You’ve just created the design that, more than any other, was the signature of electronic music making in the first decade of the 21st Century. What’s your second act? Having made the monome grid controllers the biggest design hit in music creation in the last few years, then moved to a farm in upstate New […]

“Reverb” seems too vanilla a word to describe a box from Eventide. Regarded as one of the best hardware effects processors ever, Eventide’s brilliant sounds have sadly been out of reach to most musicians. Eventide’s new stompboxes finally make those effects portable and affordable. The latest is Space. Room, plate, spring, hall. Special effects / […]

For one candidate to challenge the reigning BOSS Loop Station line, there’s rival VOX. While they’re both loopers with some things to stomp on, the designs are quite different. The BOSS units can store up to three hours and 99 phrases; the VOX VDL1 stores two loops with a total recorded time of 90 seconds. […]

You might not see it on a magazine cover or tattooed to someone’s arm, but the lowly looper is one of those things many musicians find invaluable. And in hardware loopers, the BOSS Loop Station reigns supreme – I’ve even seen a San Francisco-based musical act who call themselves LOOP ! STATION. Believe it or […]

Photo courtesy Curious Josh. If you’re in Anaheim for the NAMM music trade show, or elsewhere in the LA area, it’ll be worth the trip tonight to downtown LA to catch the fourth annual Wham Bam. Jimmy Edgar and Richard Devine headline music performances that include WE ARE THE WORLD, Thavius Beck, Drumcell, Laura Escudé, […]

It’s difficult to describe Universal Audio’s plug-ins until you’ve tried them. It’s a bit like having chocolate sauce at your disposal, sonically speaking. Whatever your higher-level brain may have to say, somewhere deep in your mammalian brain, you hear only … mmmmmm. Chocolate. It’s the word I get from UA users, and I’ll also have […]

In songwriting, there was Rodgers and Hart, Gilbert and Sullivan. In music gear design, it’s hard not to assign a similar degree of expectation to the pairing of Dave Smith and Roger Linn. Between them, these two designers have been a major part of what music technology is today. Dave Smith pioneered MIDI (even giving […]

Genuinely new drum machines don’t come along very often, but that’s precisely what the Tempest is. It has the analog soul of a classic Dave Smith synthesizer, with the user design of a modern drum machine conceived by Roger Linn, the man who many believe fathered the genre. After fits and starts in this collaboration, […]

Kids today. They just love their Ableton Live and their Rock Band and their alternative tunings and their Live triggers and touch controllers stuck to their far-out new boutique controllers and high-end MIDI guitars. Starr Labs has a line of MIDI controllers for Rock Band gamers and musicians on a budget, real guitarists (that’ll be […]

I’ll open with what I just said to some (perfectly reasonable) questions raised by Øivind Idsø on Twitter: most users make video with proprietary software and watch it in Flash. The idea is to change that. It turns out to be hard. Open video advocates have now gotten some huge gifts from Google; I’m disinclined […]