The Swedish epic metal group Falconer decided to take a slightly different direction for their seventh album for Metal Blade Records, leading to an album that more fully embraces their folk influences, and features lyrics sung entirely in Swedish. Produced by King Diamond guitarist Andy LaRocque at his studio in Sweden, the band seems to expect fans of their more metal-oriented work to be slightly confused, but explained that the album is a way of paying tribute to their longtime influences.

Packing an armory of steel-coated riffs and songwriting swagger, British hard rock legends SAXON will release their 19th studio album titled "Call To Arms" "This is probably the best album we've written and recorded in the last 20 years," states Biff Byford unapologetically. "I know a lot of bands say that, but 'Call To Arms' really does feel like that to me. It's the perfect embrace of our past with a great modern edge."

After acquiring the Vocaloid 2 speech synthesis engine from Yamaha, Crypton Future Media began to develop their third Vocaloid. Miku Hatsune's voice was created by taking vocal samples from the voice actress Saki Fujita at a controlled pitch and tone. These different samples all contained a single Japanese phonic which when strung together would create full words and eventually phrases. The pitch of the samples was to be altered by the synthesizer engine itself and was constructed into a keyboard style instrument within the Vocaloid 2 program.