There’s a beautiful immediacy and tactile quality to hardware step sequencers. And there’s all the flexibility, convenience, and power of software. Solution: combine them. We’ve been following various custom creations for the music production tool Renoise – the latest being a lovely performance grid, and back in 2009, the beginnings of Launchpad grid sequencing. You […]

In a twist on generating music from dance, artist and coder João Pais sends us Pd-generated scores, transformed into twinkling sounds by music boxes. As it happens, the music boxes are the same featured in Friday’s story on Ritornell. The piece is RISS, a “performative installation/concert” produced outdoors in Berlin, with a 30-meter score generated […]

Experimenting with twinkling timbres made both by acoustic and electronic means, the music of Ritornell (the duo of composer Dr. Richard Eigner and pianist Roman Gerold, Austria) is effortlessly expressive and spontaneous. Little wonder that that spirit could translate even to a small object. Designer Katharina Hölzl made business cards into both a signature identity […]

Alongside its Pro Tools 10 and HDX unveiling, Avid turned some heads by recently announcing it was replacing its RTAS and TDM formats to a new format called AAX, “Avid Audio eXtension.” Now, your first reaction may not be unbridled enthusiasm, exactly: it seems the last thing users are likely saying is, “yes, please, I’d […]

Make all the hipster jokes you like. Fashionable film photography could be all that lies between us and the demise of film. With camera manufacturing and film stock going out of production, enthusiasts – both the inventors/merchandisers and users – are having to rebuild the film revolution from scratch. And while this site’s name has […]

Every so often, something comes along that’s just irresistibly lovable. So it was with the Korg monotron. With a price of US$60 (or far less), a pocketable size, the ability to run on batteries, a nice, glowing red LFO knob, a delicious filter, and toy-like playability, everyone loves the monotron. People who have racks of […]

Even from the birds-eye view of larger genres, the interrelations and ongoing transformation of music is dynamic, complex, and inter-connected. That’s the view in The Evolution of Western Dance Music, a map of musical styles in five-year chunks across the 19th and 20th Centuries, through Africa, Europe, the Americas, and Asia. The project is the […]

Big pixels, enormous screen: watching the latest LED wall spring to life from basic materials, with a lot of effort, is a sheer delight. Reader Konstantin Leonenko sends in this work, by technical producers YBCOZ, for the Dutch artist Giny Vos’ cinematic installation. The sheer quantity of LEDs aside, it’s the ability of that cinematic […]

If you do want to get religious about this, you may want to wear this around your neck: Open Source Hardware logo as jewelry! Photo (CC-BY-SA) MAKE’s Becky Stern. We’ve followed open source hardware – and generally hardware that is more open to user customization and modification – on this site since the beginning. As […]

Apple’s GarageBand music creation and amp simulation on iPad is now also on the company’s handhelds, with iPhone (3GS, 4, 4S) and iPod touch (3rd-generation and better) support. You only have to buy GarageBand once; the app runs on all those platforms, so if you had the iPad version and also own a compatible device, […]