A standalone grid musical instrument? Done. And it can be a new way to venture into the worlds of harmony. Marc “Nostromo” Resibois is back with another clever Raspberry Pi hack. We saw him last fall, beating KORG to the punch with his own – digital – MS-20 mini, using the Pi. It’s still appealing, […]

Light-up colored grids are hardly news in the controller scene. But what makes original, boutique hardware worthy of the name “Digital Warrior” is the unique take it brings to DJing and live remix – pushing the envelope with Native Instruments’ Traktor (all the while perhaps making even Ableton Live a little bit jealous). The new […]

We give you news of the thing. Then we give you a virtual thing that helps you with the thing. Then we give you a virtual thing for when you don’t have the thing with you or want a taste of the thing before you get the real thing. Or something. And we’ll keep this […]

In the box, inside the world of the computer, sound has few limits. It’s clean, it’s pristine; mimicking perfectly-miked drum kits or high-fidelity sounds is as easy as dialing in the gigs of samples you’ve assembled. But … wait a minute. It’s too clean. There’s something beautiful about a digital circuit, screaming and crunching as […]

Art in light and sound is routinely spread across venues, or sprawling through buildings in the horizontal. Not at TodaysArt. The festival in The Hague, Netherlands went vertical. Taking to the nineteen-floor tower of the former Ministry of Interior and Kingdom Relations (Binnenlandse Zaken) and the Atrium of the City Hall, the festival established their […]

It was only a matter of time. An intrepid Lemur for iPad user has devised a template that emulates Ableton’s Push hardware. Cleverly entitled “Shove,” the template isn’t just a little like Push. It actually allows you to use the iPad as surrogate for Ableton’s hardware. You configure the iPad input and output and then […]

If there was any doubt left, the analog monosynth keyboard has gone mainstream now. Fusing 70s electronic instrument design ideas with nerdy lust for sound with modern ideas about connectivity, accessibility, and timbre, a generation of instruments has made it a wonderful time for synth lovers to be alive. And the latest from Arturia is […]

The problem with most delays is that they’re a bit like dumping water on your whole project, rather than a precise shade of watercolor. They delay everything at once. So, then there are multi-tap delays, and more precise delays. And then there’s Multitude, a kind of delay studio that allows you to produce rhythmic delay […]

The usual advice applies: if you’re thinking of rushing to update to a major new OS, and you’re a musician, take your time. That’s the advice for OS X Mavericks as it would be for any big update to OS X, Windows, Linux, and now even iOS. But with that disclaimer, OS X Mavericks is […]

Ableton’s Push really is growing on me; it’s astounding to have lots of the working methods from software integrated on a piece of hardware, in pads and buttons and knobs. But because it does so much, because it’s open to so many tasks, it isn’t something that reveals itself in just a day. From mapping […]