The old standards: the Tin Pan Alley showtunes, reinterpreted by vocalists and bebop jazzers, followed more recently by reworkings of modern pop and rock tunes. The new standards: video game tunes, apparently. Especially if they’re from Nintendo games. The latest in the trend is MetroidMetal, with elaborate, sprawling metal covers of the moody themes from […]

There was a time when skeptics thought mice would never catch on. “People will never give up their QWERTY keyboards,” they said. They were half right: now we take both for granted. Now, more experiments in multi-touch interfaces are appearing by the day. Aside from mysterious Apple patents, we have, via We Make Money Not […]

Correction: A previous story misprinted the price for Pitch ‘n Time for Logic users as US$99. The correct price is US$399. -Ed. Digital pitch and time stretching has a dark secret: much of the time, it doesn’t really work. Make anything larger than a minor adjustment to the pitch and tempo of digital audio, as […]

US$1199 for a brilliant one-voice synth? Resident CDM hardware synth lover Lee reports. -Ed. The Dave Smith Instruments booth at NAMM was a buzzing hub of activity with performances by Parliment/Funkadelic’s Bernie Worrell, BT, and even an impromptu appearance by Herbie Hancock. But I still managed to get some alone time with the new DSI […]

Moog synths are known for the prevalence of knobs that scream, “reach out and tweak me,” and the latest versions have enough memory to hold a whopping 896 presets. So why would one need a software/editor librarian? Perhaps because it’s still easier to move presets between banks on a computer than with the LCD on […]

With the Web abuzz about Apple’s latest patent, filing, it’s worth reading the actual patent, 0060026536. Like all patent filings, this research may never translate to a shipping product. But it does make for good reading, and it clears up some issues — the most important one being this is about gestures, not specific hardware. […]

One of the most impressive instruments at NAMM this year wasn’t new: it was the Zendrum, a spectacular handmade MIDI drum controller. The Zendrum has been evolving gradually since the 1980s, but it’s brought to life by the latest drum samples in FXpansion‘s BFD drum sample library. That’s the fascinating thing that’s happening: as sample […]

Sometimes you wish you could just take something off the NAMM show floor and put it in your suitcase. Such was the case with the padKONTROL, 4×4 triggering hardware from Korg complete with an X/Y touchpad and incredible customizability. Why am I thinking about this now? Because I sure could use it on some tracks […]

VJing and jamming with Pitfall, controlled from MIDI drums? Heck, yes!Max/MSP/Jitter is a multimedia environment that also happens to be a development tool, the upshot being that you can do bizarre things like emulate the chips of Atari, Sega, Nintendo, and Coleco game systems (covered previously). Now imagine you could turn those emulations into a […]

Updated: This story incorrectly stated the upgrade price for Serato Pitch & Time was US$99; it’s US$399. Apple is now shipping its 7.2 update to Logic Pro, well ahead of schedule. (It was originally slated for March.) As Steve Jobs touted in the keynote, this crossgrade will deliver Universal binary support for Intel processors. But […]