Piccolo is like candy for people who like robots and drawing machines. It’s affordable, cute, and downright fun. It’s going to be on your Christmas in July wanted list. How awesome is it? Let us count the ways: It’s under US$70. It’s Arduino-compatible. It works with Processing – ideal for drawing experiments. It’s open source […]

Some of you are probably already sitting on top of a Max for Live license for your copy of Ableton Live. It’s there, just waiting to do … something. Maybe you’ve loaded one of the many extraordinary patches out there – good move. But as for building your own patches, you may easily have become […]

Steve Reich had his Music for 18 Musicians. Here’s a modular made of 18 Moogerfoogers. And for those of you who complain that modulars can become large, expensive, hard to carry, and unwieldy… This absolutely, positively … doesn’t help with that at all. (Happily, new desktop modular tools do, but… this is… also possible.) And […]

Musical history seems to happen when things collide, when things get mixed up – certainly in the twentieth, and now the twenty-first century. And so it is that one of the most important “Detroit techno” records ever released came out of Amsterdam. If this were a new artist, the long string of endorsements from a […]

“Natural interaction” is the phrase commonly applied to gestural interfaces. But a gesture is only “natural” once you’ve learned it. And as everyone from interaction designers to game makers have discovered, that can leave users confused about just what gesture they’re supposed to make. (Ironically, the maligned conventional game controller doesn’t suffer so much from […]

Jam. Far out. The artwork of Lionel Williams served as backdrop for a set of live jam sessions. It’s a question so elemental in music, you might forget to ask it: what can you get out of a (music) jam? Electronic music worldwide is dominated by the DJ, the dance party. That, in turn, often […]

As ubiquitous in our lives as the digital landscape of sites like Google Maps can be, they’re in some sense private space. They strip our world of human beings (or freeze them in strange, invasive shots taken by roving vans), and put that space in the exclusive hands of private publishers. (Or, at least, one […]

Speaking of the iPad and music making, Japan’s Human Boot Project draw a music video release for their latest track directly from screen as they play, working in the app Tabletop. I really love the personality of the resulting sounds. There’s a rawness to their music, the dense downtempo jazz-inspired electronics, which you can enjoy […]

It’s good to get out of your studio now and then, as Chris Stack does here, hauling a few instruments (including the Minimoog) our for a live gig. Photo courtesy the artist. It’s a collision between a twenty-first century tablet and some of the most iconic analog instruments ever produced. It’s MIDI and digital meeting […]

Big or small, talk to many music gear makers, and you’ll find they’re in the business largely for love. But it’s still amazing just how many gear makers choose to go it alone. They build equipment in their flats and garages, hand-packing their creations and shipping it to a world of fellow musicians. Koma Electronik […]