On the guitar front, nothing much apart from the new Roland GR-MIDI converter. This comprises a pickup and controller, and a rackmounted control box that converts the signals from the pickups to MIDI information, this means that you can now use any guitar to play any MlDI synth, and about time too.

News reaches us of a Roland Super JX club, set up by Gigsounds. Although the name refers to the top-of-the-line synth, the club is for all people who buy any Roland or Boss product from either of Gigsounds branches in Streatham and Catford. They aim to provide a newsletter, giving exclusive offers on Roland/Boss gear. Members will get priority on demonstrations, and they will have meetings in the shops studio showing the use of the gear in a recording situation. Sounds good, so let us know what you think.

At the cheap end of the audio market, the news is that 'poor' George Martin has placed the biggest ever order for Mitsubishi. He has bought two X-850 32-track digital recorders and two X-86 digital mastering machines for Air studios in Montserrat. Obviously this is great news for most indie bands, as they will no doubt flock to the island to record at the famous tax-loss studio.

Greengate are about to release the DS4 16 bit sampling and sequencing system, and are having a series of demonstrations for interested punters, Queen already have their order in for one. The system has 12 seconds of sampling available as standard, expandable to 24 secs, and has a ridiculously high bandwidth. Contact them on (Contact Details) for further details.

Again, for those with money to burn and looking for somewhere to record, Lillie Yard studios could be the place to go, having been completely refurbished this year. The studio has a super large amount of outboard gear, with Studer tape machines and DDA desk, the big pull for those of a hi-tech bent is the list of synths and computers. A Fairlight, PPG, and Yamaha TX 816 live there, not forgetting a Linn 9000 and most other goodies lots of musicians dream about. A programming room is also in the complex.

'Yorkshire company develop revolutionary new Organ' screamed the press release, closer examination revealed that it is in fact a sampled pipe organ. This has taken eleven years to develop, and the first production models have been installed in various dens of iniquity, St. Pauls Methodist and Wilmslow United Reform being two.

To mark Casio's 30th birthday, they have hired the Statue of Liberty for September the 13th, called 'In Praise of the Earth'. Isao Tomita will be conducting events from a pyramid suspended above Manhattan, with lasers, sound and music, all being on the agenda, not forgetting fireworks of course. The event will be televised for those who don't fancy going to New York to see it, whatever next we ask. Akai to hire Krakatoa for their bonfire party perhaps?

Designer products are set to become 'this years model' with Akai announcing that they have bought Linn, (the company that drove many a naff session drummer out of work) with 'Akai by Roger Linn' being the label, 'Marshall by Sartre' to follow perhaps? Hot news reaches us about a tasty item from the designer stable. Do you remember the Akai S612 sampler? Well how about six, yes six of them in a velocity sensitive keyboard, that's right, a five octave job that allows multi-sampling, is compatible with the current sound library for the S612, and will sell for less than a grand! For another £150, it's expandable, enabling 16 samples to be available in memory. This isn't the April issue in case you were wondering. No details about availability, but the doobrie in question is called the X7000, and sounded pretty fab to us.

On the drum machine front, Korg seem to have produced a mega-goodie, the DDD-1, having touch-sensitive keys, individual outputs, full MIDI spec and stores 100 patterns and 10 songs. The good news is that the DDD-1 comes with 3.2 secs available for you to sample into and new sets of sounds are available on plug in ROM cards. There's a tempo tap facility and an audio trigger plus all the things the Emulator and Linn do, for a price of £799.

Continuing the fashion of producing synths and then selling them with the keyboard sawn off, Roland now have the Super JX available as a rack-mounting option, the MKS 70. Boss have two new drum machines, the DR-220A and DR-220E, continuing the Dr. Rhythm series. They both have the same functions, the only difference is that the 'A' has samples of acoustic kits and the 'E' uses samples of electronic drum kits, each having eleven sounds. An LCD similar to the TR505's is used, unlike the 505 it doesn't have MIDI.