Unexpected collabs, Behringer surprises and more: The biggest music tech stories of NAMM 2025

[Stephan Bobb]

Unexpected collabs, Behringer surprises and more: The biggest music tech stories of NAMM 2025

Story by Si Truss

For makers of synths and studio technology, however, the emphasis was shifting away from NAMM even before then. Berlin’s Superbooth, while smaller in scale, now feels more significant as a venue for music technology news. What’s more, these days many synth-makers opt to forego trade show announcements altogether in favor of unveiling gear online and via social media.

All that being said though, NAMM remains a significant industry event and 2025’s show was undoubtedly the biggest and busiest in several years, with major players like Roland and Behringer returning to the show floor.

Music Radar’s Managing Editor Si Truss and Tech Channel Editor Matt Mullen sat down at the show to discuss this year’s biggest music tech stories and the hottest new products. Watch our full rundown of the biggest NAMM news in the video above or catch up with our quick summary below.

While we’ve rounded up a few highlights here, there’s much more to see from NAMM, for music technology fans, guitarists, drummers and beyond. Catch up with all the news with our live show coverage.

NI meets Akai (and more)

The biggest news to come out of NAMM is typically the unveiling of a hype-worthy new product from a well-known manufacturer. This year, though, one of the most significant – and unexpected – announcements hasn’t arrived in the form of a shiny new synth for us all to drool over, but something very different entirely.

No, Native Instruments hasn’t rocked up to NAMM 2025 with the next generation of Maschine or an upgraded Kontrol keyboard in tow. Instead, it’s arrived with a message of co-operation and a mission to empower music-makers, no matter whose products they use.

Ahead of this year’s show, the company announced that it’s teaming up with a handful of top names in music... – brands that could be considered its biggest rivals – to integrate its software ecosystem with products beyond the realm of Native Instruments, giving owners of instruments from brands such as Akai, Novation and Korg the opportunity to access its content and take advantage of integration with its NKS protocol.

We got the chance to check out some NI Kontakt instruments running on MPC hardware during the show, and it certainly makes for a good combo. Our biggest question, however, is where this leaves the future of NI’s own hardware business – should we see this collaboration as an admission of defeat by Maschine to its most direct competitor?

Behringer’s latest clones nail authenticity – for better and worse

Behringer has had to defend itself from ‘vaporware’ accusations in recent years – the suggestion that the prolific synth brand announces a considerable amount of gear, some of which never actually makes it to market.

Given this, the company’s return to the NAMM shows after a 10-year absence is a good opportunity to try and get our heads around the shape of the company’s current lineup of genuine products. Highlights from the booth include recent releases like the controversial LinnDrum inspired LM Drum and PPG emulating Wave.

Early impressions are that both Wave and LM Drum sound on the money and feel authentically vintage – for better and worse. Those looking for an authentic old school experience will likely be happy, but despite a few modern niceties, both designs feel decidedly old school.

The big surprise from Behringer was its clone of the Yamaha DX1 – an ultra-rare, bitimbral, frequency-modulating beast that’s the crown of the DX series.

Like the DX1, Behringer’s BX1 is a 32-voice FM synth with a formidably complex architecture, but the German manufacturer’s remake departs from the original on a few significant points, most notably its analogue filter. All in all, the BX-1 certainly looks like a crowd-pleaser, and it’ll likely be cheap enough to keep Behringer’s fanbase on side when it’s eventually released.

We’re not entirely convinced that FM synths are as ripe for recreation as vintage analogue though, particularly in a world where we’ve moved on to excellent modern FM synths like Elektron’s Digitone or Korg’s Opsix.

((Image credit: Future))

Melbourne Instruments’ Roto could be 2025’s best controller

Melbourne Instruments is the Australian brand behind Nina and Delia, two analogue polysynths with a twist: their knobs are motorised and rotate all by themselves in response to modulation and patch changes.

This year, the company has made the ingenious decision to repurpose these touch-sensitive, self-rotating knobs for a MIDI controller, appropriately christened Roto-Control. It’s a simple idea, but an excellent one, giving you real-time feedback on parameter changes in your DAW or device.

It’s not all about the knobs, either; eight keyboard-style buttons and a row of displays provide additional control and versatility, while Roto-Control’s Motion Recorder feature allows you to automate and loop MIDI parameters on external hardware and software.

Donner’s L1 puts a modernised spin on the SH-101

Chinese brand Donner's latest release is another generously priced analogue synthesizer that also takes cues from a vintage Roland instrument: the SH-101. Joining the B1 in the brand's Essential series is the L1, a modestly sized monosynth that complements the expressive tones of Roland's '80s classic with a modern touch.

