Rocking it old skool… sort of. The iPod Classic, the true successor, ten years on. Photo (CC-BY-ND) Mac User’s Guide. The tenth anniversary of the iPod debut means you’ll find plenty of commentaries on Apple’s iPod and how it has changed music. It’s an issue that’s been talked to death enough, continuously, in the past […]

Something I always appreciated about classical music training was learning to appreciate the particulars of each instrument, whether or not you played them yourself. A French Horn, for instance, is not an instrument without challenges: everything from tuning to balancing dynamic range to how you look when you add and remove muting can be demanding. […]

The man who gave harmonicas a boldly futuristic vision is lost to us. We’ve learned that Walter Müller, inventor of the MIDI wind controller Millioniser, died this month. Rock Erickson of Millioniser writes with the news, and updates us on plans to carry on with the Millioniser as well as to honor Müller’s memory. (See […]

Hot For Heat by Moderna For visual design, we look to look books and scrapbooks and massage our eyeballs and optical centers of our brain. For music, increasingly, the mix helps us find the mood, aided by expert practitioners in finding the right sound. Sure, dozens of Web startups show up in my inbox each […]

If you think Moog’s entry into iPad synthesizers is too new-fangled, something for the kids, and nothing compared to the authentic analogness of … uh … analog, you’ll like this, at the opposite end of the spectrum. In the same week they unveiled their first iOS synth, Moog has their first 500 series module – […]

Editing gain before mixing. Soon – Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria! At the AES show in New York, Avid as expected updated their flagship Pro Tools DAW to version 10, and unveiled a next-generation version of their higher-end HD line. Since it’s Friday, and perhaps not the best day for processing […]

One of the smallest measures of time in the world is now the time that elapses between when Apple ships a new mobile product and someone has uploaded a video / album / feature film with it. It’s rather amazing. Somewhere, other tech vendors are … crying. But that said, I think the video above […]

Carl Craig. Photo (CC-BY-ND) James Kendall. “It must be a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.” -Arthur Dent, in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy If you’re having any issue getting through your Thursday, it’s tough to beat some proper, good techno – the kind of techno anyone can love, […]

Integrated Melodyne pitch correction in PreSonus’ Studio One is made more interesting by the technology behind it. Celemony this week describes a new technology they call ARA, or “Audio Random Access.” The notion is this: rather than just receiving or generating audio signal, the plug-in gets access to audio data. That means you can actually […]

If you want to be promptly ignored, the best way to do it is to try to release a new DAW. Aside from the fact that even most musicians don’t know what the word “DAW” is (hint: it’s a big program that puts all your computer production, mixing, and recording stuff in one place), you’re […]