I’m busy finishing — count them — 5 feature stories at once today (coffee, please?!), so that means it’s time to check in on the rest of the blogosphere. It’s “I love the 80s” time again on this week’s Best Music Blog. Words cannot describe the geeky goodness of the new Commodore 64 Music Blog. […]

In follow-up to my story Tuesday about the new Dubstation from Audio Damage (and other assorted Dub links), ever-vigilant reader Adrian Anders is here with a couple of free VST alternatives. I still think the Dubstation may be worth US$40, but there’s no reason not to check these out, too, if you’ve got a PC. […]

Some magazines have no standards, I guess. Nice work if you can get it, though. Seriously, though, the folks at XLR8R Magazine have a book out called Bedroom Rockers: Where DJs Call Home; check out a PDF sample plus parties for the book in NY (tonight), Miami, Chicago, Boston, and Berkeley, with DJs (of course) […]

ReBirth is the program that made Propellerheads famous; it was a brilliant emulation of the wildly popular Roland TB-303 bass and TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines and paved the way for Reason. Today, Propellerheads is putting that legacy to rest, discontinuing the application from 1997 and opening the ReBirth Museum. Among lots of other goodies, […]

More bad news continues to pour in from New Orleans, as musicians rally to keep strong and help. Associated Press had reported R&B legend Fats Domino was missing, but good news — he’s been rescued. Harry Connick, Jr. calls New Orleans residents “freakishly strong”. Friday he’ll be part of a televised fundraiser with other musicians. […]

To those of you from Mississippi, Louisiana, and other areas hit hard by Katrina, if you’ve got Web access and reading this, we’re thinking of you. It’s especially important for the music community to come together to help each other out around the world. Musicians often lack insurance, and are especially vulnerable financially, as all […]

Bored with keyboards and drum pads? How about light-sensitive photocells with customizable control options, all in a spacey case that looks like it escaped from Sun Ra’s Arkestra? Tony Amendolore of ElectroKraft has a new MIDI controller creation he calls the Lunar Module: Multiple photocell “portholes” light up blue for feedback; use as a Theremin-like […]

Amos responded to my call for people who’ve actually built the Sound Lab Mini-Synth discussed yesterday. Check out his lovely work setup: very neat and tidy. If you check out Amos’ blog skyline-7, you’ll see he’s had more luck with guitar pedals — actually, that’s probably a better first DIY project than tackling a whole […]

Our informal “DIY day” continues here: Fabienne Serriere follows up her how to get started with Csound tutorial with a walkthrough on how to build your own MIDI hardware, complete with custom sensors. It’s quite nice, but the aesthetics are a wee bit on the unfinished side (think raw, open breadboard). Now we need her […]

Now that this time I actually did my homework, more on Fabienne Serriere, the talented sound hacker who’s given us the two-part tutorial on custom MIDI control and Csound (see previous post.) From whatthehack.org: “multichannel audio specialist and futurist fabienne serriere (aka fbz) is a franco-american software, hardware and embedded interaction designer. she believes in […]