Stage piano. That usually means one thing: back-breaking pain. If you want 88 keys but don’t want a keyboard that weighs 50 or 65 pounds, your choices are generally limited. This week, you have one more choice: M-Audio’s new ProKeys 88sx keyboard. It’s semi-weighted, since full hammer action would add weight, but it still feels […]

If you’re a fan both of skilled keyboardists AND horse racing, you were sad this month to learn that Kentucky Derby fave Stevie Wonderboy dropped out of the Derby field after an injury. I’m hoping for a late entry by Keith Emersontrot as a longshot. (Hey, this wouldn’t be a blog if I didn’t occasionally […]

Why leave art to the visual artists when you can get sonic stimulation with your eye candy? Curate your own sound art exhibition on your browser with the new soundtoys.net site. Thanks to a tagging scheme (a la del.icio.us), you can quickly navigate to artworks and even pull together your own themed show. For a […]

It’s been a long, long time coming: AudioMulch has finally gone from “preview” to 1.0. That means a strong new candidate for your modular sound-making brainwaves might be ready for prime time. (And check out that “meta surface” interface, pictured!)

Imagine touching a screen to directly control Live, Reason, Reaktor, and Max/MSP while you’re playing, with a full view of the interface. That’s been possible with tablet PCs for some time, but not with a touch-centric interface. While the Mac faithful have been drooling over a vague Apple patent for touchscreen interfaces, no one seems […]

All signs indicate that Vista could be a great OS for musicians, from overhauled audio drivers to robust 64-bit computing support and overall improvements in stability, performance, and usability. Microsoft tells CDM they can let us in on further details early in March. Now the bad news: Microsoft seems to be making a marketing decision […]

Ah, “undocumented features.” Here’s my least favorite MIDI and audio “feature” in Windows: since Windows 2000, the operating system imposes an arbitrary limit of ten 32-bit audio (wave) and MIDI device drivers on the system. These are actually 10 driver entries in the Registry, so you don’t have to have 10 USB keyboards to hit […]

While on the subject of physical computing, you can’t get much more physical than the pulse from a human body. pixelcrypt has created a piece that synthesizes music using human pulse. Two participants can collaborate on the music by regulating their pulse; the sonic feedback means this interactive art piece also doubles as an excellent […]

At first, I thought FretPet was a virtual fret interface with MIDI output to your favorite soft synths. And so it is. But closer inspection reveals a lot more. This Mac tool, newly available for OS X with an expanded feature set, is a unique way of exploring pitch and chords. If you know nothing […]

Usually, if you sample George Clinton, you wind up in court. A circuit court decision in fall 2004 ruled that an unlicensed George Clinton sample was illegal regardless of context, length, or recognizability in a decision so sweeping even the record industry opposes it. (See my article below; the details are quite complex.) For once, […]