Music Thing’s compact synth will make a composer out of you

Music Thing Workshop System
Price: £750BUY

Learning to play an instrument tends to follow a well-worn path: get to grips with technique, play your first notes or rhythms and gently ease yourself into the western musical tradition. Music Thing’s Workshop System – a compact, keyboard-less synthesiser in a small, foam-lined case – sets all that aside and asks you merely to have fun with sound by connecting its various modules. Turn knobs, flick switches, create some noise, listen to it metamorphose and make soundscapes as smooth or as jagged as you like.

It’s the brainchild of Tom Whitwell, a former magazine editor at Mixmag and The Face. For years he’d been tinkering with DIY electronics and modular synthesisers while running a blog documenting his work. When he was asked to run a week-long retreat focused on sound experimentation, he came up with a rough design for a compact, all-in-one instrument that could be played by anyone, not just synth nerds. “We’d start with a simple sine wave, play with that for a while,” he says, describing a typical workshop. “Then connect to the frequency modulator, turn the control – and the noise becomes bonkers, everyone just starts laughing! People play with it in a way that I find so interesting, because there’s no right and wrong.”

A light-touch manual gives you enough information to get started, but the key is experimentation. Plug in a pair of headphones and use the supplied 3.5mm jack cables to connect oscillators to filters and modulators, turning knobs and learning what each of them does while creating a fizzing whoosh or a growling resonant loop. The system is augmented by tiny add-on cards that pop in a slot and let you incorporate everything from bell-ringing sequences to the sound of rain. While to some degree you’re wrestling with the machine’s idiosyncrasies, using it is analogous to singing, because you’re responding intuitively to what you hear. I’m a classically trained musician who’s been a slave to the 12-note scale for nearly my whole life, and I’ve lost hours to this thing. It’s like being a kid again.

All hands on deck

AlphaTheta XDJ-AN DJ system
Price: £999
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DJing journeys often begin with a simple controller with decks and faders that operates software running on a laptop. This portable, all-in-one system dispenses with the laptop entirely; it has a built-in screen and can pull in tracks from a USB stick, Rekordbox Cloud or a streaming subscription (Apple Music, Beatport or Tidal), letting you construct playlists on the fly and quickly assign tracks to each deck. I particularly liked the coloured waveforms that identify upcoming bass-heavy (or bass-light) sections of music, the ability to use effects (filter, echo, reverb) to smooth transitions, and millisecond-perfect looping of sections. With a layout inspired by club-standard units, it offers a significant step-up for bedroom DJs.

Get on board

Musical Beings Tembo
Price: POA
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Much modern music-making happens in a grid, prodding at dots on a screen to create beats and sequences. Tembo turns this into a supremely tactile process, with a wooden chequerboard-style matrix, built-in speakers and beats (wooden discs) that are magnetically held in place. Move a “beat” across the board and the rhythm changes. Stacking them or flipping them over introduces variation. A music teacher friend of mine remarked that it has huge potential for teaching rhythm to kids, but it’s also a powerful musical tool, with a sampler, filter and effects along with USB connectivity to other MIDI instruments. Tembo smashed through its Kickstarter target almost 50 times over, and the waiting list is open for its second round of shipping.

Guitar hero

Enya Cyber-G Pocket instrument
Price: £199
BUY

Folded, it looks like a Bluetooth speaker – and it is. Unfolded, it looks like a handheld metal detector wielded at airport security, but it’s actually a neat portable instrument that’s playable by musical novices. You hold it like a guitar, pressing pads on the “fretboard” while thumbing a single trigger switch to produce beautifully voiced guitar or piano chords. It doesn’t take much exploration to figure out how to play a simple song (say, The Beatles’ “Let It Be”), but connect it to the accompanying app and you can change sounds, key, beats, tempo, and play along to a library of songs, guided by flashing lights on the neck. Or you can change all the preset chords, choose a distorted guitar sound and go full jazz metal.

Mood music

Fraknoise Melancholytron
Price: €825
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Dutch multimedia artist Allard Krijger has long had a fascination with the idea of melancholy, and his latest exploration of the theme is a 72-page book of art, poetry and prose that comes with a synthesiser. In Krijger’s words, “it allows you to hear and perhaps play melancholy… each sound an attempt to capture a particular shade” – be that nostalgic, urban or romantic. Its various sounds are listed in the book, and while their names don’t give much clue as to their nature (“Liminale”, “Greylorn”) the idea is that you explore them through play, with different key combinations shifting the mood. The sonic quality is reminiscent of the ’60s mellotron beloved by Krijger, but he created all the sounds from scratch. A unique project.

@rhodri