Image: Livid Instruments. Livid Instruments has just revealed their next hardware controller. Well, sort of revealed – this evening on Twitter, they declared that it was a “Top secret sneak peek of our new controller.” Top secret – you know, just on the Internet. No one will see it there. It’s full of encoders, if […]

Avid is updating their M-Audio Axiom line of USB controller keyboards. New in this version is DirectLink, which provides automatic mappings for software like Ableton Live, Logic, Cubase, and of course Avid’s own Pro Tools, similar to what’s in the Axiom’s big-brother Axiom Pro. The controller itself has also been improved, with lower-profile faders on […]

Matthew Dear – Black City Teaser from Ghostly International on Vimeo. Matthew Dear is one of electronic music’s great sonic innovators and impresarios, co-founder of Ghostly International and Spectral Sound (Ghostly recently celebrating 100 landmark releases), and recording extensively under musical identities Audion, False, and Jabberjaw. But for all that, I think it’s his voice […]

Veta just reminded me that the CDMo RSS feed has been broken for a while in some browsers. I use Google Reader so I never noticed that anything was wrong. It’s now fixed. Which brings me to other, server-related CDM news. If you’ve been keeping an eye on CDMusic, you may have noticed Peter mentioning […]

David Pogue made the immensely-successful Missing Manual book series in order to fill in for the manual that should have been included with software. But an impassioned fan of MOTU’s BPM drum sampler went further than that – a lot further. Simon (ssp/plastikaudio) has constructed an entire hardware controller for BPM. It gives MOTU’s software […]

The Moog badge, as seen here on a foot pedal, is probably the only one that could spawn a festival. Photo (CC-BY) Audiotecna. You have to hand it to Moog – what other brand in music these days inspires this kind of passion, let alone an entire music festival? Moogfest itself seems to have gone […]

The live session that inspired the album, in turn inspired by some whales. Photo by Ryan Muir, courtesy Motormouth. Digital music is of course created the moment you commit a recording to a file, so it’s fitting to me that we can take musical inspiration from acoustic sources as well as electronic. And one of […]

Metope – Rebird, Unofficial Music Video from moka on Vimeo. moka (Matthias Dörfelt), a German-based artist and communications student, sends along this lovely unofficial music video for Metope’s “Rebird.” A series of sound-reactive shapes begin in minimal form, then degrade and traverse a landscape of geometries and texture, in custom software built in the open-source, […]

Luminair for iPad – multi-touch DMX lighting control – A Quick Preview from Synthe FX on Vimeo. Controlling lighting has been caught in a kind of Stone Age – expensive, inelegant, awkward, and antiquated. But while the iPad’s impact has perhaps been overstated with some problems (“it’ll save publishing! it’ll replace all other computers! it […]

Sometimes, DIY music boxes reach moments of mad genius. To me, they’re almost a kind of compositional conceptual art, executed as a set of circuitry and disguised as a piece of music gear. They assemble in series a set of solutions to design problems, but result in something – through the combination of invention and […]