Hamstead Soundworks announce the Redwing pedal Hamstead Soundworks' latest guitar effects pedal has been developed in a collaboration with Daniel Steinhardt and Mick Taylor of That Pedal Show (TPS).

Erica Synths Steampipe: features, release date, price and all the details you need to knowAfter introducing it earlier this year at Superbooth, Erica Synths has officially launched the Steampipe, a synth which mimics wind instruments.
Dubbed an “eight-voice polyphonic synthesizer like no other”, the Steampipe is the result of a collaboration with Dutch company 112dB.com, and uses physical modelling to “mimic the rich, organic overtones of wind and string instruments”.

READ MORE: Pharrell Williams says its a misconception that people think he’s a “tech geek”

It’s an interesting prospect. Here’s everything you need to know:
Features
Eschewing conventional oscillators, the Steampipe is designed to recreate the sound of a range of wind instruments, but can also mimic strings, pipe organs and more. Erica Synths says it can also “conjure sonic imagery ranging from wisps of clouds to fairground band organs to industrial horns of the railroad”. That paints quite the picture, so let’s dive deeper into some specs.

As previously mentioned, the Steampipe features eight-voice polyphony, and is powered by a physical modelling engine with 32 adjustable parameters. There’s also five assignable LFOs with delay and sync, an extensive modulation matrix, 192 user preset memory slots and if you want to get straight down to business, 64 factory presets.
You can also plug in a MIDI keyboard via a DIN5 MIDI input and MIDI Thru/out, and all parameters are MIDI CC controllable.
Credit: Erica Synths
In terms of form factor, the Steampipe weighs a modest 3kg, and measures up at 45.5cm x 27cm x 7cm.
What Erica Synths says about the Steampipe
“Due to detailed controls over multiple physical modeling parameters, the Steampipe is capable of generating very organic emulations of real instruments, but it goes well beyond the pitch and dynamic ranges conventional instruments can produce – for instance, imagine how a flute or clarinet would sound in C1 or C7,” the company says.
What creators are saying about the Erica Synths Steampipe

“As a physical modelling synth, this is the most hands-on one I’ve ever used,” says YouTuber loopop. “The fact that it gives you so many direct on-panel touch points into the exciter and resonator, lets you truly dig in and experiment in ways that just aren’t possible in synths where physical modelling is yet another engine among many others and you only get to control a handful of parameters in the menu somewhere…”
“The second pro, in my opinion – and you can easily include this pro as a con, is just how unpredictable and surprising this synth is. The feedback loop is very different from how traditional synths work, and Steampipe is a refreshing change from how other synths sound.”
Release date and pricing
Credit: Erica Synths
The Erica Synths Steampipe will be available from 17 December priced at €990, with orders expected to ship from 7 January 2025.
For more information, head to Erica Synths.
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RYK Modular unveil the Envy Machine The prototype quad-channel modulation module that RYK were showing off at SynthFest 2024 has now been named and officially launched. 

Apple’s Vision Pro might add support for PlayStation VR controllersApple is looking to make its Vision Pro mixed reality device more attractive to gamers and game developers, according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The Vision Pro has been pitched as more of a productivity and media consumption device than something aimed at gamers, due in part to relying on eye and […]
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National Center for Public Policy Research proposes BTC treasury to AmazonThe National Center for Public Policy noted that MicroStrategy's stock outperformed Amazon's stock by 537% due to its Bitcoin strategy.

