It’s not about pissing contests with who can get the biggest rack of gear any more, evidently. While some of us CDMer can’t stop collecting computers (see the forum thread on that), many are looking for a minimal setup that lets them focus on actually, you know, making music. These setups often aren’t just minimal […]

Here we are, a site that regularly follows unusual gaming – music crossovers, and I don’t think we could ever have imagined anything this odd: a video game in which you play as Frédéric Chopin (yes, the one you’re thinking of), fighting disease with magical powers in a dream world: Chopin’s Dream Screens at Kotaku […]

Okay, Intel Mac owners: go get it. Max/MSP/Jitter 4.6 beta is here, with support for Intel Macs. Okay, now everyone else: version 4.6 offers a lot of cool stuff even if you don’t have an Intel Mac. For Mac developers, there’s the ability to write externals in Xcode. And for 3D visual people, I’ve seen […]

My friend Francis Preve sends pictures and details of his new “convertible” studio. He claims this is shameless self-promotion, but I call it aesthetic envy — and for another reason to be envious, Gabriel & Dresden’s Tracking Treasure Down (for which he did a remix) just hit #1 on the Billboard Club Charts. Not too […]

Media artist Toshio Iwai continues to develop stunning, fanciful ways of making music. From SONAR, here is Toshio Iwai working live with his Tenori-On music controller, in case you haven’t seen this already: More YouTube goodness after the jump, but let’s skip ahead to the even better news: Toshio Iwai has started a development blog […]

W. Brent Latta is a professional game composer and sound designer; here he brings us his pro opinion of how Microsoft’s next-gen game box shapes up. Hey, it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it, right? And as Tomonuba Itagaki, the creator of Ninja Gaiden, says, “Xbox 360 is the best. So we […]

Watch in horror as Roland and Yamaha use GarageBand as an excuse to push their products: GarageBand changing the face of music creation [Macworld.com] Of course, GarageBand has had a legitimate impact on the market, and we’ve seen plenty of consumer-geared products. If it’s glossy white plastic, blame Apple. If it’s a rip-off of GarageBand’s […]

Hard-core musical applications of antique Commodore 64 computers continue to spread. There are plenty of pristine C64s out there, so there’s something beautiful about seeing these heavily modified computers get a second life. First up, the superb DIY and circuit bending blog Get LoFi has gotten their hands on the new Prophet64 music cartridge for […]

Preset libraries are rarely designed with the avid sound designer in mind. Usually what you get is overdesigned patches that don’t really work for your music. Andrew Souter sends an interesting collection today, however: a $15 library for Native Instruments’ Absynth synth with 1,000 wavetables (single-cycle waveforms, the building blocks of lots of classic digital […]

Now having seen fold-up guitars in briefcases, here’s another approach to what to put in your portable guitar rig, from our friend Kevin Johnsrude of The Nettles. Kevin plays both bass and guitar, but he has a more portable rig so he can play music everywhere. Kevin writes: In the photo: The diagonal headless guitar […]