sunwarper

It seemed like this week was turning out to be quieter on the music gear front than the last few, but to my surprise, quite a lot has happened.

If you could fix some of the biggest problems you have with your favorite piece of music gear, but doing so came with the possibility of breaking it, would you take that risk?

After a couple of weeks dominated by custom firmware and community-built operating systems, this week's new music gear announcements has shifted back toward hardware and creative production tools.

Koala Sampler has become one of my favorite ways to make music on an iPad, and one of the things I've always appreciated about it is how much functionality has been added over the years.

Last week, custom firmware felt like an interesting trend that was starting to bubble up around samplers and grooveboxes.

I've spent the last five years making music with the SP404 MK2, but one thing I've learned is that finishing a track and figuring out how to perform it live are two very different challenges.

This was a surprisingly busy week for hardware music making.

I've been curious about the Dirtywave M8 for a couple of years, but trackers have always been a little intimidating to me.

After spending the last few months with the MPC Sample, I understand why there was so much hype around its release.

When Roland first added the looper to the SP-404MKII, I completely underestimated it.

The Roland P-6 has become one of my favorite small samplers since it was released.

I held off on buying the Teenage Engineering EP-133 K.O.

When the MPC Sample launched, it felt like exactly what I had been waiting for.

The SP404 MK2 is known as a powerful sampler.

When I first got into sample based music making, I kept coming back to the same question: what's the best way to flip a sample?

Is there still a place for the Roland P-6 as a sampler in 2026?

Before a recent trip to Hawaii, I made a decision that felt a little risky.

One of the biggest mistakes I made in music production had nothing to do with using the wrong gear.

For years, I assumed a DAW was the ultimate music making tool.

Koala Sampler somehow just became even more powerful.

Sampling is at the heart of so much modern music.

Koala Sampler is one of the best mobile beatmaking apps out there.

If my SP404 MK2 broke today, would I buy it again?

The Akai MPC Sample has just been released, and this latest iteration of the iconic MPC series takes a very different approach compared to the more “DAW-in-a-box” style of recent models.

Getting into DAWless gear had a huge impact on my creativity.

It’s been about a month since Yamaha released one of the biggest updates yet for the Yamaha Seqtrak, and after spending real time with it, I wanted to share what’s actually changed.

The term stem splitting describes something that once felt almost impossible: the ability to separate individual sounds from a fully mixed song.

When it comes time to chop samples, the P6 includes a very quick "auto" chop function.

NAMM 2026 has come and gone, and after spending three full days on the show floor, these were the synths, samplers, and genuinely weird experiments that stood out to me the most.