I don’t care how great your touch typing skills are, when you’ve been drinking beer and jumping around on stage for an hour you’re going to need some light to help you trigger that next sample. Fortunately for laptop performers an increasing number of current machines are coming with integrated lighting solutions. Whether it’s the […]

Being behind the scenes on a website is great fun when everything is working. Site admins can have an overview of everything going on: Instantly seeing new comments, forum threads, incoming links, spam forum signups and reader feedback gives a faint feeling of superiority which is just delicious. With CDM2.0 we’ve tried to bring some […]

It’s been an extremely eventful couple of weeks, from the inside of the site anyway. From the outside it probably just looked like downtime, reduced posting frequency, more downtime, images disappear, images reappear, more downtime, more images disappear, and now everything is fixed. This all came about when the (now ex-) CDM site host 1and1 […]

As of about 3AM Eastern Time, CDM’s forums and comments are offline while we migrate to a new server. We’ll have them back within a few hours, and hopefully other than that, all you’ll notice is improved performance! Thanks for your patience. Note: We are experiencing difficulties with our integrated image system. We expect to […]

We’ve just received sad news via Korg USA: Korg USA mourns the passing of company President Michael Kovins. Michael, who worked with the company for 26 years, served as Korg USA President for the last 14 of those years. A respected music industry figure, Michael was diagnosed with Leukemia nine years ago and fought the […]

Ah, sweet, sweet mono: because two speakers is really too many. Part of the idea behind the Reason Drum Kits 2 was providing alternative sampled drums with different miking configurations for different sounds, so in that spirit, the Props are giving away a mono set to registered RDK users. (Hey, why not give it to […]

Now that the rest of our studio has gone digital, the approach to producing score for acoustic instruments has changed, too. Here’s a look at some of my favorite toys and tools for keeping music flowing. You’d have to be a true Luddite to argue that word processors are bad for writing. Blogs, perhaps, sometimes […]

Ever suffered garbled audio on Windows and couldn’t figure out why? Driver settings were likely to blame. Audio on the Mac is now essentially plug and play; I don’t remember the last time I even touched an audio driver setting other than to switch from one device to another (switching between devices also works better […]

Talk about digital technology and music, and people are often skeptical: doesn’t technology get in the way of making music? But technology and music have always been interwined, and even for advanced composers, better understanding the technology of how acoustic instruments work is fundamental to realizing musical ideas. Unfortunately, orchestration books, despite their best intentions, […]