Molten Music Monthly November 2025

News
robinv

A bumper bunch of blips and boxes for you this month including some scattered thoughts on the impact of AI on music and our industry. Do/don’t be afraid (delete as applicable).

Sponsored by DF Audio – https://dfaudio.com.au

Buy from Perfect Circuit – https://moltenmt.com/perfect-dfaudiopatchwork

DF Audio are kindly sponsoring this months Molten Monthly. They have a new version of the Patchwork and a little thing called the Nano U.

The Patchwork is a blissfully simple desktop patch bay that lets you leave a bunch of things connected up which you can easily reroute without having to fiddle around the back of your gear. Perfect for setting up effect loops, inserts, and pedals. It’s great for switching between synths when you’ve got more synths than inputs to your speakers or DAW. 12 patchable channels with minijacks on the top and full fat ones on the back.

The Nano U is a thoroughly useful utility box. It has level boost for bringing line up to Eurorack levels, it has envelope followers to take CV shapes from incoming audio, it has a little bit of mixing and attenuation and a CV offset. Very useful to have knocking around.
https://dfaudio.com.au/patchwork

If you’d like to sponsor a Molten Music Monthly and get your product right up here at the front then just get in touch – it’s ridiculously affordable.

Before we get onto the new new stuff here’s a quick roundup of noteworthy updates, releases or product line additions that I’d like to squeeze in without devoting a whole chapter to.

Dreadbox has reissued the NYX as a fully built semi-modular synth rather than a kit. It’s a fantastic looking dual oscillator, dual filter machine with a deep reverb that reflects its soul.

Stylophone has released the DF-8 which we first saw at NAMM in January. It’s a pair of filters with multiple types, two envelopes, sample and hold and delay. It’s standalone or drops into your Eurorack for a fabulous tonal playground.

Zoom Livetrak L6Max is now available and is probably the most useful little compact mixer I’ve ever seen. 12 channels, mic, guitar and line inputs, separate bus output, built in effects and noise reduction, aux sends. It can handle eurorack signals and you can multitrack record direct to an SD card. It’s perfect for a synth setup, takes up little space and you can just capture what you’re doing with a press of a button.

Expressive E has released a 61 key version of their Osmose keyboard, which seems like an obvious and needed thing to do.

Cherry Audio builds on the Mercury 4 and Mercury 6 Roland emulations with the eagerly awaited Mercury 8 based on the Jupiter 8. It adds expanded polyphony, effects and more modulation in this otherwise awesome emulation of a classic synth at a really great price.
Bastl Instruments has another Kastle 2 based machine. This is called the Alchemist and features 5 modes of synthesis including Filter, FM, Hypersine, Supersaw and Glitchnoise. Expect semi modular mayhem and really wild times.

Teenage Engineering has released a new version of their EP desktop sampler/composer/sequencer thingy. It’s called riddim n’ ting and before this white boy struggles with his cultural appropriation woke-ness this has been designed in collaboration with a whole host of reggae, dub and dancehall artists and it’s really quite awesome. Packed full of appropriate samples and a built-in synth engine it’s pretty damn groovy. The “Ting” is an added microphone with inbuilt party samples and effects that will get people on their feet. It’s a party machine, it’s a production tool and it looks totally amazing.
https://teenage.engineering/products/ep-40
https://youtu.be/IV6G0I_VBCk

Endorphin.es Evil Pet – Granular synthesis is often seen as posh and space-age, well Endorphines has a different take with the thrillingly named Evil Pet. It’s a riot of pink and attitude with proper knobs and lo-fi screen. It can record up to 10 minutes of audio and granulate the heck out of it. You can generate textures as a synth or use it as an effects pedal to process sound straight through it. Feels like the most instant and playable granular box yet – it has me really intrigued and eager to try.

Arturia Keystep and Astrolab 37 – We got a new Keystep where Arturia took the simplest and most immediate MIDI/CV controller, whacked in a load of features and took away the knobs. The features are great – it can generate all sorts of tunes for you and help you build single track songs – but at the loss of the immediacy of those knobs. Check out my full review.
https://www.arturia.com/products/hybrid-synths/keystep-mk2/overview
https://youtu.be/na2eyF8bAWQ

Meanwhile they’ve also released a 37 keyed version of the Astrolab. It essentially takes Analog Lab and the V Collection of software synths and ports it over the hardware. You get 40 instruments, 1800 sounds and minimal 4-knob macro control. People are really divided over it. Synth people hate the lack of control and that you can only edit in software. But really it’s just a performance keyboard that has a wild selection of authentic sounding vintage synths with pianos, strings and samples thrown in for good measure. It’s lovely to play and definitely has its uses for live performance, DAWless setups or just enjoying sounds without a computer. I’d love to see a Eurorack version that can load say 8 synths, 4 controls, make presets in software – could be ace now that the tech exists to do softsynths reliably in hardware. Check out my full review.
https://www.arturia.com/products/hardware-synths/astrolab/astrolab-37
https://youtu.be/muGokrMp6OA

