The life of a mobile musician one can be a trying one: you always wind up with a few extra pieces of gear that don’t quite fit in your bags. That’s why, even if you don’t own any Moog gear, the new Moog multi-purpose gig looks promising. Thick foam dividers and shell keep your musical […]

Waves, the people behind some highly-respected, extremely high-end audio processing effects, have turned their attention to singers. The new Vocal Bundle includes some old favorites, plus relatively new automatic tuning and pitch correction and breath removal plugins. The bundle includes: Tune Automatic pitch correction and “melody transformation.” (also available separately for US$600 list) DeBreath Breath […]

Music thing, you’ve got us beat on this one. Our friend Tom Whitwell has gone completely crazy for miniature synthesizer toys. I’m almost scared to look at your site for fear of what freakishly detailed toy synth setup will appear next, Tom. I’ve got nothing on this, so let’s just look at CDM’s toy moments […]

Welcome, Keyboard Laptops Live and Computer Music Readers! Feel free to say hi and check out the rest of the site. Photo: Vello Virkhaus with Red Hot Chili Peppers in London (thanks, Vello!) Live visuals for keyboardists? Absolutely: if you’ve got MIDI chops, slick new tools can help you tickle projected imagery while you tickle […]

Jackie Passmore is a talented VJ touring with Ladytron (and, in spring 2006, Stereolab). There are some talented genes in this family: her brother was the lead programmer of Acid. (Sorry, not the other Acid I was thinking of.) Thanks to sponsorship from Korg, she accompanies her Apple laptop with a Korg video mixer and […]

There are two ways you can get close to a new 200e analog synth from Buchla. Either (1) Spend $19,850 for an 18-panel unit or (2) Be Jim Aikin, and review it for Keyboard. Buchla 200e: Programmable Modular Synthesizer [Keyboard Magazine Review] (Thanks to Matrixsynth for pointing to this, and a Buchla video.) I can’t […]

The iRocker is a set of tools for guitarists you can load on your iPod. For beginners, iRocker includes a virtual chordbook with 200 chords and fingerings, plus a guide to scales. 5 different chord progressions / riffs are provided for playing along. More useful to most of the readers here, though: iRocker includes a […]

From the Share Skype site comes an interesting application of voice conferencing: getting your band together. As a background, our band Liquid Playground is reuniting and performing for our 10 year college reunion at Princeton in May, but the problem is we haven’t seen or played with each other for 7 years. time heals most […]

That time of year is upon us: two wonderful things, shopping, and receiving toys. So, while I normally start thinking about Christmas after Thanksgiving, I now come to you. Why should you submit your own ideas to CDM’s upcoming holiday gift guide? You’ve seen something cool, and you want to evangelize it to your fellow […]

MIDI Optional, Glowing Green Bars Standard I know what you were thinking during the silent news week as I was on vacation: “if only . . .” If only someone would release a synth based entirely on vacuum and gas-filled tubes. No pretty sine waves, mind you: only saw, square, and square with suboctave. And […]