Who said computer performance has to be a dude sitting behind a screen tweaking arcane software setups? As we saw Friday, you can hide your computer in a rig and play guitars and keyboards. David Levy reports for Apple.com that keyboardist Vince Jones totes a PowerBook onstage for playing keyboard soft synths, courtesy the sampler […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Master chip musician Gijs Gieskes has outdone himself this time: his second Walkman tape sequencer controls the Game Boy music cartridge LSDJ via various knobs and circuitry. His typography is utterly mysterious (in other words, completely illegible), so here’s my translation: It has got LSDJ sync, because it uses gwems lsdj pitch control as master […]

Brent, CDM’s resident game composer, is back with another look at the world of digital music in gaming. And again, gaming gives us a glimpse of what future digital music could be like — namely, permutable. (That’s a word, isn’t it?) -PK The level of interactivity in today’s game audio continues to grow and expand. […]

We hear a lot about studios in software, but the “studio in a box” concept lives on. Yamaha’s new portable digital audio workstations integrate a mixing console, recording, effects, and mastering — and they hook up to USB 2.0, so Yamaha’s clearly thinking of these as companions to your computer, not replacements. You can check […]

Windows users have been begging me for more coverage, but here’s one for the Apple crowd, nonetheless: Apple has updated both its iBook and Mac Mini. The across-the-board change is more RAM: Finally, every Mac they sell comes with 512MB of RAM. (They don’t deserve any slap on the back for that; the previous RAM […]

Several sites are reporting that M-Audio has introduced a new 88-key stage piano, but it’s not new: in fact, Ken “King of Keys Hardware” Hughes from Keyboard Magazine has a great review of the ProKeys88 from Keyboard’s July issue. Ken’s verdict: a great keyboard, an incredible price (street around US$600 from what I can see), […]

Ah, the plight of the Manhattanite: there is no room here for a grand piano. So I’m eager to try Native Instruments’ new introduction to the pile, Akoustik Piano. The pianos: Three grands (Steinway D, Bechstein D and Boesendorfer Imperial) and one vintage upright (Steingraeber 130) Did they finally get layering right? I’ve heard some […]