Make Noise Multiwave is a suitably baffling 8-channel dual-wavetable oscillator. It uses one set of controls to generate 8 different outcomes of the two wavetable oscillators. It’s all part of Make Noise Universal Synthesizer System and pairs with the Polimaths and a pair of QXG modules – heavy stuff. Basically it’s an 8-channel audio and control system that connects via ribbons on the back. Honestly that’s as far as I get because I get brain freeze just listening to the explanations. It’s evidently wonderful, creative and extraordinary but it’s a long way outside my current understanding of the universe and so I’d best leave it there until I get my degree in Make Noise-ness. I wonder what would happen if you just used it by itself?
https://www.makenoisemusic.com/modules/multiwave/
https://youtu.be/qa1-GdH0M_M

ASM Diosynth – After many years of waiting for something more than the Hydrasynth ASM surprises us with a wind synthesizer. It’s called Diosynth, designed for wind players, has bite and reed sensors, pressure pads, joystick and gyroscopic control. It has the wavescan oscillators from the Hydrasynth where you can morph between 8 waveforms and then modify them with filters, EQ and growl. They’ve added a sample element for key noise, breath and key-off which is a nice touch along with a bank of sampled instruments. All the sounds are editable in a software app so this is a complete synthesizer in a wind instrument as opposed to just a MIDI controller.
https://youtu.be/HMFfEAj9iYs
https://www.ashunsoundmachines.com/diosynth

Venus Instruments Veno-Orbit – we first saw this a while ago but it looks like it’s about to arrive. The is Veno-Orbit a multilayer looper, polyphonic sample player and drone machine. You’ve got two recording decks, four layers and hands-on control over start, length and speed. You can cross-fade between layers, add envelopes and play them via MIDI. You can pull in sample layers from the SD card or record straight in – it can also be CV rather than audio giving you a selectable layered source of modulations. Divkid has done an exhaustive video on it and it looks pretty intense. I wonder if there’s a simpler approach.
https://www.venusinstrumentsaudio.com/products/veno-orbit

Landscape Moon – A smaller development of the Noon passive drum machine, this is Moon. It offers 4-channels of rhythmic chaos that’s activated using voltage from other sequencers. It’s all powered by the incoming voltage gates and CV and kind of drags energy into its starved circuits. It’s mad, unstable and really quite beautiful as an object. It can be a drum machine, a drone, a chaotic sound generator and performance instrument that’s unique whenever you turn it on.
https://www.landscape.fm/moon
https://youtu.be/JtXzd908W34

Industrial Music Electronics, the people behind the Piston Honda and Hertz Donuts have been reconfiguring since the loss of their manufacturing partner and other business shenanigans. Scott Jaeger says he has lots of unrealised designs that he’s hoping to bring to market soon and in the meantime has release a number of cool utility-style modules including the Harmonics wavefolder, Multiple Miggs buffered mult and voltage processor, Destablizer waveslicer and King Slender mixer and slew limiter. All his stuff has a slightly bonkers and creatively chaotic feel and I’m quite excited by what could be coming down the line.
https://www.industrialmusicelectronics.com/

Loess Labs Quad Creek – Interesting looking semi-modular analogue sound generator and effects machine. It uses pulses fired into four band pass filters to create drones, plucks and wah-like effects. You can buy it made, as a kit, as a PCB or build the whole thing yourself for free by downloading the files. So, you have these creaks that pings a resonant filter with a pulse interpreter. In the middle there’s a sequencer and pulse generator with white noise percussion to run things and mixes it all together. Each filter is independent so you can use them all differently. It’s deliciously weird.
https://youtu.be/D_fRNRYVuKw
https://loess-labs.net/inst/creek/

AudioThing B00GA – Hainbach is at it again with another super-smooth plugin inspired by some old piece of tat he found in a skip. This one is a micro-sound tone and rhythm generator. It combines random functions with a pair of microsound sequencers and noise to produce patterns of clicks and hits that then go through a bunch of effects. It actually produces some really interesting rhythmic components that could easily fill out the back end of tracks or provide more interest than that tired old hi-hat. Of course there’s acres of sound design and experimental stuff to play with too! Great name.
https://youtu.be/xCpht2iFEic
https://www.audiothing.net/instruments/b00ga/

Patch and Tweak community. You know those Patch & Tweak books from Kim Bjorn and others? Well there’s a whole Patch & Tweak club that I wasn’t aware of where you can subscribe and get access to a whole library of resources, discussion, collaboration and community. There are various subscriptions levels starting with a digital magazine, then an e-book library of all the titles and finally a whole community with interviews, forums, patching tutorials and all sorts of stuff. So if you thought the books were good why not join a growing community of people wanting to learn more.
https://www.patchandtweak.com/

AI – Is the AI boogey-man coming for your creativity? Possibly, yes. I heard the other day that music generating AI Suno generates more music in two weeks than Spotifys entire catalogue…. And it does it again and again. Warner Music Group threatened to sue Suno for training its LLM on copywrited music. They’ve now come to an agreement where Suno will only train on licensed music. Artists can opt in and get paid and you’ll also have to pay to download music you make with Suno. Apparently this is immensely empowering. All it really means is that those musicians who already get paid by the likes of Spotify will continue to do so by Suno. What does it mean for the rest of us? Who knows. Without intention content isn’t really art, it’s just content and we have enough of that to fill our time for many lifetimes. AI isn’t going to stop you making music, finding an audience, and laying your heart on the line. If anything it will inspire us to make music better, to be more human, more connected and more ambitious. Who knows, AI might even dig you out of your writers block, it might help you finish that track or give you more time to make music by handling your marketing and social posts.

