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 […]

If you’re an iPad-using, keyboard-playing musician, Akai has your dock. Their original SynthStation was a cute little accessory, but required playing a tiny keyboard (and iPhone-sized screen). The SynthStation49 looks more serious, with nine MPC-style pads, transport controls, and dedicated pitch and mod wheels. The iPad sits on what Akai describes as an adjustable “cradle,” […]

Going wireless has long been a desire of musicians, but solutions have been slow to catch on. Two new products add wireless capabilities to your existing MIDI gear; I’ve talked to the creators to explain a bit about how their solutions work. AirPower from Starr Labs uses proprietary 2.4GHz communication for wireless MIDI communication. The […]

What should digital DJing look like? It’s an open question. If you aren’t willing to contend with the (potentially-unreliable) combination of real vinyl control records with computers, the question becomes what DJing technique hardware should embody. Writing for CDM, Ambivalent of Minus Records was most enthusiastic about advanced hardware mixing in Allen & Heath’s Xone:DB4. […]