Pedaling your Mobile Web Server Across the GlobeWe tinkerers often have ideas we know are crazy, and we make them up in the most bizarre places, too. For example, just imagine hosting a website while pedaling across the world—who would (not) want that? Meet [Jelle Reith], a tinkerer on an epic cycling adventure, whose bicycle doubles as a mobile web server. [Jelle]’s project, jelle.bike, will from the 6th of December on showcase what he’s seeing in real time, powered by ingenuity and his hub dynamo. If you read this far, you’ll probably guess: this hack is done by a Dutchman. You couldn’t be more right.
At the heart of [Jelle]’s setup is a Raspberry Pi 4 in a watertight enclosure. The tiny powerhouse runs off energy generated by a Forumslader V3, a clever AC-to-DC converter optimized for bike dynamos. The Pi gets internet access via [Jelle]’s phone hotspot, but hosting a site over cellular networks isn’t as simple as it sounds. With no static IP available, [Jelle] routes web traffic through a VPS using an SSH tunnel. This crafty solution—expanded upon by Jeff Geerling—ensures seamless access to the site, even overcoming IPv6 quirks.
The system’s efficiency and modularity exemplify maker spirit: harnessing everyday tools to achieve the extraordinary. For more details, including a parts list and schematics, check out [Jelle]’s Hackaday.io project page.

New Tullomer Filament Claims to Beat PEEKRecently a company called Z-Polymers introduced its new Tullomer FDM filament that comes with a lofty bullet list of purported properties that should give materials like steel, aluminium, and various polymers a run for their money. Even better is that it is compatible with far lower specification FDM printers than e.g. PEEK. Intrigued, the folks over at All3DP figured that they should get some hands-on information on this filament and what’s it like to print with in one of the officially sanctioned Bambu Lab printers: these being the X1C & X1CE with manufacturer-provided profiles.
The world of engineering-grade FDM filaments has existed for decades, with for example PEEK (polyether ether ketone) having been around since the early 1980s, but these require much higher temperatures for the extruder (360+℃) and chamber (~90℃) than Tullomer, which is much closer (300℃, 50℃) to a typical high-performance filament like ABS, while also omitting the typical post-process annealing of PEEK. This assumes that Tullomer can match those claimed specifications, of course.
One of the current users of Tullomer is Erdos Miller, an engineering firm with a focus on the gas and oil industry. They’re using it for printing parts (calibration tooling) that used to be printed in filaments like carbon fiber-reinforced nylon (CF-PA) or PEEK, but they’re now looking at using Tullomer for replacing CF-PA and machined PEEK parts elsewhere too.
It’s still early days for this new polymer, of course, and we don’t have a lot of information beyond the rather sparse datasheet, but if you already have a capable printer, a single 1 kg spool of Tullomer is a mere $500, which is often much less or about the same as PEEK spools, without the requirement for a rather beefy industrial-strength FDM printer.

Omnisphere Snowfall by The Very Loud Indeed Co. The Very Loud Indeed Co. have announced the launch of their latest sound set for Spectrasonics’ hugely popular Omnisphere software synthesizer.

Google says its new AI model outperforms the top weather forecast systemGoogle’s DeepMind team unveiled an AI model for weather prediction this week called GenCast. In a paper published in Nature, DeepMind researchers said they found that GenCast outperforms the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ ENS — apparently the world’s top operational forecasting system. And in a blog post, the DeepMind team offered a more […]
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The £25,000 Tom Evans Pre-Amp Repair and a Copyright StrikeWe were recently notified by a reader that [Tom Evans] had filed a copyright claim against [Mark]’s repair video on his Mend it Mark YouTube channel, taking down said repair video as well as [Mark]’s delightful commentary. In a new video, [Mark] comments on this takedown and the implications. The biggest question is what exactly was copyrighted in the original video, which was tough because YouTube refused to pass on [Mark]’s questions or provide further details.
In this new video the entire repair is summarized once again using props instead of the actual pre-amp, which you can still catch a glimpse of in our earlier coverage of the repair. To summarize, there was one bad tantalum capacitor that caused issues for one channel, and the insides of this twenty-five thousand quid pre-amp looks like an artistic interpretation of a Jenga tower using PCBs. We hope that this new video does stay safe from further copyright strikes from an oddly vengeful manufacturer after said manufacturer event sent the defective unit to [Mark] for a repair challenge.
Since this purportedly ‘audiophile-level’ pre-amplifier uses no special circuits or filtering – just carefully matched opamps – this is one of those copyright strike cases that leave you scratching your head.

