I know you’ve been there. Somehow, even with a small assortment of gear, you find that you have exactly the wrong combination of plugs. It’s actually even worse if you’ve bought into the inexpensive mobile music revolution. iPads are chock full of apps; little boxes like the KORG volcas can be great fun. But… the […]

“Instead of going to music school, I studied design.” Wiggle, wob, drum, pads, and scan are new gestural instruments that seek to cut the distance between an idea, making a move with your body, and a sound. Think you could draw a doodle that expresses a sound? Wish you could just air-drum in that percussion […]

[vimeo width=”640″ height=”360″]https://vimeo.com/120154304[/vimeo] 18€ buys you this lunchbox-style synthesizer kit – and it’s just the thing to put together on your lunch break. Unit Unlikely is a hardware startup working with simple parts to make accessible, fun instruments. And its founder joins our resident Dutch design expert to talk about what it’s like diving into […]

[vimeo width=”640″ height=”360″]109389202[/vimeo] It looks like Pin Art or Pinscreens – those moldable frames full of pins popularized in the 80s. But the result is something that lets you dig your hands into sound and musical structures in new ways. It looks expressive and, let’s be honest, really fun. (For the research minded, there’s also […]

Ableton Live can be a fantastic tool for playing live, for improvisation, and for studio work. But while some people put together very effective DJ sets, it doesn’t always stack up to other software out there in terms of satisfying certain significant DJ techniques. And that’s too bad. Because if your DJ aspirations include lots […]

iPad creation tool Auxy may have come with a lot of fanfare touting its simplicity and elegance when it launched. The piano roll-turned-touchable music maker first launched on the merits of doing less, better, then turned into something more of us might use with the addition of MIDI. But a rather significant upgrade has come […]

Apple Music, the company’s streaming / social / radio service, rolls out today. So you’ll see plenty of people talking about how it looks to listeners. But how does it look to artists? If you followed my previous advice about signing up for “Music for Artists” via Apple Connect, you may already be having a […]

Audiomux already changed how we use our iPhones and iPads. Out: juggling cables and audio interfaces just to record an app. In: using apps seamlessly on your computer via just a Lightning or (30-pin) Dock cable. Well, if that didn’t make you interested in plugging your iPad into your DAW, this should. Using an app […]

All those pads – it took virtuoso finger drummer Mad Zach to take advantage of them. Mad Zach’s five free Drum Racks accompany today’s release of Ableton Live 9.2. Since he, frankly, makes most of us look bad with his agile use of the Push hardware, I wanted CDM to talk to him more about […]

A free update to Ableton Live, version 9.2, is now available and out of beta. We covered this in some detail before: Live 9.2 Answers Your Warp, Automation, Tuner, and Pad Wishes Hands on with the Ableton Live 9.2 Tuner [Video] But today, in addition to the release, we get a closer look at the […]