What do you get when you cross brilliant musicianship, technological wizardry and one of the brightest line-ups in modern jazz? Answer: Steps Ahead. Interview by Liz Rose and Leslie Fradkin.

Put six PCM drum sounds in a small black box, add a velocity-sensitive pad and a sprinkling of controls, and you have some pretty neat add-on percussion modules. Dan Goldstein hits and listens.

Chas de Whalley talks about the prime of Mr Ian Broudie

Being a brief glance back at the fascinating history of tape recorders, from mono to digital

Technology For The Common Man

The distance between the affordable and the state-of-the-art. Is it getting narrower?

Buzzing back again, cock

New Jerusalem

Part 4: Dave Stewart continues his monthly series with a look at the ideas behind his song 'New Jerusalem'.

Sixty Something

Part 6: Sixty something. Dave reflects on originality and where to find it.

Roland Desk Top Media Press Conference

cheap routes to a famed shape

What is 1¾" high, has 31 voices, plays the piano, vibraphone and sax, and has its own library? Simon Trask checks out Roland's latest PCM sample module.

At last, a keyboard that presents FM programming in a more accessible way, and at an accessible price. Simon Trask previews the great new hope of digital synthesis.

On this month's RE:MIX mixed-mode CD...

The words behind the sounds on this month’s CD and CD-ROM

It's just another month in the diary, exploding monitors and mains fuses

Yamaha DX7 Digital Synthesizer

E&MM's resident FM expert, Jay Chapman, takes a critical flick through the pages of a new book intended to ease the programming on Yamaha's DX7 poly.

SOS On-line

More news of what SOS is doing on The Music Network.

A look behind the scenes at some of MT's own out-takes: quotes from the famous, letters from the punters and photographs from the "rejected" file. So we all make mistakes...

You'll be hard pushed to find a UK studio that isn't choc-a-bloc with Japanese studio equipment, but have you ever wondered what they use? David Mellor takes a slow boat that bypasses China, and visits two Tokyo studios to find out.

six strings