Open Labs’ NeKos are powerful keyboards that pack a full-blown Windows PC, tuned software, and control surfaces into a single musical instrument. They’ve got some heavy-hitting celebrity endorsements, and they’re rugged: one NeKo managed to continue functioning after being being beaten with a baseball bat and set on fire by DJ Richard Devine. This month, […]

I try to keep on top of all the trends, but some just seem to pass me by. Like the explosion in toaster music hardware. Get LoFi gets the scoop on toaster synths, shown above, which is what you get when you cram a bunch of synth electronics into a toaster. Maybe all that extra […]

The Covert Operators now have their own Website, and they’re filling it up with tons of sound content for Ableton Live. You may recall the excellent free Covert Operators preset library (most of them for Ableton’s Operator synth); it’s back and newly-updated, for a total of 700 nicely-organized presets. On top of that is the […]

Another one bites the dust? I’ve just been tipped off that Hartmann Music, the makers of the unusual but innovative synth, have closed shop. There’s a statement in their German news, but it hasn’t yet been translated to English. (See further discussion in a thread on KVR.) More on this as it happens; German speakers […]

2D shooter? Interactive sound sculpture? Why choose one when you can have both? Transcend is an open-source, cross-platform (Mac/Windows build or *nix source), 2D shooter game. Thanks to morphing shapes and what the developer calls a “musical power-up system,” as you shoot your way through the levels you’re simultaneously “assembling an abstract visual collage and […]

Okay, which is scarier — the fact that someone obsessively photographed hundreds of cassette tapes, or that you remember almost each individual design variation and are looking through them, feeling waves of nostalgia for mix tapes past? Cassette Jam ’05 (via Make: Blog See also the somewhat befuddling Project C-90 (see sam bot). I can’t […]

Jordan Kolasinski, a grad student in Music Technology at NYU, reports to CDM on the Music Player Live event here in New York over the weekend. Verdict: not so hot, but Jordan did get the scoop on a fantastic piece of software for improvising and creating songs called RiffWorks (shown), currently Windows-only and bundled with […]

It seems I may have misunderstood the comments of at least one of the experts quoted in Wired.com’s recent story on 8-bit music. (See my original comments and ensuing discussion.) Ethnomusicologist Rene T.A. Lysloff, faculty at the University of California Riverside and author of Music and Technoculture, writes in response; here’s his letter in its […]

Reason running luxurious choirs, orchestras, and multisampled drum kits? Absolutely. Sure, you could run sample libraries in any number of software samplers. But Reason is inexpensive, portable (thanks to ReWire), easy on system resources, and friendly to use (especially with Reason 3’s new features). Soundware libraries like the Sonic Refills series have been out for […]

As I continue this Reasonable Friday, here’s a reader report on how to use Propellerhead Reason live in performance. He’s making use of the terrific Windows-only MIDI tool Peter Tools LiveSet — more on that in an upcoming story. And he’s taking his one-man band to an environmental-activist music festival outside Sydney in gorgeous environs […]