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 […]

Let’s do the Time Warp again. As far as synthesizers making spooky sounds are concerned, I’m pleased to party every day like it’s Halloween. (After all, what is the point of music electronics if not to scare small children, animals, and… adults?) But I want to take us back to 2007, when our friends at […]

Serato’s ability to work with Quartz Composer opens up some unique possibilities for audiovisual DJ sets. I could describe what those are, but here Venus Rollergirl shows them off in Serato Scratch, as it’s easier to see than talk about. (That’s not to be confused with Serato DJ, now a separate product.) In this case, […]

Engineering a production instrument is a kind of study in compromise. For mass-produced musical instruments, it’s a fusion of practicality and economics, made affordable by a mass-market supply chain. What makes the monome creations special isn’t just that they look beautiful; the art isn’t aesthetic only. They are uncommonly uncompromising. They’re designed in such a […]