Apple’s Quartz Composer has long enabled beautiful, intricate generative and responsive visuals, often even with simple patches. But assembling its compositions into something with which you can perform is more of a chore. 2 V-P isn’t the first attempt to wrap Quartz’s interactive visualizations into a performance tool. But it might be the most practical. […]

The phrase “alternative universe” always seems to fit Renoise. Imagine a world in which the tracker metaphor – a music arrangement notion mostly associated with software from years ago, especially on Amiga – became dominant. From there, you begin to explain that Renoise is an instrument that brings that retro idea into a modern context. […]

If you’re looking to give yourself sonic inspiration in a new shape, a musical marketplace has some deals for you now. Resy is a recently-launched curated shop for “indie” instruments, both hardware and software. It’s worth mentioning them now because they have a lovely deal through end of day tomorrow Monday the 23rd, and also […]

Even in a big year for acquisitions – with Gibson acquiring Cakewalk, for one – this news comes as a surprise to many of us. Yamaha, the 1887-founded Japanese conglomerate with a stake in everything from golf carts to wheelchairs to jetskis to pianos, is acquiring Line 6, the independent California-based guitar and sound product […]

Holiday Card from Shilo on Vimeo. If hearing the tune from the vintage HBO intro/bump doesn’t send a little nostalgic chill down your spine, you probably didn’t grow up in the US in the 1980s. Looking back at this old animation earlier this year, I was struck by the old way of making motion graphics. […]

Alongside starting orders for the Mac Pro, Apple this week released updates for all its pro apps, including Logic Pro X. And, showing ongoing attention to MainStage – which Cupertino says is used by a number of high-profile celebrities in their tours – the live performance companion app gets some attention, too. The banner feature […]

It looks like a machine from the future. It is a machine you’ll only be able to get in the future. And it may be further off before we really see music applications that reach its full potential. But it does paint a picture of a music machine that’s futuristic, and it isn’t so far […]

All of Apple’s pro apps get updates this week. Compressor adds GPU optimizations; Motion does hardware H.264 encoding and adds 4K export. But Final Cut Pro X 10.1 is the big news. It’s finally the payoff of the painful transition to the X generation. At the same time, combined with a steady parade of updates […]

All of Apple’s pro apps get updates this week. Compressor adds GPU optimizations; Motion does hardware H.264 encoding and adds 4K export. But Final Cut Pro X 10.1 is the big news. It’s finally the payoff of the painful transition to the X generation. At the same time, combined with a steady parade of updates […]

Strictly speaking, the Prophet 12 isn’t news. It’s just a module version of the Prophet 12 keyboard introduced earlier this year. (You can add ears and rack-mount it.) And yet, it’s getting lots of buzz online. I was thinking for a bit about why that was, and eventually arrived at this solution: for synth lovers, […]