It's the attack of the clones. The latest is a clone of Clavia's Nord Modular keyboard, the EUR 149.00 North Mood. (via Gearjunkies) The VST plug for Windows/Mac painstakingly sampled, sometimes note by note, presets on the original Nord. Supposedly it's an instrument "without compromises" — but here's a significant one. Part of the whole […]

The Princeton, NJ chapter of the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) is celebrating 50 years of the RCA Synthesizer on Thursday, April 14. (PDF info) Automatic lounge music: The RCA Mark I wasn't exactly what we'd think of as a synthesizer. Developed by RCA engineers Harry Olsen and Hebert Belar, its original intention was to […]

Straight from the files of "Looks-like-an-April-Fool's-but-it's-real": From owlProject: The Log1k and iLog are instruments built from logs. (via near near future) The Log1k is a log with a gearbox motor that spins wooden disks to produce rhythmic noises, complete with "touch-sensitive switches" — wait, as opposed to non touch-sensitive switches? Don't forget the flat panel […]

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is shipping, with delivery by April 29. US$129 to upgrade, but there's a bundle with the new iWork and iLife (including the superb GarageBand 2) for $249, and students/faculty can nab it for US$69. My OS philosophy remains: if you're an audio person, don't ever install the OS upgrade the […]

Scott Wilkie from M-Audio talked to Scott Sheppard's Inside Mac Radio show on April 9. Obviously M-Audio's new iControl is the first controller designed specifically for GarageBand, but what about other applications? Scott's answer was clear: If you're using Logic Express or Pro, YES If you're using anything else, NO Does that mean even track […]

Off-topic, but this is just too cool to pass up — and there's a CDM tie-in, too. Regular reader Cris 'Atariboy,' the musician/graphic designer who did the UI for music software like Rax, Zebra, and Bidule, has been busy. Via plasq, the folks who brought us the Musolomo live sampler instrument, comes Comic Life, a […]

One of our favorite developers, Granted Software, has joined up with another of our favorite developers, plasq. Granted is the developer of apps like Rax, a terrific AU host, Still Life, a cool program for creating custom moving slide shows, Midiclock MIDI synchronizer, an experimental LAN-based MIDI app called iMIDI, and ReVision, a ReWire QuickTime […]

Big conferences like Musikmesse mean all of us get pummeled with press releases from big music developers. But this year, some of the smaller (but no less beloved) audio developers got together a "Sound of the Underground" booth at Musikmesse to show off their own unique gems (thanks to Atariboy for the tip!). In the […]

Friday we looked at a big roundup of game controllers for music, courtesy Chris O'Shea. Ready to look like a cyborg when making music? Want to keep your entire budget under US$20? Here's where to get started (thanks to atariboy for some link pointers here): Get the hardware: Pick up a P5 virtual reality gaming […]

New-fangled convolution reverbs may be capable of perfectly reproducing real audio spaces, but what if you want a classic reverb sound? IK has launched Classik Studio Reverb (CSR-1) with just that need in mind. Four models cover hall/room, ambience, plate, and inverse reverbs. And if you're the kind of person who gets uneasy when "90s […]