The Perseid meteor shower arrives on the 13th of August – this Thursday. So, let’s celebrate with some music and sound. First, a quick refresher: what is a meteor shower? It’s what happens when the Earth passes through the debris trail left by a comet. (Ah ha! See, just now you were sitting at your […]

Jam Supercut from Matthew Ogle on Vimeo. Call it a jam session that has completely fallen apart. Having Web services go dark is certainly not news in this day and age. We’ve come to expect that Internet services won’t be there forever. (Google Reader, anyone?) But if you pull apart some of the backstory behind […]

Sometimes the narrow apertures of musical genre can be a dead-end for inspiration. You often just can’t find a way to kick-start your creative process by listening only to songs that sound like you want. So, mixes really ought to be mixes. They ought to be personal. And even for producers and DJs, listening ought […]

Happy 8th of August, everybody – that means it’s 808 day, of course. So, to celebrate, let’s flash back to a 2012 video of Egyptian Lover assembling a beat in his hotel room. The LA rapper/producer was a big part of the early hip hop and electro roots of 808 use. There’s something that still […]

The problem with festivals isn’t that we’re lacking for choice. But in the fast food court of summer festivities, the offerings tend to be arrayed in hard-edged silos. Here’s the dance music one, and it’ll be a rave. Here’s the rock one, and it’s just going to be about guitars. Here’s the experimental one, and […]

Here’s a live jam video that shows just how performance-friendly an all-in-one iPad drum machine can be. The pad controller you’ll recognize. But there’s an Audiobus story here, too. It started as a way to route audio between apps on iPads and whatnot – a drum machine app could be processed by a filter app. […]

The very fact that a tool is called a “digital audio workstation” rather than “music making software” tells you something. Historically, these have been tools that do a lot of things in a fairly complex interface. And so a lot of DAWs seem to be counting how many windows and views and tools they can […]

Put control over Ableton Live in the palm of your hand – and control MIDI gadgets even without the aid of a computer. That’s the vision of LK (the former Livkontrol), out today for both iOS and Android handhelds. This isn’t the first pocket controller. But it might be the first pocket controller to become […]

Since the spring, Native Instruments has been eager to talk about Stems every chance they got. And shops and some celebrity DJs have been quick to endorse the new initiative for releasing music in multi-track, DJ-friendly formats. But today, on the occasion of the official Stems launch, you can actually get your hands on Stems […]

Let’s be honest: it’s a bit of a mystery why KORG has’t already shipped a mixer. KORG volca series customers seem to snap up every single volca model the Japanese maker can cook up. That leaves them with a bunch of toys with stereo minijacks and no way to mix them together other than buying […]