2020 is a crazy complicated beat machine app from Japan

Want to go from four on the floor to, sort of four thousand all over the place? Yotaro Shuto is a Japanese electronic musician who performs in DUB-Russell, and he’s decided to turn his monster Max performance patch beat machine into a product. That’s meant taking it to Kickstarter.

Inside SoundCloud, the move to revenue begins

SoundCloud has become a popular punching bag for the music press. The formula runs something like this: choose a screaming headline predicting the company’s doom, run some out-of-context business numbers and some negative quotes by an unnamed source, then (presumably) rake in clicks.

Remembering Keith Emerson and his titanic synth legacy

In news reverberating with synthesizer lovers and keyboardists everywhere, Keith Emerson died last night in his home in Santa Monica at age 71. Mr. Emerson’s impact on the world of keyboards and synthesizers is hard to overstate. And that impact may be wider now than ever before. If the musical idiom in which he worked […]

This amazing video proves that live techno is always better

So, today one of the Internet’s targeted millennial marketing conglomerate – cum – music press outlets decided to ask if anyone likes live techno sets as part of a series that could be titled “We Troll The Internet to Increase Click Revenue.” I really wanted to argue with the content of the article, but – […]

KORG volca FM is here – and does some unexpected tricks

KORG’s runaway-hit volca series has proven small can be fun. But the volca FM promises more power in a small package. The volca FM, teased in California in January and demoed in early prototype form, is now official. And part of why we’re eager to get our hands on one is that it’s more than […]

Ableton just released every last detail of how Push 2 works

Wish granted, hackers. The full specification for Ableton’s Push 2 hardware is now online on GitHub, after passionate Live users clamored for its release. And there’s a lot. This isn’t just a MIDI specification (though that’s there). Every minute detail of how colors appear on LEDs gets covered. (The color “white” has its own section. […]

Google are giving away experiments to teach music and code

Technology’s record in the last century was often replacing music making with music consumption. But in this century, that might turn around. Google seems to hope so. Today, the company posted a set of free sound toys on its site, all running in your browser. They’re fun diversions for now – but thanks to open […]

On women’s day, imagining a new future in sound

Let’s be clear: there should be no excuse for the press in our sphere, including this outlet, to treat International Women’s Day as a chance simply to talk about women in music. That obligation is year-round and daily, or we simply aren’t doing our jobs. But that’s not the origin of Women’s Day, anyway. The […]

Tour: What you can do with SoundCloud’s Pulse app

The thing that makes SoundCloud so valuable – that it’s home to vast swaths of listeners and vast populations of producers – also gives it a split personality. As the people making the sounds and music, we want both. We want a big, happy audience – but we also have unique needs for managing our […]

It slices! Patches make Ableton’s new Simpler more powerful

By letting you get creative with audio, Ableton’s Simpler and slicing workflows have always opened up musical possibilities, and they got a lot more powerful in Live 9.5. But it could do even more. Developer Mark Egloff has released four clever Max for Live patches that let you slice without Push, chop in new ways, and more.