L1 is built around a 3340 analogue oscillator and 3109 voltage-controlled four-pole filter, a recreation of the SH-101's original filter chip that features the same self-oscillation abilities. L1's oscillator can produce saw, pulse and triangle waves, along with noise and a sub-oscillator.

These are joined by a single multi-waveform LFO and two envelope generators - one more than the original SH-101 - the first can modulate several parameters including pitch and filter cutoff, while the second shapes the VCA. The synth also features a 64-step sequencer, with storage space for 128 patterns and 32 songs, and a multimode arpeggiator.

((Image credit: Future))

Stylophone’s CFM DF-8 filter promises both beauty and beastliness

Coming in the same brutish-looking form factor as Stylophone's DS-2 drone synth, the DF-8 filter includes both an emulation of the smooth 2045 low-pass filter and Stylophone’s dirtier Gen R-8 filter, creating a device that the company says has ‘beauty and the beast’ vibes. But that's only half the sound design story.

While the 2045 filter has just a single low-pass mode, the R-8 can be run in low-pass, band-pass, high-pass and notch configurations. When the two filters are combined you get three additional modes: Bandpass+, Band Reject+ and Notch+.

You can access any of these modes in each of the two channels, and these are controlled by a pair of ADSR envelopes. Trigger options include gate a signal, an audio signal threshold and a manual trigger button, while there’s also an auto-repeat mode that works like an LFO.

With a desktop or modular-friendly form factor and a promised price around $300, the DF-8 looks like a potentially brilliant sound mangling tool that could pair while with budget synths and Eurorack systems alike.

There’s potential in Roli’s tech if you can look past PR bluster

Hear the word ‘piano’ and the chances are that you’ll visualize an acoustic or digital instrument with 88 keys that can be played without the need to connect it to anything else. ROLI, however, has other ideas: its new ‘Piano’ is a 49-note light-up controller keyboard that’s designed to be used with its previously announced Airwave hardware and piano learning software.

The ROLI Piano looks like a larger version of the company’s Piano M, which itself bears more than a passing resemblance to the Lumi keyboard that we first heard about way back in 2019. Alongside ROLI Piano, we’re also getting a companion AI Assistant, a generative AI platform that promises to make learning to play “easier, more intuitive and more fun than ever before”. When these two products are combined with the Airwave, you get what ROLI is calling the ROLI Piano System.

In typical ROLI fashion, the brand wasn’t shy of hyping up the potential of its tech, heralding it as the future of the piano and claiming that, “in a few years from now there will be no piano that doesn’t have a camera”. While that statement is undoubtedly hyperbolic, there’s certainly some interesting tech behind Roli’s system. We’re not convinced it’s quite ready to reshape the world just yet though.

((Image credit: Future))

The stage keyboard wars are hotting up

2025 sees Roland return to NAMM after taking a few years off. On the music technology side of things, the brand’s biggest announcement was its new V-Stage piano – a flagship stage keyboard that sees Roland parking its tanks on Nord’s lawn, right down to the cheeky inclusion of red panelled wooden ends.

“It’s basically an all-in-one gig rig but it has a complete focus on keyboard sounds, so that means organ, acoustic piano, electric piano. We do have a synthesizer section as well, but the main focus is keyboard sounds with a dedicated section for each. It’s also designed to be very quick to operate, to set up your scenes and your patches,” Roland’s product specialist David Ahlund told us.

While Roland has its eyes on Nord’s turf, the Swedish brand has its own products to show, in the form of updated Piano and Organ lines. In short, it’s a good year for keys players and touring musicians.

Bitwig’s first hardware release wasn’t quite what we expected

We’ve known that Berlin based software brand Bitwig has had a hardware release in the works for a while, but not the precise form of what that would be. It came as something of a surprise then, to discover that rather than follow the familiar route of creating a controller that physically manifests their software (in the style of Ableton’s Push) Bitwig has instead chosen to make an audio interface.

Intrigued, we found out more from Fredrik Astevall, Bitwig’s business development manager on the NAMM show floor.

“Bitwig Connect is more than an audio interface,” Astevall explains. “It’s got all the interface features you would expect – all the ins and outs – but the CV coupling means that you can control analogue hardware, like a synthesizer, Eurorack modules, that gives it an extra layer. “And on top of that it’s a MIDI interface, there are DAW controls and a special Bitwig mode…”

((Image credit: Future))