My adventures with Quartz Composer, the free development tool that ships with Mac OS X Tiger, continue. What it does: QC is another visual development tool with a patching interface so you can create without coding. It’s a perfect visualization/VJ tool for musicians, thanks to handy audio and MIDI inputs: it’s easy to link the […]

Can’t tell your gloomcore from your EBM from your synthtron? Don’t worry. Neither can I. Fortunately, Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music (now at version 2.5) makes sense of the tangle of electronic music microgenres in a Flash-enabled multimedia interface the whole family will enjoy. There’s even a tutorial for the tutorial, in case you get […]

Thanks to readers asger, Fer, and Joel/Warpedeye, who send us the latest experimentation in musical instrument controllers. They don’t quite look like the Next Big Thing — but sometimes oddities are just as interesting. First up is The (Untitled) Box which “should theoretically eliminate the keyboard and mouse dance party” for running audio and video. […]

Soft synth overload: it’s a debilitating syndrome where people wander around, unable to recognize loved ones, glazed eyes, muttering incoherently “VST . . . Native Kontraktimpakgutoek. . . polyphony . . . sampledgigabee…..” etc. So, let’s cut to the chase: big sample-playback synth, user skinnable and customizable, and (B3 organ aside) lots of great 80s-digital […]

Online music not only offers new opportunities for spreading new independent music, but new music activism as well. I’m really excited to have the chance to pass along this email; some of my favorite Afrobeat artists involved here. Politics aside, it’s music I personally enjoy more than a lot of the Live8 stuff. And getting […]

There’s plenty of homebrew music software for the Game Boy and GBA (check out LSDJ and Nanoloop), but what about next-gen portables? MusicThing gets the scoop on PSP Kick, a sampled drum machine for PSP. PSP Kick is very simple — it’s just a 12-slot drum sampler with AIFF output — but it sounds like […]

A fun discovery today from one of our favorite sites, EM411: a new set of ‘chip’ emulators is available from mmonoplayer. Available in a few flavors including Max/MSP externals, PD externals, and a few Pluggo-powered VST’s, the Atari 2600, 5200, 7800, ColecoVision, Sega Master System, GameBoy, NES and IntelliVoice are available. mmonoplayer claims that additional […]

As musicians, these kinds of features sound familiar: “Four effects layers per channel , larger clip bank, integrated MIDI templates, effects triggers, clip sequencer, easy-to-use LFOs, new effects and parameters.” Some kind of new sampler/synth, maybe? Actually, it’s the new features in the upgrade to the VJ app, Livid Union 1.5, for Mac OS X. […]

Chris of Pixelsumo alerts us to the Beatbox “physical programmable drum machine” at the RCA show in the UK. (see additional commentary at MusicThing) So, is this the future of drum machines? Of course not. An Akai-style sampler has a physical interface, too, and it’s more usable than these. But after a slow start, watch […]

Ableton Live 5 doesn’t ship with any new instruments; it’s limited to slightly-upgraded versions of its bare-bones sampler and drum machine, Simpler and Impulse. Both of those are great fun to use, but people longing for a deeper, playable instrument with an Ableton interface would want to consider Operator, Ableton’s a la carte synth. So […]