You may have noticed that there's rather more to this issue of Sound On Sound than usual — 32 pages more in fact, in the form of The SOS Guide To Going Live, making this effectively our biggest ever issue. The supplement, besides containing the magazine's mail order pages, includes a selection of articles about various aspects of taking your music live: amplification, the value of a good master keyboard, MIDI control of lighting, and even a look at the importance of proper insurance.

Although we'd like to bring you even more editorial every month, we simply can't fit any more pages into the magazine itself — this is our way of ensuring that we can both extend and deepen our coverage of hi-tech music and recording, and The SOS Guide To Going Live is only the first of a series of supplements; so look out for more added value in forthcoming issues.

Moving from stage to studio, this issue also has news and reviews of some significant products, not least of them Passport's AudioTrax. Passport have done a superb job in exploiting existing Macintosh hardware, or the combination of some of the older Macs with Farallon's MacRecorder, to create what is perhaps the first true MIDI equivalent of the affordable 4-track cassette recorder. Your computer can now record your guitar, vocals or other audio material along with MIDI in a fully integrated manner, and at a real home studio price. It's not CD quality, but it works — and seeing it in action, knowing that AudioTrax costs a mere £260, is about as much fun as you'll have with a Mac for long time to come. You still need to be able to afford a Mac, and at least an LC or an SE30 at that, but a product like this serves, perhaps even better than the likes of Studio Vision or Digital Performer, to point the way ahead in recording — and tape doesn't play a big role in the long term.

Nevertheless, tape is at present unrivalled as a cost-effective, reliable and efficient medium for storing both digital and analogue audio. What's more, constant development by manufacturers ensures that tape has plenty of life in it yet — witness the rumour reported from NAMM of Tascam's rival to the Alesis ADAT (well, it had to happen), and also the Fostex X18, a superior successor to their X15 that is actually cheaper than the original machine was on its introduction.

But pride of place this month goes to the Kurzweil K2000, a keyboard that far exceeds what most would have expected from the company's new flagship product. Kurzweil's user base has always been far stronger in the US than over here, and UK players tend to regard the company's instruments as very classy, though somewhat staid and a little expensive. The K2000, however, is a bold piece of instrument design, with a synthesis section that is nothing if not thorough, the option of user sampling into 64MB of RAM, stunning digital effects, and a user interface that makes this power accessible — the key to a good instrument or piece of software.