The miracle of recording is somehow no less extraordinary in this digital age – the ability to capture sound, the revolution that transformed music making worldwide, for better and for worse. In fact, if anything, the abundance of digital music is causing some people to rediscover the recording techniques that preceded it. Andy Deitrich of […]

Some art requires creative applications of technology in order to refine technique. At top, below: [Processing co-creator] Casey Reas. Digital minds converge at various places on the globe, but I’m uniquely excited for Resonate Festival 2013 in Belgrade, Serbia. I can think of no other place where this many different kinds of visualism intersect, from […]

I hesitate to give teaser/hype campaigns extra words, but there’s simply too much anticipation about whatever Swedish hardware maker Elektron is doing to ignore it. The makers of Machinedrum, Monomachine, and Octatrack have a minisite through which they’re gradually trickling out teasers for whatever they’re doing next. The safest bet – particularly given the samples, […]

DSNT// Water Projection from DSNT on Vimeo. Expect some serious brightness to make it work, but water can be an ethereal, otherworldly surface for light, blurring the lines between substance and image. Oisín O’Brien of DSNT sends this brief but beautiful work from Belfast. DSNT are busy, too, providing both musical content and visual design […]

Can a compact controller not only shrink the conventional music keyboard, but transform it, too? The layout on the just-announced QuNexus is something familiar to keyboard players. But the QuNexus assumes some new ways of playing, with keys that sense pressure and an instrument that you can tilt. Following in the footsteps (fingertaps?) of Keith […]

Endeavour’s evo keyboard closely resembles a conventional music keyboard controller. But its piano-style keys and high-performance internals are custom engineered from the ground up for additional expression. High-speed connections mean lower latency than is possible with MIDI, and touch- and pressure-sensitive keys allow additional ways of adding to a performance, all in an aluminum case […]

As controllers get wild and creative and integrated with software, here’s one that might be simple and versatile enough to work with anything for some time. Photos courtesy Livid Instruments. Finally: a boring controller. No, that’s a good thing. We’re in an amazing era of controller hardware, witnessing an explosion of kit with fancy features, […]

The rest of the year, we work hard to convince people that the Theremin is a beautiful, lyrical instrument, able to play Classical music and with a quality not unlike a crystal-clear human soprano, and not in any way necessarily connected with aliens or b-grade sci-fi movies or, most of all, Halloween. Yet, oddly, those […]

Machinedrum, aka Travis Stewart, has a track that fulfills all the needs of a Halloween special one-time single download release: 1. Your butt will move around in a shaking fashion. 2. It will make you smile. 3. There’s some wolf-howling action. (Good for your inner canine, even after this holiday season passes.) 4. There’s a […]

Here’s another episode in the gradually-evolving HD mixing revolution. VJ Anomolee, aka Mattheiu Brooks, has put together one incredible rig. One $140 HDMI touchscreen. One Arduino with Ethernet. And then the engine of the thing, the Blackmagic Design ATEM Television Studio, which costs under US$1000 / 900 €, but provides HD video mixing, built-in H.264 […]