CDM welcomes guest reviewer Pierce Case, who shares his experiences with Native Instruments hardware/software combo for Mac and PC, Guitar Rig. In a first for CDM, we’ve also got sound samples for you to hear. So will Guitar Rig make you replace amps and pedals with software? See what Pierce thinks. (And unlike me, he […]

Christopher Scheidel has created an impressive Mac Mini-based rig for playing keyboards and guitars. He’s documented the whole process at his site Heavylift. There’s a lot to be learned there about how to do it yourself (including taking advantage of cheap LCDs for display), but here are the basic specs: Hardware: Apple Mac Mini 1.2G […]

Stumbling around for the right foot pedal? Prostage hears you with their giant new foot pedals. (via Synthtopia) Looks like fine kit: all-metal, no plastic, delay-tap, LCD on some models (various alternatives) and GIANT LETTERS AND NUMBERS for the vision impaired. Their continuous controller pedal looks especially nice for sending volume to organs or other […]

Jim Aikin, synth madman, sound guru, and my book’s tech editor (meaning he’s the only one keeping me accurate and sane), takes the Combinator under the microscope in a tutorial for O’Reilly. If you thought the Combinator was just a way of combining modules into combis (single instrumental patches), you’re missing a lot — this […]

Ableton has finally packed some great presets into Live 5, but it’s a far cry from the amount of instrumental/sample and effects content built into something like Reason. That’s why we’re such great fans of Track Team Audio and their libraries of additional content for Live. Live 5 totally changes how presets work (that’s a […]

Up in the sky: it’s a Zoom! It’s a 4-track Portastudio! No, it’s a CompactFlash-based 4-track recorder from Korg. Yes, the march of CF-based recorders continues. Hot on the heels of last week’s look at sub-$400 recorders, here’s another one — with a twist. The Korg D4 is a “complete portable studio,” not just a […]

Ever wished you could see the Circle of Fifths (aka Circle of Fourths) displayed on your clock? Well, now you can. And you can even click individual keys to see key signatures, just in case y— hey, wait a minute! Speaking as a sometimes-theory teacher, are you telling me you haven’t learned your keys yet? […]

The crew at Remix Magazine got a chance to (literally) remix a Disney Chicken Little toy; they’ve posted the process and results. So what gear does DJ Chicken Little use? Pioneer CDJ-1000 Allen & Heath Xone mixer Virus Indigo keyboard PowerBook G4 running Ableton Live Hmm, absurdly cute, gets all the “young hens,” and has […]

Overwhelmed as I am by the absurd number of widgets for Macs and Windows that whizzed through the site over the past days? Me, too. Here’s a look back to keep it all straight: Part I: For Konfabulator — onetonnemusic roundup, drum pad/pattern machine; For Dashboard: Guitar Chords, Oblique Strategies, Symphonic for iTunes Part II: […]

Getting people uninhibited enough to sit down and play with game controllers: easy. (Well, among geeks, anyway) Getting them to play music together: hard. So, the solution by Benjamin Gaulon, aka Recyclism: hook some NES controllers into a Mac running Max/MSP and let them play that way. Hit the project section to find videos of […]