Ed: The dynamic duo of hits in a wide variety of genres, Joey P. and Dale “RamBro” Ramsey, have contributed to albums selling over a combined 75 million copies. For CDM, they look at another dynamic duo: the combination of Cakewalk’s Project5 with Propellerhead’s Reason on Windows. Both programs tout an all-in-one design, but there […]

Dan Phillips with Korg Research & Development is one of the designers behind Korg’s ultra-premium Korg OASYS keyboard, among many other projects. In addition to getting to design electronic musical instruments for a living, Dan is an electronic singer-songwriter, writer, composer (Fox TV, As the World Turns), consultant (Santana, Emily Bazar), producer, remixer, and even […]

2D shooter? Interactive sound sculpture? Why choose one when you can have both? Transcend is an open-source, cross-platform (Mac/Windows build or *nix source), 2D shooter game. Thanks to morphing shapes and what the developer calls a “musical power-up system,” as you shoot your way through the levels you’re simultaneously “assembling an abstract visual collage and […]

CDM’s resident game composer W. Brent Latta talks to Tim Larkin, the composer behind the eagerly-anticipated, upcoming Myst 5 and the current PC/Xbox title Pariah, and featured in the live game music performance festival Video Games Live. (Sound samples at his site for both games; watch this space for updates on the Myst soundtrack and […]

ReBirth is the program that made Propellerheads famous; it was a brilliant emulation of the wildly popular Roland TB-303 bass and TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines and paved the way for Reason. Today, Propellerheads is putting that legacy to rest, discontinuing the application from 1997 and opening the ReBirth Museum. Among lots of other goodies, […]

We’ve been waiting for this for some time, and it’s finally here — a huge upgrade to Jitter, the data processing, realtime 3D/2D/video graphics powerhouse. Along the way, though, is a nifty upgrade for Max die-hards with lots of cool stuff hiding behind a 4.5.5 version upgrade. I can’t wait to get my hands on […]

While the 8-bit music crowd are reimagining Kraftwerk as covered by Game Boys (more on that soon), 8-bit is getting its own acoustic treatment. No, not that dude who plays a Mario Brothers medley on the piano (though adding the blindfold is a bit kinky). One-man band Jason Cox last week took Super Mario World […]

Games Week continues with the introduction of a new regular column by sound designer and game composer W. Brent Latta. First up, Brent introduces game music as an art form and ideas about how to listen to it. It’s fitting that Brent would launch his first column with a tribute to why the NES is […]

A terrific, free audio tool is lurking in Mac OS X Tiger’s developer tools. AU Lab is intended for testing Audio Unit effects and instruments, but it’s feature-packed enough to be useful to end users, too. If you haven’t already, install Xcode Tools from your Tiger install disc. Then launch Developer > Applications > Audio […]

If you haven’t seen it yet, The History of Sampling by Jesse Kriss lets you interactively navigate the links between sampled songs and samplers. Jesse’s site pulls data from the-breaks, a huge collection of sampling rap music. The real story, though, is how this site, and many other nifty new sites making rounds on the […]