For Sonic Core, the obvious highlight of the New Year was their attendance at the NAMM show in California.  The chance to show off their latest software, hardware and keyboard chops!   Meanwhile artists and music technologists around the globe continued to enjoy the longevity of one of the world's most enduring Digital Audio platforms in Scope.  To this end, we feature some of those artists this month from Europe and Australia, and a tribute to a great singer from New York.  And if the surface of our planet doesn't host enough great talent, we can now surf to the clouds to find more.

Technology-wise there's more Modular IV content as promised, and a further look at the power under the hood of the XITE-1 including some tips on how to harness it.  And brushing off an older forgotten classic, I discovered that VDAT was a quick and elegant solution to recording Audio within the Scope environment.  Not to mention a neat user interface that represents the era of its origins (it's good to have a classic digital device on screen amongst the usual analog ones).

It looks as though 2011 could shape up to be a very interesting year as during 2010 we witnessed an industry shake-up that saw some major DSP players realign their products to native platforms. Against this backdrop Sonic Core continued to make inroads into the mobile and studio DSP market with the release of the XITE-D and Scope 5.1 on both 32 and 64-bit platforms. And let's not forget the upcoming John Bowen Solaris synthesizer, evolved from Scope technology and on display at this years' Frankfurt Musikmesse at the EMC Stand (Halle 5.1 C47) April 6th to 9th. This ground breaking synthesizer uses six state-of-the-art third generation Sharcs to generate audio at 96Khz with 32-bit floating point calculations for higher fidelity.