You have the con: for tactile control, the patch is fully integrated with Akai’s APC40 controller for Ableton Live. Photo courtesy Darren Cowley. Ableton Live may have “Live” in the name, but just as with any musical equipment, getting it ready for a show often involves elaborate configuration to make reliable control a reality. Over […]

This is a New York City-produced set of haikus, so it’s accompanied by Brooklyn cherry blossoms. Photo (CC-BY-SA) Taís Melillo. It occurs to me that I tend to write long articles, and people don’t always read them closely. And sometimes I do indeed obscure my own ideas, so I’ll make this as clear as possible. […]

David Byrne discusses at TED the influence of architecture and venue on musical activity. (I saw him give an extended version of the same talk, with discussion, at New York’s Center for Architecture.) It’s a question that’s especially relevant to electronic music, I think, as digital music has been a big confused about its venue, […]

Nope, you’re not hallucinating. Whatever line there was between playing Rock Band as a game and playing Rock Band as musical instruments has now more or less evaporated with the release of Rock Band 3. Yes, there’s a keyboard, and yes, you can add a strap to it, if that makes it a keytar for […]

Before digital projectors, before even the film projector, there was the world’s simplest projection tech: light source, shadow. From the traditional Indonesian art of Wayang shadow puppetry to modern artists scrounging used overhead projectors as they are retired from schools, the medium is as rich as ever. Electronic musician Mira Calix (Warp) uses cast shadows […]

Ready for some superior German engineering in your controller hardware? Before the APC or the Launchpad, before the Kontrol X1 from NI, Faderfox was the underground, boutique choice for controllers. “Professionally” made in Germany, the devices really are little tanks. They have incredibly solid-feeling buttons and knobs, and as opposed to the sprawling form factors […]

(CC-BY) Windell Oskay. Wanting something is different from needing something. And bending something to musical activities is different from requiring something for musical activities. Apple introduced a promising-looking update Monday to the iPhone. I didn’t really see much reason to talk about it, because there’s nothing specific in the update to music, even if it […]

Now that digital technology allows rapid creation of new interfaces for music and sound, the question of how to represent those elements visually has new life. But whether digital or not, practitioners of music have long been interested in applying further descriptions to music, from the Baroque Doctrine of Affectations to the involuntary association of […]

The grooves are fun, but the generated names for the groove are even more so. Need a new band name, anyone? Generative: the rhythmic frontier. These are the voyages of the starship MicroTonic. Its online mission: to explore strange new grooves, to seek out new beats and new musical cultures … Yes, Patternarium, by software […]