Hit your own upgrade button with Ableton Live: costs nothing, keeps on giving. Photo (CC-BY) Andrea Mitrani. Get a whole new Live, for free. Smart users can make it happen. Sure, just a mere mention of Ableton can bring out angry hordes of Live users waiting for whatever they imagine they want out of Live […]

“Everything old is new again” certainly could be no more true than in electronic music, in which futuristic possibility is constantly expanded by our history, a tradition in finding alien, new sounds. So it’s a great pleasure to go back and read articles from electronic music’s past. They just might open a window to its […]

Finding something intelligent to say after watching Beeple is like trying to compose a work email after sex. You just want to sit in the afterglow. Beeple’s tenth instrumental film is full of three-dimensional goodness, a joy ride through a fantastic, videogame world. It’s also eminently musical. As fanciful characters pop out of a rotating […]

One way or another, Apple is involved in a whole lot of the music to which people listen. Here, writer David Dodson considers what that means (and similar issues with other digital music listening beyond Apple, like Spotify. Photo CC-BY) Yutaka Tsutano. What does it mean to “master for iTunes?” Apple tripped that question with […]

Figure, the iOS app that’s powered by Reason instruments and effects, is now available on the App Store for US$.99 cents. The sound is Reason on your phone – literally, with the Thor polysynth and Kong drum machine, plus the Master Bus Compressor and side-chaining from Reason in effects. But the user experience is quite […]

Indeed. Image (CC-BY-NC-SA) Bony Bünz AKA Cheek fille AKA Vi AKA L’Effroyable. Quietly, steadily, software has been making SoundCloud upload a standard feature. In some mobile applications, it’s second only to “save” as a feature. That makes getting your music online and shared uncommonly easy. Below, we’ve got the running list for mobile and desktop […]

File these designs under “do want.” Some of your favorite gear is rendered in miniature: Roland’s TR-808, E-MU’s SP-1200 sampler, Akai’s MPC 2000XL, and (coming soon) even the Yamaha NS-10 near-field monitors. It occurs to me that someday soon, such tiny things might even work in some form as functioning music equipment. For now, you’ll […]

Faith in fiction: our friend, virtual magician Marco Tempest, is back with another must-watch, dazzling effects-laden soliloquy. There’s plenty of sparkling eye candy, but as is often the case with Marco’s work, the content behind the effects delves into the philosophy of what magic, theater, and fiction itself really mean. The message is timely. Rooted […]

What you’re seeing isn’t an analog oscilloscope, though it … plays one on TV. It’s a digital concoction, built with Windows visual patching environment vvvv. And it does wonderful, twisty things with your beloved oscilloscope for visualizing sound. “Cat Weasel” sends us his latest work, which he describes thusly: An experiment in designing audio waveforms […]

Technology may be about the next Big New Thing, but as with music making in general, making music with tech is for many of us a lifetime vocation. So, it’s welcome news to find that time-tested tools, maturing over decades rather than months, are enjoying greater use than ever before. We saw Pure Data (Pd) […]