Thomas Dolby is back on the road, as we saw yesterday. He mentioned in his blog that he’s playing custom MIDI controllers made out of re-built vintage signal testing equipment. Apparently Dolby uses these to tweak his soft synths. (Beats a Behringer control surface, huh?) Well, now we’ve had a chance to get a closer […]

What’s that racket? 16 player pianos, three xylophones, four bass drums, a tam-tam, a siren, and three “airplane propellors,” all MIDI-controllers, are playing what may have been the most modern piece of music in the 20th Century. It’s “bad boy” composer George Antheil’s 1924 composition Ballet Mechanique. And it’s take 21st-Century technology to realize his […]

The Monome is a new music interface with LED-backlit pads, a USB interface that transmits OSC and MIDI data to a computer, and — here’s the unusual part — open source, hackable firmware and software interface. Touch the pads, and you can use this as a step-sequencer and remix tool (as in the example), but […]

Want to share audio between applications easily on an Intel Mac? Now you can. JACK OS X, the superb open-source solution for routing audio between applications and computers on Mac OS X, is now a Universal binary for Intel/PowerPC Macs with today’s release of version 0.73. That means if you’re running an Intel Mac, you […]

Thomas Dolby is on the road again after 15 years. And how times have changed: unlike the year 1991, the year 2006 means he can blog the whole tour. For starters, he’s posted the gory details of his performance rig “for the geeks and musicians out there.” (You called?) Power Mac G5 Dual 2.0 GHz, […]

It’s easy to miss stories among the various cool distractions on Matrixsynth, like videos of synth pioneers Laurie Spiegel and Suzanne Ciani. So, I can’t help but point to Matrix’s extended review of my book, along with some words from me about why I wrote it, even though self-promotion makes me feel funny. Why? Because […]

Among the many “best of” lists spontaneously appearing on the CDM forums, contributors and readers have compiled a fantastic list of inspirational music videos from a variety of acts. One thing that strikes me is the breadth of aesthetics; whereas once electronica had very strong connotations (and the videos with it), these are really high-art […]

While analog enthusiasts tout the benefits of that approach, Texas Instruments is bragging this week about the digital engine that powers Korg’s RADIAS synth, providing both analog emulation and digital processing. Unlike synths, Digital Signal Processing (DSP) chips don’t get misspelled English names. Instead, the brain of the RADIAS is the Texas Instruments TMS320VC5502 DSP. […]