For all the app choices in music, a lot feel like plug-ins crammed onto the mobile screen. Auxy may have the essential combination of ingredients – a simple, quick UI, but now the ability to make sketches you finish in Ableton Live, and sounds you can more easily tweak. Auxy always had an elegant, approachable […]

Focusrite went public in 2014, but this week brings its first major acquisition – and it’s a big deal. Monitor maker ADAM from Berlin joins the UK’s Focusrite / Novation / Ampify. Publicly traded companies and fast growing business empires have a bit of a challenge in the music tech business – music creation is […]

It’s one of the first challenges with any modular – you get a wild banging groove, but then… you’re stuck with it. One new video tutorial suggests a way to arrange your modular with Ableton Live and free VCV Rack software. Live’s real-time arrangement and triggering features have always been part of its appeal – […]

It’s time for a throwback – this video was produced in 2014. But don’t miss out on a serious vocoder love fest full of history and celebrity interviews. And just wait, because the vocoder may be about to make an AI-fueled comeback.

It’s an automatic glitching bass. It’s a transformative set of 128 Wavetable sounds. It’s a Max for Live chaining device. It’s all of that – it’s Leakage, the free/pay-what-you-will Ableton Live creation from Tom Cosm. The idea is to give you ever-changing bassline sounds each time you hit a note, for colorful and glitchy results. […]

Like alien artifacts dug up in sci-fi, once-forgotten technologies are resurfacing as newly futuristic. And so behold vector synthesis – that moment when signal for light and sound intertwines.

Now, even your browser can produce elaborate, production-grade eye candy using just some Ableton Live MIDI clock. The question of how to generate visuals to go with music starts to get more and more interesting answers.

Here’s one serious Japanese game + music nerdgasm: legendary arcade maker Taito, game giant SEGA all come together on the KORG platform on the Nintendo platform. KORG Gadget on the Nintendo Switch was always at least an intriguing novelty. As with titles for Nintendo DS and Game Boy before it, bringing a music creation tool […]

Few software tools have proved as expressive in generative visuals or audiovisual performance as TouchDesigner. Get introduced to its AV powers in a new, free video – or if you can make it Montreal, get the full experience live. TouchDesigner is a dataflow tool – a graphical, patchable development environment – uniquely suited to squeezing […]

So, I hear you like tuned 808s. And strings. And pianos. And wavetables. And FM. And filters. And… okay, let’s just put all of those in one synth but make everything a preset. Meet FL Studio 20.5. The folks at Image Line are always full of surprises – somehow their always-free-upgrades churn out more and […]