Roland has been pushing the ideas behind the Principles for Music Creation with AI which aims to use AI to enhance and empower human creativity rather than replace it. They have this amazing pedal called Project Lydia that uses a Neutone AI model to learn tonal qualities of sounds and instruments and then place them over the top of whatever instrument you play. So it takes any sound, reacts to that and then uses the performance to turn it into any other sound. It’s open source and DIY making it open to modification and development for live performance and somehow, because it’s hardware, it doesn’t feel like an AI tool that just takes over your DAW.

https://aiformusic.info/
https://articles.roland.com/introducing-project-lydia/

RackDocs – A brilliant iOS app that labels every feature on every Eurorack module and lets you make notes on what things do. Take a photo of a module and mark it up in whatever way is helpful to you. It has 12 types of annotation, mutiple contexts, LED behaviour, switch positions and more. Everything you would put on a patch sheet if you had one that you didn’t lose. You can store 5 modules for free, after that you have to pay a quid a month. It takes time to label all your modules so it’s really for the dedicated modular nerd. But you can import from modular grid and download ones other people have done. So over time it’s going to get easier. Fabulous idea – I’ll never have the time or patience
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rackdocs-eurorack-reference/id6753894257

Frequency Central Florian – Out of the Frequency Central workshop comes Florian (named after the geezer from Kraftwerk). Apparently it’s the modular love child of a Roland SH-2 and ARP Odyssey. It has two Roland style oscillators, with a sub, ring modulator and multimode Roland 700 filter. It has an ADSR plus some ARP inspired A/R generators and VCA. It has a pair of LFOs and is ready to make some tunes. Those two oscillators sound pretty awesome and you get a solid synth voice in Eurorack form.
https://frequencycentral.co.uk/product/florian-modular-synthesiser-copy/
https://youtu.be/OrmIOWWVLgE

Lunacy Audio Taps and portals – I rarely buy plugins these days but every once in a while I’m inspired by something shiny and new in software. Taps and Portals was made with the fabulous Benn Jordan and so it can’t help but be interesting. Taps is about echoes and Portals is about feedback networks. The interface is beautiful, I love it. It brilliantly visualises what’s going on and you can take it from regular delay into shimmering universes of echoes. You can shape and pitch the taps with filters and envelopes and then saturate the heck out of it. Portals works within the Lunacy Audio Beam plugin. It create inputs and outputs for looping signal all over the place. You can nest stuff with stuff and design playgrounds of audio mangling. I have no idea how to use this but I to think I’ll sit down with sometime and get deep into it.
https://youtu.be/gHk-pC9OjOk
https://lunacy.audio/products/tapsandportals/

Cubase 15 – A whole new version.
https://www.steinberg.net/

Monk Echo – This is more of an effects pedal really but I really liked the look of it. It’s a reverb and delay that’s somehow based around the sound of the human voice. The delays and reverberations are morphed by formant filters to give these strangely choral effects – hence the “Monk”. Inside there’s infinite delay, granular pitch shifting, modulation, distortion, degradation and more. Sounds flippin’ epic.
https://youtu.be/-5ydRSSxoSk
https://mentha.works/

Synth East – Synth East is rockin’ along. It took us just a few days to sell out of the Saturday night tickets for the Cabaret Voltaire gig. But we still have plenty of other things going on. The main event is the Saturday expo where we fill the Arts Centre with synths and manufacturers. We have a few tables left so if you make synths and would like to show them then please get in touch. During the day we have the fabulous patch-off with myself, gaz, Steve Davis, Starsky Carr, Jason Lim and Scanner. Also performing during the day we have modular artist Ardler Saint and experimental sound artist Emmally Parsons. Friday night we have film about the Studio Electrophonique and a fantastic presentation from Electronic Sound magazine charting the history of the magazine and electronic music. Closing with a performance from Lilly Sphire. But the big news is that we’ve booked the DIY workshops. We have Moritz Klein bring the Erica Synths EDU Labour-based DIY workshop to Norwich. Over the course of 4-5 hours you will prototype an analogue hi-hat module, learn about circuit design and test these things out under Moritz watchful eye. There are only 12 places, tickets are £125 and include an EDU hit-hat module to build at home.

There’s nothing quite like it, 20th to 22nd February, in Norwich, tickets available from the Norwich Arts Centre.
https://syntheast.com/

Synth Picnic – Not to be confused with Synth East, the next Synth Picnic is on Saturday the 13th December. It’s a pop-up synth and modular day to give people access to synths. Come and have a play. I’ll have the new Astrolab 37 available and all sorts of other bits and pieces. Nearly everything is available to rent, for a month, for terribly affordable prices included entire modular systems. So check the website and book something and them come and pick it up on the 13th, return it next month – easy!
https://synthpicnic.com/