It’s clear right away that Kiran Gandhi is an “always-on artist.” We’re sitting down with the drummer/singer/electronic musician/businesswoman at Ableton’s Loop conference, and as she reflects on the acoustics of the outdoor tent where we’re recording, she sings an impromptu recording into her phone. There’s even a lyric reminding her to write about tents. The […]

“Gesture” is a term that gets tossed about regularly in modern interaction design. But to me, the word is most deeply associated with classical music – and the gestures that first brought me to music, the piano. In this video for TED@BCG, I got to talk about that and why I think it can inform […]

It’s sweet harmony as Korg and Nintendo come together at last. A musician from lower Saxony named eVADE/duality micro has produced a cable to sync up Game Boys running popular homebrew software with Korg drum machines and synths.

Digital, analog – whatever. Let’s see what happens when Ableton’s latest digital hardware, the new Push, meets Eurorack, for a sort of convergence of the stuff electronic musicians are talking about right now. (Don’t worry; we aren’t going to a round-the-clock all-Ableton format – the Berlin developer is notoriously conservative about spreading out releases, so […]

Music software can make you feel good. Music software can also make you feel almost guilty. And sometimes that makes you feel good. David Abravanel takes the updated Live 9.5 Instant Haus device (in Max Essentials) for a test drive, in combination with Simpler’s new slicer mode. Somehow, no one has done a video on […]

The new Push hardware may have been the big, new shiny from Ableton this week. But for Live users, the software changes in 9.5 may have the greatest impact on day-to-day music-making life. Live 9.5 has arrived as a free upgrade for Live 9 users. The biggest change is the new Simpler, but some other […]

We covered Andy Grobengieser’s lovely Minimoog LEGO kit proposal. But perhaps the iconic synth keyboard just isn’t open-ended enough in terms of sound design. You want kids to play with the wide sonic palette of the legendary Moog Model 55. Now, they can.

::vtol:: prankophone from ::vtol:: on Vimeo. If you pick up the phone and instead of a robocall or someone pocket dialing you, you get what sounds like a synthesizer that’s lost its mind, blame the Prankophone. Since we’re going to cover the latest from Ableton and Korg and so on in detail, we practically need […]

Okay, OK Go fans – now there’s synth hardware as quirky and charming as the band’s Internet-viral synth-pop. We got our hands on a very limited edition KORG volca sample made especially for OK Go. This is the battery-powered sample unit with grungy digital sound playback and loads of knobs for manipulating sound, plus the […]

Whatever identity crisis and legal wrangling may be going on at SoundCloud at the moment, the site’s DNA is all about creation. That’s where the site came from – initially, with labels and producers as a way of sending around tracks – and it remains the strong point. SoundCloud is the operating system for music […]