Top 5 music tech gifts 2025
Treat your favorite musician to a gift that will keep them creating long beyond the holiday season
Get into the gifting spirit
Christmas itself may be a little way off, but it’s the perfect time of year to start thinking about gifts — and maybe to save a little money too if you’re lucky. If you have a keen musician on your list, however, it can be hard to know where to begin, especially if you’re not musical yourself.
Fear not, we’ve done the digging for you. Here, we’ll round up five foolproof presents that are bound to prove popular long beyond Christmas 2025. Read on for some of the most hyped, most inspiring, and most downright useful music tech gifts of the year.
ROLI Piano System
The ROLI Piano is really a two-in-one. Made up of our very own ROLI Piano and Airwave, it’s sort of like a regular piano but with superpowers.
Firstly, and most conspicuously, it lights up. And it’s not just about putting on a show — although that is a bonus. ROLI Piano’s keys each glow to provide helpful hints about scales, chords, arpeggios, and more, making it easier to get to grips with for beginners. In fact, for those just starting, it also pairs with the ROLI Learn app to teach playing techniques and music fundamentals through an ever-growing library of hit songs.
For more experienced musicians, ROLI Piano comes with everything they need to start expressing themselves, right out of the box, including the ROLI Studio plug-in suite. This comprises two instruments — one for medics sounds and one for drums and percussion — both designed to work with Piano’s hidden expressive features: you can slide each key from side to side to bend individual notes, and polyphonic aftertouch allows you to alter their timbre independently too by pressing down harder into the keybed.
Airwave is the final piece of the puzzle, and arguably is what makes this setup truly special. This revolutionary device sits behind ROLI Piano (or any conventional MIDI keyboard) and tracks all the joints in each of your hands in incredible detail. In doing so, it allows you to sculpt your sound by moving your hands above the keys themselves — effectively allowing you to play the air too.
Telepathic Instruments Orchid
If you want this next item, you’ll have to move fast — the Orchid is arguably the most talked about music tech gift of this year, and maker Telepathic Instruments can barely keep them in stock.
The brainchild of Tame Impala frontman Kevin Parker, Orchid is a synthesizer that makes it easy to generate lush, evocative chord sequences. The ability to play a full chord with one finger is not entirely new (ROLI Studio, for example, has this capability built in), but Orchid’s purpose-built hardware with its charming form factor and fittingly dreamy sounds elevates the feature to inspiring new heights.
The way Orchid works is simple — the right hand selects root notes on a conventional keyboard, the left selects a chord type, and the synth emits beautiful-sounding chord sequences with the kind of smooth voice leading you’d expect from a pro pianist. There are built-in sounds to choose from, drum beats to play along with, and plenty of added controls to tweak things to your liking.
Teenage Engineering EP-133
Swedish brand Teenage Engineering has gained a reputation for exquisitely designed, but extravagantly expensive, (mostly) musical products. They’re not all about the high end, though, as the Pocket Operator range shows. These popular, portable devices pack a variety of music-making capabilities into a pocket calculator—sized package. The EP-133 K.O. II, to give its full name, is a more fully-featured sampler and groovebox that retains the Pocket Operator ethos on a slightly bigger scale.
What does it do? Essentially, it’s a fast, fun music studio in a box. You get mechanical keys that also offer velocity sensitivity for finger drumming, a step sequencer, built-in performance and mastering effects, and a choice of USB-C or battery power. There’s also a built-in microphone for recording your own sounds, and 64 MB of storage for saving them. And yes, we do mean megabytes — the EP-133 takes a less-is-more approach that seeks to inspire creativity through limitations rather than endless choices,
Despite that, the recent 2.0 firmware update has added a few powerful new features, including resampling for more involved sound design, sidechaining ability to help important elements out through the mix, and a song mode that allows you to extend and combine loops into fully fledged tracks.
Seaboard M
If ROLI Piano is an expressive take on a conventional keyboard, Seaboard is our attempt at reinventing it completely. In place of a row of keys, Seaboard has a seamless silicone surface covered in Keywaves — tactile bumps laid out like regular keys to help you find your way around.
Why? Because it allows for virtually endless expression. Like ROLI Piano, you can bend individual notes on Seaboard by moving your fingers horizontally, but your not limited by the travel of the key you’re currently playing — you can glide up or down to entirely new notes. You can also push harder into the surface to discover new timbres, as with Piano, and additionally slide your fingers from front to back for an extra dimension of expression.
Seaboard M is the latest in our line of portable, affordable Seaboard controllers. It features 24 miniature Keywaves, Bluetooth connectivity, and up to 10 hours of battery life, making it ideal for expressing yourself on the move. It also comes with the aforementioned ROLI Studio to take advantage of all that expressivity.
Seaboard M may (just about) fit into a Christmas stocking, but if you’re looking for the ultimate expressive gift, consider our full-size flagship, Seaboard 2.
Ableton Move
Like the EP-133, this is another all-in-one music-making device — again suited to the studio, the stage, the sofa, or anywhere else you find yourself inspired to create. Move takes a distinctly Ableton-like approach to portable production, drawing both ideas and instruments from the brand’s popular digital audio workstation software, Live.
Move packs 32 RGB pads, a powerful processor, a built-in microphone, and an OLED display into a backpack-friendly, slab-shaped device. You can use it to sequence and play four tracks at a time of beats and melodies, then optionally transfer them to your computer to add the finishing touches in Live. Move comes with more than 1,500 built-in sounds and offers 64 GB (we do mean gigabytes this time) of storage — equating to at least enough samples to keep you occupied throughout any bus, train, or plane journey.
If your intended recipient is a fan of electronic music or already an avid user of Ableton’s desktop software, Move is a surefire hit.
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