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 […]

Touch DJ, one of the early DJ entries on iOS. These apps could tie more closely into iTunes libraries on the device, broadening their appeal. Photo (CC-BY-ND) William Brawley. Following mobile music making means keeping up with technical details that are complex and changing. And because the Internet is open, when you post a story […]

A little stretch of desk, a couple of monitors, and a copy of the free and open source DAW Ardour running on Linux, (CC-BY) wstryder / Lauri Rantala. (Note: this is presumably Lauri’s studio, and is certainly not mine, seeing as I can’t play the guitar, and thus recording the results of me playing a […]

As a consumer market fails to embrace Blu-Ray and audiovisual options become more complex, if only we had Devo and Ray Charles to guide us through our purchasing decisions. (Alternatively, we could have the folks at Best Buy dress up in Devo’s creepy eyeball masks, but maybe that’s cruel.) Devo Demonstrates LaserDisc – 1984 [Retro […]

Developers for iPhone, iPod touch, and now the iPad have long complained about lack of access to the iTunes library, the file store and metadata for uploaded files. While version 3.0 of the OS provided limited playback capabilities (play/pause/stop), it was a far cry from what you’d need to build a DJ or other music […]