Novation upgrades their SL series with the new SL Mk II line. It has 25-, 49- and 61-key version, plus the Zero again, with no keyboard. Mechanics came from Fatar, a giant display is present (144 character), endless rotary encoders, XY pad, buttons with LED backlight, eight drum pads, and of...

Despite the terrible market situation, Frankfurt has some relevant news for the electronic musician. First, a newcomer, Teenage Engineering has this toy, OP-1 , which is still not available for a while, but previewed. It is a small USB MIDI controller plus a modeilng synthesizer and a sampler in...

MFB will ship this wonderful analogue drum machine, MFB-522 in May. It has nine fully analogue sound generator, driven by a 16-note sequencer with 72 patterns and 8 songs. Tweak your very own sounds with the TR-style knobs, and a MIDI In connector is also available to receive Note On and Clock...

Roland has announced all the new products for this year - not less than 32 pieces. On the first picture is a reborn instrument, a keytar with the classical Roland brand, AX. AX-Synth is not only a keyboard controller, it has a sound source with 128 polyphony and 256 preset sounds. Unfortunately it...

Drumtracker is Toontrack 's answer to Drumagog - a software that analyses your acoustic drum track and makes a MIDI file, according to your beats. The very low price is 99 euro, for both PC and Mac. Check here .

LinPlug's  RMV is a serious instrument, having a heavy-weight sample playback engine and a sophisticated drum synth, too. It has 48 instrument pads, all polyphonic, and all have an own 12x12 modulation matrix as well as envelope generators, parametric EQ, distortion, lots of insert effects at the...

Although it is promised more than a year ago, it is still nowhere. Yes, this is the new drum computer of Roger Linn and Dave Smith which had several names during the times (now it is called LinnDrum II ), and several designs - the actual one is here at the right. It is extremely desirable now but...

To make a phone call or surfing via 3G is not the easiest tasks with the new iPhone as the news coming about extraordinary bugs but the phone has won as a music platform undoubtly. Three new products prove it: at first, IR-909 , a Roland TR909-clone, which has the same sequencer philosophy as the...

Don't you have groove? No problem, erratic2 from de la mancha will make it. This drum sample player has several random functions to make your life happier - random layers, random velocity, random pan and swing functions color the mechanical beats. It has 15 sound slots, six velocity layers per...

iZotope adjusted his very attractive drum software, iDrum to work on iPhone - you can buy it at the AppStore for five USD only. We did it so, and had a good time jamming with it as you can see in our video - just play it, you can learn about using the editor, tempo setting, volume and panorama...

A free, downloadable page that consists of samples of a huge amount of drum computers: 111 pieces of classic hardware sampled fully. Akai, Boss, Casio, E-mu, Fairlight, Jomox, Korg, Linn, Oberheim, Roland, Vermona, Yamaha and many more. Check here .

Buy the new card from electroKraft for 49 USD, and you can make a perfect 8-bit drum machine from your Nintendo NES. You can play the samples with your game controller perfectly - a rather strange experience on stage... Buy it here .

Circuit bending has reached the software instrument race: here is Nusofting 's Broken Drum Machine , a software drum machine which makes perfect noises in this style, just check the demos here. In the BDM we can deal with four drum sound - all of them has an alaog modeled oscillator, plus a PCM...

It's a joy to own a Battery from Native Instruments : they now released a new free, downloadable sample pack under the Artist Kits program. Dobie, Johnny Fiasco, Pete Davis, Marcus Rossknecht and Santiago & Bushido made these hip hop and realted kits - you can get it from here (registration and...

Akai plays the drum in hardware: XR20 follows the classic desktop drum machine design, with an up-to-date feature list. Having more than 700 sampled sounds (including some basses and synths from the hip-hop and R&B fields), providing an effect section of EQ, compressor and reverb, running from...

Roland of course has a long list of new products for the first half year revealed at NAMM. The most interesting for us is the new Fantom keyboard line - the biggest, Fantom G8 is on the picture (G7 and G6 have less keys). It has a big wide LCD screen with mouse support, they doubled the waveform...

This wonderful drum machine, MFB-503 is manufactured in Berlin by a small company, MFB . It makes three analog noises - kick drum, snare and tom -, and plays all the hats and cymbals from sampled source; the same method as it was introduced first in the legendary TR-909. You can tweak the sounds...

Fxpansion 's gigantic studio drum production system, BFD has version two now, and it is much more brutal than ever. It has 55 gigabytes of drum samples - that means ten drum kits carefully organised, plus 5000 grooves. It has new EQ modules, and costs 400 USD, here .

According to Future Music and Matrixsynth, Roger Linn , legendary maker of the first digital drum machine is finishing his second instrument. The name of the device was - planned earlier this year - Boomchick which is now renamed to LinnDrum II . It will come in two different versions, a full...

Jomox became a big expert of 909-clones so it is highly awaited to produce something in the 808 field. In January we will be totally satisfied: XBase 888 will be out on the street then, with real analog bass and snare drums (plus tom-tom), and with a digital section for downloadable drum samples....

A new, 2.0 version is distributed by Synesthesia from Mandala , one of world's finest electronic drum controllers. The instrument now communicates via USB also, and its surface has 7 zones, plus 128 positions from the center to the edge - a huge possibility for expression. Its sound is generated...

AudioRealism started to ship ADM , the ultimate vintage drum machine emulator. As we announced earlier ADM contains all the sounds came originally from 606. 808 and 909 drum machines, all modeled and expanded with extra parameters and full automation. It also has a programmable filter (PCF). Read...

Summer NAMM is up and running with very few real news. One of them is came from the drum factory of Alesis - on the picture you can see the Performance Pad , a decent drum pad controller with built-in high quality sound generator. It has 233 sounds, 100 drum kits and 24-bit output. It has two...

MIDIzoo.com took this photo at NAMM: the product is only a picture, but hopefully will be available sometimes in this year. Roger Linn , maker of the first digital drum machine will release this wonderful toy in cooperation with Dave Smith (also a legend, credits: Prophet, Wavestation and the MIDI...

This futuristic Yamaha drum controller called DD-65 will be available this summer. it has eight pads, two pedal inputs, and has an own speaker set but has professional features also like the drum stand kit and the CF card slot, plus the USB. it has more than 200 sounds, the sequencer has a...