It’s been almost 30 years since MIDI was first demonstrated at the winter NAMM show, 1983. Marking the anniversary, The Recording Academy is giving a coveted Technical Grammy to the two people most associated with its creation – so-called “father of MIDI” Dave Smith (then founder of Sequential Circuits, now Dave Smith Instruments) and Roland […]

PK: In the digital age, subscription services or “all-you-can-eat” music gives passionate listeners nothing if not flexibility and a wealth of music. But they can also distance music lovers from labels they care about – and the reliance on streaming threatens to sever the special relationship you have with albums that are really special. Drip.fm […]

I hear it all the time – people want something that just plugs in and visualizes musical inputs. But then, on the other end of the spectrum is a crowd that wants that and powerful editing capabilities. For both, this could be a compelling development. Image-Line, the developer behind the Windows music tool FL Studio […]

The desire to be a little different in a band might drive someone to choose a custom guitar, or maybe, you know, change their hair. For some, it drives them to build a giant flying saucer they can play like an instrument by waving their hands. No, MIDI controller, don’t destroy Earth. Klaatu barada nikto. […]

Ableton visits the home studio of Berlin-based producer Robert Lippok (Raster Noton, To Rococo Rot). I’m a great fan of Robert’s work; to me, it’s full of musical imagination, and I like his reflective-but-free approach to his music. I had the fortune of interviewing Robert about iOS over the summer in front of the CDR […]

Connecting Reaktor 5.8 with Konkreet Performer from Konkreet Labs on Vimeo. Mapping control from one place (like an iPad) to another (Reaktor) is tough to describe, but easy to see. Watch as strange, spacey geometries control futuristic generative sounds and beats, and it all starts to make sense. And so, this hands-on video is a […]

For months, you’ve heard about Audiobus, an app that allows iOS apps to work together rather than being isolated tools. Now you can try it – and see if connecting apps on iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad can make you more musically productive. The video above puts it more nicely than a written explanation could, […]

Panoramic Room 2.0 from Carlos Freitas on Vimeo. Last week, we traveled to Portugal to see an immersive mapped environment produced by Lisbon’s Dub Video Connection. Now, the artists share the sequel with CDM. Well worth watching for more context. It’s especially nice seeing the more abstract geometrical visual language combined with figurative work – […]

FIBER Festival – Sharing Signals from Hotpixel on Vimeo. When you see artistic ideas spreading, practices evolving, part of the reason is that people are being exposed to those ideas. (It’s nice when contagion has artistic symptoms, rather than, you know, nasty illnesses and whatnot.) Here, the design agency Hotpixel documents a video montage love […]

A wintry afternoon sometimes calls for putting the work on hold and spending some time jamming. So, this week (in approximate celebration of Sinterklaas), I headed around the corner to the offices of Koma Elektronik, the boutique all-analog gear producer. Here’s a few minutes of combining digital with analog, each with its own timbres and […]