Flex sensors are fab: these cheap strips send varying voltages when you bend them, seen in use in projects like Eric Singer’s sonic banana (basically, a bendable tube for triggering sounds). The trick is turning that flex data into something useful. Hypersense Complex is a three-person collaborative working on new musical interfaces, and they’ve been […]

While we’re busy rack-mounting Mac Minis, how about a vintage Nintendo Entertainment System (NES)? If you analyze these photos closely enough (via Make), you should be able to do what this fellow did and cram your eBayed NES into a 1U rack mount. (It ought to go really nice next to your rack-mounted synths or […]

Via Pixelsumo comes a fantastic lineup of links to futuristic interfaces for music, etc. If you were impressed by Cycling 74’s new Lemur touchscreen, with the power to let you touch multiple points on a pad simultaneously for controlling music/sound/etc., Jeff Han has built his own. His Frustrated Total Internal Reflection project may sound like […]

CDM’s resident expert in indie music Atariboy is back with still more selections from the world of indie music. Get those headphones ready. -PK Here we are again. The third installment of dithered is the new black, albeit, 3 weeks late 😛 I like albums. I like the end to end experience instead of just […]

Any of you lucky enough to be in North Carolina this weekend for the huge Ether Music Festival, entirely devoted to Theremin music, please drop me a line. (See previous report.) I’d love to post photos and show reports here, even casual show impressions. Music Thing has a quick initial report from Jason from Theremin […]

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 […]