Trainspottr is the social music player Facebook forgot

Facebook is all but happy to distract you. It can bombard you with instant messages, show you endless pictures of the babies your forgotten friends from high school have just popped out. Now it can do live video streams and spawn trending news. What it bizarrely doesn’t do much is play music. And if you […]

Learn audio skills as a game, free, with your ears as guide

You are probably equipped with ears as sharp and precise as the world’s top sound professionals. What you lack, then, is training.

Trigger effects in Bitwig with MIDI, for free

In the latest chapter of “people on the Internet doing cool things for electronic music,” here’s a creation by Polarity. It lets you rapidly trigger effects parameters via MIDI. And if you’re a Bitwig Studio enthusiast, it’s available for free.

Movement is a do-everything, musical rhythmic effect

Movement is here – and it’s a little scary. The folks at Output have some weird way of dialing directly into the zeitgeist of what we want from production these days, and delivering it in an easy form. They did that with reversed samples (REV), with vocals (EXHALE), and now they’re doing it in an […]

Quick listen – love the new Jimmy Edgar ULTRAMAJIC sound

In the dark, damp swamp that is the stream of dance music that press get in their inbox, Jimmy Edgar has consistently been a rainbow-colored lighthouse. Apart from the tropically-hued surrealist work of Pilar Zeta literally making that true, Jimmy has been an aesthetic compass at the helm of his ULTRAMAJIC label. Basically, stuff this […]

Your unconscious meat body plays this online drum machine

I am a damp rag of exposed flesh, my limbs ill-defined blobs drifting in some undetermined direction as I float through space – wet steak in a wormhole. But then there’s a parade of translucent boxes against this surrealist-nightmare distorted planet, and a triumphant series of chime rings out. A clear pattern is articulated from […]

Listen to how pop hits have evolved over the years

There’s a simple antidote to the endless circular “pop music was better in the old days” debate: actually listen to the songs. A new interactive tool lets you do just that. But warning: it may not be as pleasurable to turn back time as you think.

McDonald’s in the Netherlands lets you DJ with your placemat

Move over, collecting stickers off your Coke to try to win Monopoly. Dutch McDonald’s customers can DJ using a combination of their phone and a placemat.

The 1955 Fender Tweed amp now lives in software

The art of modeling at a handful of the best software shops continues to progress. And so it is that Universal Audio say they’ve simulated every tiny detail, “from speaker paper and heat dissipation, to filter caps and transformers,” of one of the world’s best-known amplifiers – the Fender Tweed. It’s the cranked sound of […]

Lords of Synth is an epic parody from Adult Swim

In a gift to synthesizer lovers everywhere, the comiticians of Adult Swim have produced an extended retro electronica opus imagining an alternate-universe battle of the bands between Wendy Carlos, Vangelis, and Giorgio Moroder.