I Want My IR TV: A Giant Screen Made of 625 Remote Controls

From the avalanche of discarded, used electronics, artists are beginning to make new works. DeFunct/ReFunct, as covered here in some detail recently, appeared last week at Berlin’s Transmediale. But for a uniquely-elegant transformation of the old into the new, Chris Shen shares his TV screen made of some 625 remote controls, as installed in an […]

Faderfox UC3: Compact Controls for Ableton, Anything Else, and Now Cheaper

No disco-colored pads. No pressure-sensitive controls. No flashy layouts for specific software. It’s not an iPad app. No, it’s just the Faderfox controller we love: incredibly compact, engineered and built like a tank in Germany from metal and high-quality pots, with gimmick-free controls. And perhaps more than any previous version of the Faderfox series, the […]

Cubasis + Audiobus: Complete Solution to Record and Edit Sounds from iPad Apps

Audiobus may have just gotten its killer app. See if this scenario is familiar to you: you’ve got some instrument or effect on the iPad or iPhone, and you’re making some cool sounds. But you want to actually get to recording more than one track of that instrument, perhaps even as far as arranging it […]

Projection-Mapped Raw Bacon: Music Video by Hands Make Fire

Hint: if you’re wondering how you could possibly projection-map raw bacon successfully, you… can’t. “Projection Mapped Bacon” sounds a bit like someone did a Mad Libs parody of CDMotion, so I of course have to post this. In fact, it’s a charming DIY music video in which projection mapping, in fits and starts, is fitted […]

Good Listening: You Need More Mute Speaker In Your Life [Interview]

Music with beats can get some people down in the mouth, as the demands of the commercial dance floor wedge music into narrow genres and expectations, awash in nostalgia. And that’s just the time CDM turns to our regular columnist Matt Earp, not only to help us find the artists dancing to their own drummer, […]

Tech for Guitarists: What’s New, What’s Changing in Digital Guitar Tools [NAMM Report]

Who says guitar technology isn’t advancing? Joe Gore is a guitarist who’s unafraid of the bleeding edge, so he was a natural to report back to us from the hallowed halls of new musical instruments, NAMM. He takes a look at what’s new and what’s evolving through a guitarist’s eyes. And this stuff is interesting, […]

MusicMakers Hacklab Report: Blinking Lightbulbs with MIDI, Why Working Together Matters

It’s a wonderful time to be experimenting with technology and music. You can create something that looks like the stuff most people imagine as “the future” – elaborate dances of light, power over sound just by waving your hand, software that seems directly out of Star Trek. But you can do it with technology that […]

C64s, Control Voltage, MIDI … iPads, Keyboards and Audio: NAMM Saturday [Gallery, Impressions]

Everything old is new again. And everything new is everywhere – at least if we’re talking iPads and so on. At Anaheim’s massive gathering of music gear, there were some definite themes. Photographing for CDM, James Grahame and Marsha Vdovin give us a look at the tools on the floor. James has stumbled upon various […]

Roland V-4EX: HDMI, RGB, SD Mixer Will Have US$1995 List

We’ve gotten more details on Roland Systems’ Group’s V-4EX mixer. This really is an evolution of the V-4 – and Roland apparently still views “V-4” to mean standard definition, meaning you’ll need to look elsewhere for internal HD mixing. But the V-4EX does deliver on connectivity, with functionality via things like HDMI, and all in […]

Keys and Knobs and Such, New Gear, in Photos: Notes and Gallery from NAMM Day 1

From the Prophet 12 to Korg’s MS-20 Mini (and King Korg – more on that soon), iConnectMIDI interfaces for your iPad to Arturia ultra-portable keyboards, from analog to digital, from big releases to oddities, CDM has some roving reporters out on the floor of America’s biggest musical instrument trade show, NAMM. James Grahame, principal engineer […]