What does that tasty ice, cold vanilla ice cream need? Chocolate sauce and peanuts. What does the Novation Circuit need? This sample pack.

So, this just happened – Ableton quietly announced an SDK for working with file export. That follows up the company’s wildly popular Ableton Link platform for sync and jamming, which is available both as an open source project and as a mobile and desktop SDK. Novation’s Blocs Wave uses this export functionality, as mentioned today […]

For many of us, finishing something is still a task best left to a laptop. The precision and familiarity of a desktop interface, the favorite suite of plug-ins, a big monitor in the studio, and tools like Ableton Live all add up to something that mobile just can’t beat. But that’s finishing. Starting and sketching […]

If there’s one thing that can bring more feeling and humanity to club music, it’s improvisation. That’s why it’s such a pleasure to meet people like TM404, aka Andreas Tilliander of Sweden. Andreas’ latest antics included opening up for Richie Hawtin at Loveland at this week’s Amsterdam Dance Event. That’s a regular gig for TM404, […]

Someday, I’ll realize my dream of gathering ethnomusicologists and neuroscientists and engineers and we can finally sit down and work out why it is that the 303 is so damned pleasing. In the meantime, we can obsess over the nuances of different 303 recreations. Kudos to ADSRsounds for putting that together. They not only compare […]

Working in the synth business is basically one of the most fun things you can do. So in addition to the pleasure of getting reports from owners, we wake to total surprises like this video from Olivier Ozoux, who has made a terrific stop motion unboxing video and live jam with the synth. MeeBlip joins […]

There’s something counterintuitive about it, right? Plug a USB stick into a giant digital player alongside turntables. Or plug the turntables into a computer. What if the USB stick … was the actual player? In the age of rapid miniaturization, why hasn’t this happened yet? Well, thanks to an open source project, it has happened […]

What would your future clone think of you now, looking back across an apocalyptic reshaping of humanity? That’s the question posed by the 2005 novel The Possibility of an Island, and it resonates in Franz Kirmann’s new album Elysian Park. This might sound bleak, but it isn’t. Kirmann’s new record paints a science fiction sound […]

You can get the feeling of “pushing into” an iPhone as of the iPhone 6S. It’s an expressive, intimate gesture, which is generally used for … wait, really, shortcut menus? That’s pretty boring. Ever since I saw the feature, I wanted to see it used for music applications. And one obvious fit is an emerging […]

The beautiful thing about software is that it’s flexible. You can reconfigure an entire live rig on the fly. But it’s still necessary to channel that flexibility into consistency, especially playing live. Reuse the stuff you need most so it’s always there. And train your hands and muscle memory so you can play fluidly. Savages […]