FaLaLaLaLa.com is a site dedicated to “Preserving Memories of Christmas Vinyl Past.” It’s a vintage holiday galore, with album art, music downloads, and lots of notes for albums like Christmas with the Big Ben Banjo Band and the Rock ‘n Rhodes Christmas by The Rhodes Kids. (Not ringing any bells, so to speak?) Best, by […]

The week before Christmas and New Year’s is usually totally dead, but apparently some software developers were clearing house and getting updates out the door before going on vacation: Reaktor 5.1 (Mac/Win) is actually a major new update with new instruments and sounds. The update is a whopping 80 MB; upgrade via NI’s update manager. […]

Here’s an instrumentation for the analog lover: a room full of modular analog synths and analog keyboards, packed with classics from Moog, Yamaha, Roland, and Korg. Composer Matt Hodson writes to tell us about his “London Synthesis Orchestra,” an ensemble filled entirely with synths: My latest project … ‘the London Synthesis Orchestra’. Based on using […]

Gijs Geikes has been hard at work since we last saw his latest bizarre Walkman Tape Player / Game Boy Sequencer. A new model sync with the Little Sound Dj cartridge: plug in a Game Boy, and other goodies (like a Walkman tape player and Stylophone keyboard), and you can create wild, screaming patterns like […]

Interactive artists and musicians have long experimented with sensor-packed gloves for controlling music, sound, and video. There’s Laetitia Sonami, who controls Max/MSP with her Lady’s Glove, and many other projects like the Hypersense Complex flex sensor glove-cum-gestural software as seen here this summer. Laetitia’s glove is elegantly sculptural, as seen below, and with years of […]

Composers and arrangers, you know the problem. Sure, you’d like to be able to immediately hear every note you put down on a score played by real musicians, but it’s just not possible. You need to turn out a quick demo, or make a rehearsal CD for a singer, and that means turning to your […]

Image-Line’s FL Studio is a huge underground “cult” hit for digital music making. It’s Windows-only, and it seems to get more love from the European press than the US writers for some reason (maybe because Image-Line is stingy with free press copies). But it’s got some great pattern-based features for those of you who like […]

Our friend James Grahame (of Retro Thing, Reflex Audio, and hopefully soon to become a guest contributor on CDM 2.0) has launched his first book: Essential Retro: The Vintage Technology Guide (See also James’ announcement, Music thing) Why should CDM readers be buying this book? Because the table of contents looks like a list of […]

I couldn’t be more proud to share this one: over a year in the making, my book Real World Digital Audio is now hitting shelves: Real World Digital Audio [Official Book Site] I launched this project with Peachpit Press because we wanted to compress the broad range of skills you need to master music production […]

Just came back from the ITP show at New York University and had a blast. (Ah, yesterday. Remember when we still had a transit system in this town? Good times.) I know we have some readers over there, so, NYU students, faculty, and ITP visitors, drop me a line. Let me know about your work […]