Creating a product that’s genuinely innovative isn’t always easy. As consumers we all get so used to familiar norms – the feel of a weighted keyboard, the architecture of a synthesiser and the conventions of mixing a track – that anything that goes against the grain can be met with suspicious eyes. That said, everything that we now consider central to music production once took its own teetering first steps into an uncertain world. Across all the preceding categories, you’ll have noticed more than a few products this year have done things slightly differently (Modalics’ Beat Scholar, Baby Audio’s Transit and Sonic Charge Synplant 2 to name but three), but now it’s time to doff our cap to the truly forward-thinking.
While we’re largely keeping a software angle, we can’t not mention the superb CMPSR from Digit Music. Merging a gamified, joystick-centric interface, this hardware controller enables those with limited accessibility a route into expressive music-making with MIDI. It’s a highly configurable beast, able to trigger chords, explore the depths of MPE-capable instruments and even take out onto the stage as a live instrument in its own right.