Happy New Year, everyone. We’re taking the day off, but while we’re putting together a year-end review of musical technology and invention, any nominees for stories that fell under the radar, that people might have missed? DIY projects, unique tools, or anything of the sort welcome; we do appreciate your ideas, as always. Let us […]

Robotkid, aka Josh Randall, is the veteran former Creative Director at Harmonix who regularly infused VJ and real-time visual aesthetics into the company’s games (Beatles Rock Band, VibRibbon, etc.). Now, he’s gone to LA, where his passion for the most fantastically colorful trips of the past is feeding new visual fancies. And they’re too good […]

Mixes these days have become almost too common, many of them somewhat random selections of crowd-pleasing tracks, in no particular order. And they tend to be solo endeavors. modernluv, apart from being a duo of two significant stastemakers, is significant in that they’ve put together a real sound. It actually is “sultry” and “dark” and […]

With sounds from Hannes Rasmus to Cosmin TRG, Sofia hand-picks some of the finest production work of the last couple of years – sharply-focused, beautifully-made gems, all.

The LFO – Low Frequency Oscillator – is one of the most fundamental of electronic music elements. Creating a signal that modulates the sound of something else, the LFO has a history that’s roughly as old as sound-making electronic circuits themselves. And yet, there’s still more that can be done with them. Two new LFOs […]

They’re a recent addition to popular OS X live visual app VDMX. But now is the perfect time to talk about the magic of shaders, generally. Standard “fragment shaders” are capable of performing feats of visual wonder as both generators and effects, using geometry and pixels. Written in GLSL, they are portable to any OpenGL-compliant […]

If you wondered where your musical inspiration would come from in the waning hours of 2013, or the early hours of 2014, we’ve got some ideas. In lieu of top-this-and-that lists, we have a motherload of musical listening and discussions for a series we’re calling Music into 2014. Eclectic and electronic, Mexico’s label Static Discos […]

As more sales – particularly software – move online, we’re finding that musicians can save a lot on their tools by waiting on sales. Black Friday / Thanksgiving / Cyber Monday saw steep discounts on some terrific stuff, and now there are loads of sales in the quiet period from Christmas to New Year’s. Half […]

Hyperbubble – A Synthesizer for Christmas from Ambar Navarro on Vimeo. Put the synth back in … Christm… um, Christmasynth. Synthmas. It’s the reason for the season. And that’s the message of a delightful video from animator Ambar Navarro. (Apologies if you’ve seen this already – Ambar sent her work to us last week – […]

We open on a Christmas Eve dinner. The goose has been stripped to the bones, the third wine glass drained to its last drops. A typical-looking family leans back. Cut to a close-up on a scraggly-looking electronic music producer. He rolls his eyes at the next question. “Why don’t you play some of that music […]