Working with music production today is a bit like science fiction. It’s fitting that visions of technology’s promise, menace, and humanity would inspire electronic music.

Thermionic Culture product names follow a distinctly avian theme and so it continues with this unit, the Rooster, which provides dual valve based preamps and EQ with 'attitude' courtesy of a distortion function first used in the Culture Vulture.

There are two Rooster models available, one with unbalanced outputs (on review here) and the other with transformer balanced outputs for around £180 more.

The Rooster carries all the hallmarks of the Thermionic Culture aesthetic across its 2U front panel: gloss black finish, neat white legending, quality knobs and switches, and a large green power light. The Rooster presents a well laid out control surface that flows logically from left to right, and with plenty of room between switches and knobs it is very easy to work with.

Have you been paying attention to Renoise, the modernized tracker? You might want to start. The cat is out of the bag on Renoise 2.5’s new beta (available immediately to registered users), and it looks like it may be a dramatic leap forward. Even better, 2.6 promises to allow a level of customization, scripting, and integration we haven’t seen in any music tool, anywhere.

Two memes have gripped the underground electronic music over recent years. One has been the tracker, and its atomic, ground-up musical process, embodied in new and old software and in the love of handheld game systems like the Game Boy. The other has been the grid as a way of reconceiving and playing musical patterns, from Ableton Live to the monome.

Now imagine if these two memes collided.

The tricky thing about introducing a new feature is that you almost immediately hear from users about other features that would go well with that feature. (There’s a children’s story that goes this way.) The folks at Cakewalk have done what I think is a pretty amazing job of working through a big feature list, and throwing in additional goodies users get without even asking. They’ve also listened to users and been thorough in fixing issues – some quite particular – in 8.5. The result is that SONAR 8.5.2 brings a mature version of some significantly-changed features, and an unusually significant amount of stuff for a “point” release. If 8.5 was beginning to feel like 9.0, 8.5.2 definitely does.

Flash back for a moment to SONAR 8.5 and updates, which made enough of an impact among die-hard Cakewalk lovers that we started to see bizarre fan videos about it. As previewed back in September, 8.5’s banner features were a step sequencer, an arpeggiator, a Matrix View grid for triggering MIDI and audio clips (yes, reminiscent of a program that rhymes with Sable Bun Drive), a new sampled drum instrument, AudioSnap for tuning the timing of audio, and nice new effects strips.

Colour-coded displays, chunky guitarist-proof footswitches and an undeniable Cornish/Bradshaw vibe makes the M13 stompbox modeller the processor of choice for many gigging players these days. For those wanting something a little less expansive, we now have the M9: a stripped-down version of the same… except it's not that stripped down!

Aside from a reduced front panel and the lack of a stereo FX loop, the feature list compares favourably with the M13: same effects (109 in all), same infrastructure and the same impressive chunky build.