Live in Frankfurt, I’m here at Propellerhead’s pre-Messe announcement event with CEO Ernst and team. What’s new: A US$1 iOS app that’s designed for music-making on a bus. Multi-touch interface, built around quick access to tonality, rhythm, and pattern – but the Reason engine under the hood. The same as Reason on desktop. After years […]

The center of the macular portion of your eye is called the fovea; it’s the portion of your retina that most nearly represents what you’re looking at directly. I adopted from my father the phrase “thinking off the fovea.” It means tackling a problem not by focusing directly on it, but what’s at the periphery. […]

Lisbon, Portugal-based multimedia studio Dub Video Connection shares their 2011 showreel with CDM, as they play big-screen visuals with some of electronic music’s biggest acts. (Yes, it helps having this kind of showreel and documentation!) I love the high-energy abstraction and patterns amidst high-contrast ephemeral imagery, so I asked the artists to tell us a […]

Who says every music production tool has to be either a traditional DAW or Ableton Live? Not Renoise, for one. I’m running out of things to call it. Modernized tracker? Tracker on steroids? Music production tool from an alternate history in which conventional DAWs were ignored and everybody just kept on using trackers? How about […]

Now that they’re more expressive and more affordable than ever, analog modulars are finding their way into a lot of visualist studios. Here’s a teaser of some work by reader Johnny Woods. He writes: “Nothing digital whatsoever (it’s all rutt-etra style animation and video synthesis), but I thought you might get a kick out of […]

Photo by Rafal Wojczal of Qunabu. A small note based on Part 1: this is no history of dub – no need to create a list of dub forefathers in the comments! But if you’re interested in such things, definitely watch Bruno Natal’s Dub Echos, he talks to everyone under the sun, and it’s fascinating!) […]

Pioneer, that best-known brand of DJ hardware, wants you to use hardware alongside software. And they’re uttering the word “remix” rather than “DJ.” And they have something that really doesn’t look like a CDJ, so much as a remote control for a spaceship carrying CDJs. It seems to be something of a trend. We saw […]

Francis Prève works the crowd. Photo courtesy the artist. The abundance of music, and the preceived ease of producing it, comes to some as bad news – or even harbinger of apocalypse. But load up a craft with quantity, and quality is what stands out. Francis Prève is a perfect Renaissance producer. With years of […]

Austin comes into view. Photo (CC-BY) David Berkowitz. Okay, I may be in Germany (see you next week, Messe!), but if you’re in Austin, Texas, the CDM radar is picking up some strong blips of things you probably want to be doing, starting today, Do. 15 Mär. (Erm, uh, sorry, Thursday March 15!) Highlights include […]

Adding pads to a digital DJ setup: here, the new Kontrol F1 hardware, with its colored matrix of pads, nestles in between more conventional mixers and decks. Image courtesy Native Instruments. Native Instruments had already revealed that it would add new hands-on remixing capabilities to its flagship DJ hardware and software line. But today, we […]