There I was, minding my own business, when I stumble upon a news item about the D-Touch Drum Machine. The idea appeared to be that you would print off a couple of sheets of paper, make a couple of paper counters and arrange them on a sheet to create drum patterns. Following links to youtube videos it looked every bit like some kind of clever April fool jape - but it's July. Blocks would be put down on the paper and new noises would occur. I thought it was just people off camera making the noises. They would all be giggling to themselves as they got people to build their own drum machines out of paper - what a jolly caper. However, i looked a little deeper and found that maybe there was something else here.

Eight years after the first "The Grand" arrived Steinberg have reached version 3. There's a lot more competition around these days, with everyone having their own massive piano sample to tempt serious players, and The Grand 3 certainly brings Steinberg back into contention. Along with the Steinway D they've got a Yamaha C7 and the ubiquitous Bösendorfer 290 Imperial plus an electric piano, the Yamaha CP80 and an upright called the Nordiska Pianofabriken whatever the heck that is. It certainly brings along a wide palette of sounds in a single package of an alarmingly huge 88GB's of samples.

Four fabulous days were spent talking nonsense to passing punters in a huge hall inside the Excel exhibition space. This is the second  year of the London International Music Show and how it differs from Music Live! or the British Music Fair, or the Plaza is anyone's guess but all the usual exhibitors were in attendance. Most of the visitors seem to prefer thumping drums, banging keyboards or whacking guitars than talking intelligently about computer based music technology - and who can blame them? It wasn't packed by any stretch of the imagination although tube strikes may have had something to do with that, but there were enough people to make it interesting.

If you're a guitarist wanting to use software guitar plug-ins then you'll want one of these. You can't fool yourself forever that you're content with a mouse and keyboard shortcuts - you need to get your foot into the action so you can actually play like a guitarist rather than a sound engineer who likes to tweak things after the event.

The strangely named StealthPedal (what - you can't see it or something?) is a nifty rugged metal wah pedal with a USB audio interface built in. Gives you a couple of guitar inputs into your computer and full expressive control over your software parameters - like, for instanse, perhaps, wah!

A guitarist using software is not something you could have comfortably predicted, even a couple of years ago. As a rule the predominant guitar based creature likes to lump about big bits of gear, enjoys twiddling knobs and gets a kick from stamping on switches – and this they still do with abandon. While computers enabled the modelling of real amplifiers and created a new generation of guitar tone technology most manufacturers pumped the software back into hardware, completely underestimating the guitarist’s ability to evolve into a more virtual environment. IK Multimedia stood out from the crowd at a time when no one really considered the idea of a plug-in being something a guitarist would be interested in. Amplitube, IK’s original amp modelling and effects plug-in, was a resounding success.

Since 2004 Cockos have been offering Reaper as a viable alternative to the mainstream music making software such as Cubase or Sonar. Now in it's third incarnation can it really compete with the big names and provide a stable, professional recording environment for like $60? Yeah, pretty much.

FabFilter has just released "Timeless 2" a tape delay come modulation monster plug-in. It's the latest in a little flurry of releases and updates from the Dutch duo Floris Klinkert and Frederik Slijkerman. They haven't popped up on my radar since Fabfilter One a couple of years back, which is a half decent fat synth with a quite extraordinary quality of filter, so I thought it would be nice to have a look and see what they've been doing with themselves.

There's always a fear that when a software company gets bought out its key products will find themselves lost and unsupported in some windowless office somewhere. Thankfully, that's not so with Sibelius and Avid. Sibelius is and always has been the best score writing software available. It's style, ease of use and the way it sort of "flows" is unmatched but it's needed a good kick in the arse for a long time now and it looks like Avid have supplied that. Avid are the owners of Digidesign who make the Pro Tools recording software and have been long criticised for its lack of score editing facilities and so bolting Sibelius into the Pro Tools recording environment seemed like an obvious idea.

It's somehow comforting for a program to remain largely unchanged for hundreds of years. Band-In-A-Box (BIAB) has been doing its thing since 1988 and I don't think there's ever been anything else to match it. In a nutshell it's an automatic accompaniment generator - it's a bit like a software version of a home keyboard such as a Technics or Yamaha. In what it does it's extremely powerful and now includes audio tracks and samples to compliment the MIDI arrangements. You can pick a style, a tempo, a key and off it goes - enter in a few chords and you have a whole band, ready to go. So, finally, after all this time, the poor old Mac user who's frustrated with the shallowness of Garage Band can delve into the wonders of BIAB and get some real automatically generated satisfaction.

Windows XP is just like, soooo 2001, but regardless of Microsoft's efforts to move us to Vista, Windows XP remains the most popular choice for musicians. Probably not for too much longer as XP keeps getting discontinued (we really mean it this time) and Windows 7 is just around the corner meaning that you could soon upgrade without ever getting your hands dirty in Vista. So while Windows XP continues to exist it's fitting to pull together the best tips on getting it optimised for running audio.

Why does XP need to be optimised for audio?