The KORG M01D app, available now for about a month for Nintendo’s 3DS handheld, seems the definition of anachronism. It’s a mobile Nintendo DS music app in an age of iPhones and iPads. It’s based on a 1988 digital synth, even as analog is back and style. You use it with a stylus. You can […]

Nobuyoshi Sano is kind of a mad genius. The writer behind some of the scores for Ridge Racer and Tekken, the talented musician has also turned out some of our favorite mobile music apps, as founder of Japanese dev house Detune. He built the somewhat-ridiculous iYM2151 workstation on iPad, but is best known for the […]

This can be a guitar. Or a DX7. You can grab the code for one app – or, if you know BASIC, write your own. Photo (CC-BY) MIKI Yoshihito. For years, lovers of chip music and handheld instruments have hacked Nintendo gaming systems to turn them into music instruments. In fact, long before anyone in […]

Music making, child’s play. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Attila Malarik. You might not expect a handheld game console, the gadget kids use to play Pokemon, to prove much worth as a musical instrument. But even in the age of readily-available computer plug-ins and iPhone apps, the DS holds its own. In the hands of two sets of […]

Hey, remember this guy? It’s the Nintendo DS, and before shiny iPhones and iPads and Androids stole everyone’s heart away, Nintendo’s handhelds first demonstrated the musical, visual appeal of mobile among hackers and artists. Now, the 3DS could well win some of that spotlight back, perhaps surprisingly so. Our friend Dave Dri has gotten a […]

Hey, remember this guy? It’s the Nintendo DS, and before shiny iPhones and iPads and Androids stole everyone’s heart away, Nintendo’s handhelds first demonstrated the musical, visual appeal of mobile among hackers and artists. Now, the 3DS could well win some of that spotlight back, perhaps surprisingly so. Our friend Dave Dri has gotten a […]

Retro chip music appeal and the occasional Super Mario Bros. game aside, you probably think of the Nintendo NES and Famicom system as something collecting dust at garage sales. You probably don’t think of this NES running as a self-contained music production workstation, syncing to MIDI and Android, or exploiting new software for producing elaborate […]

With the recently-announced Korg M1 app and DS-10, the Nintendo DS handheld remains a surprisingly-good choice for handheld music making. A new app could take that further. Nintendo may have struck a blow to homebrew music developers by successfully blocking hardware that allowed it to run. But while it’s not nearly as open to development […]

The original M1, definitely larger than a DS. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Kevin Phillips. Having made their own DS-10 instrument, Korg and DS developer AQ Interactive yesterday presented something new for the handheld Nintendo. This time, they’re revisiting one of the all-time greatest hits of digital synthesis, the Korg M1 workstation. Markus Schroeder tips us off that […]