Liquid Metal Ion Thrusters Aren’t EasyWhat do scanning electron microscopes and satellites have in common? On the face of things, not much, but after seeing [Zachary Tong]’s latest video on liquid metal ion thrusters, we see that they seem to have a lot more in common than we’d initially thought.
As you’d expect with such a project, there were a lot of false starts and dead ends. [Zach] started with a porous-emitter array design, which uses a sintered glass plate with an array of tiny cones machined into it. The cones are coated in a liquid metal — [Zach] used Galinstan, an alloy of gallium, indium, and tin — and an high voltage is applied between the liquid metal and an extraction electrode. Ideally, the intense electric field causes the metal to ionize at the ultra-sharp tips of the cones and fling off toward the extraction electrode and into the vacuum beyond, generating thrust.
Getting that working was very difficult, enough so that [Zach] gave up and switched to a slot thruster design. This was easier to machine, but alas, no easier to make work. The main problem was taming the high-voltage end of things, which seemed to find more ways to produce unwanted arcs than the desired thrust. This prompted a switch to a capillary emitter design, which uses a fine glass capillary tube to contain the liquid metal. This showed far more promise and allowed [Zach] to infer a thrust by measuring the tiny current created by the ejected ions. At 11.8 μN, it’s not much, but it’s something, and that’s the thing with ion thrusters — over time, they’re very efficient.
To be sure, [Zach]’s efforts here didn’t result in a practical ion thruster, but that wasn’t the point. We suspect the idea here was to explore the real-world applications for his interests in topics like electron beam lithography and microfabrication, and in that, we think he did a bang-up job with this project.

Last Week in DIY & Independent Musician NewsLast week in DIY and Independent Musician News including maximizing your Spotify Wrapped account as an artist even after its release, marketing music in during the holidays, a new credit card designed for musicians and more...
The post Last Week in DIY & Independent Musician News appeared first on Hypebot.

Last week’s top Music Business NewsIt was another busy week in music business news with a Federal Court upholding the TikTok ban law, a scary music AI study, a key industry white paper from Keith. Continue reading
The post Last week’s top Music Business News appeared first on Hypebot.

Pharrell Williams says its a misconception that people think he’s a “tech geek”In a new episode of Rick Rubin’s Tetragrammaton podcast, Pharrell Williams admits the biggest misconception people have about him is that he’s a “tech geek”.

READ MORE: Director of Pharrell Williams biopic calls musician’s Blurred Lines case “one of the worst judicial decisions about creativity in history”

In reality, he thinks he’s not that great when it comes to technology. “I’m the worst,” he confesses. “I use technology as much as I need to.”
When asked how he feels about “programmed music” versus ‘human-played music’, he explains that they’re two entirely different beasts. “Programmed music is amazing – but, man, when a human beings lock in, there’s a feeling that you get from it,” he insists.

In an age when AI is permeating many areas of music, Williams is fearful for the future of the industry. While he says AI can’t quite capture the human feel right now, he believes it may in the future. “What’ll be scary is when AI gets to that same place,” he says.
His stance is rather different to some of his musical peers – namely his cousin, Timbaland, who recently announced his partnership with Suno AI, calling it “the best tool of the future.” He also claims to use Suno’s AI tools 10 hours a day.

Elsewhere in the conversation, Williams recalls his contributions to Kendrick Lamar’s Alright.
Williams penned the iconic titular hook, and even sings it at certain points on the track. “The way I was saying ‘a’ight’… I was saying it on some Virginia shit,” he laughs. “They corrected me to say all right to put the ‘R’ in there… It was just the feeling of the song, and Kendrick really got it. He really understood it.”

 
The post Pharrell Williams says its a misconception that people think he’s a “tech geek” appeared first on MusicTech.

Studio Brass & Studio Special Brass from VSL VSL have announced the launch of two new brass sample libraries that have been captured in the controlled environment of the Silent Stage at Synchron Stage Vienna.