordered.
Granular
Lesson soon
Not a method but a format: separate modules joined with patch cables, in any order.
Modular

Classic synths · year each was introduced, checked 8 Oct 2026

Moog Minimoog · 1970Bob Moog Foundation ↗
Sequential Circuits Prophet-5 · 1978Sequential ↗
Yamaha DX7 · 1983Yamaha ↗
Roland Juno-106 · 1984Roland ↗

In the Library →Its drum-machine cousin: the TR-808 →

Synths on the shelf this week

The latest synth stories from our sources load here.

The whole Synths shelf →