Ready for some blue-sky, 35,000-foot-altitude thinking? Photo (CC-BY-ND Andres Rueda. Want a flying car? Dream of the flying car. Build the flying car. A competition I’m hosting with Digitópia, the musical-technological community of Porto, Portugal, extends to readers worldwide a challenge to dream up the digital musical instrument/interface/creation you want. Got something practical you wish […]

The Octatrack is an ambitious piece of hardware, combining multitrack sampling and playback with real-time audio warping. We didn’t get a good look at it earlier this week, but the folks at Gear4Music went back to get a more complete walkthrough with Elektron’s Jon. It’s followed by a proper live set – and it sounds […]

Let’s get this out of the way right at the beginning: dedicated audio editors are important. For sound design, for tweaking audio assets, and for just getting close to your sounds, editing waveforms in a DAW often doesn’t cut it. That’s made a lot of Mac users unhappy, because it’s one of the few areas […]

One of the numerous 64-bit-ready processors, the Core 2 Duo E7300. Photo (CC) William Hook. What will 64-bit mean for After Effects? Will it be worth the jump, and will your plug-ins be ready? I noted that those questions had some people concerned earlier this week. AE Product Manager Michael Coleman writes in with a […]

Image courtesy KORG, USA. Looking for all the world like it was inspired by the Gakken SX-150 synth, but packed with Korg analog electronics, the monotron has to be one of the biggest surprise announcements from a major vendor in recent memory. The tiny has the filter from the classic KORG MS-10 and MS-20 and […]

I liked the SH-201 when released – the accessible front panel of that synth, which exposes synth parameters as physical knobs, made it fun to use, and sure enough, a lot of folks snapped them up. But likable as it was, the SH-201 somehow lost some of the spirit of the SH-101 its name suggested, […]

Roland’s Messe show announcements include two releases that caught my eye. I’ll be honest: some of Roland’s recent gear, while it sells really well, just doesn’t reach me emotionally. But these new announcements strike me as having two key ingredients: afford ability and that elusive fun factor. There’s a (mercifully) cheaper, more compact shoulder-mounted keyboard, […]

Elektron, those Swedish makers of the fabulously-beloved Machinedrum drum machine, have a range of new announcements this morning. They herald the power and appeal of digital hardware, gear made for people who have grown up with computer. The biggest news, of course, is the announcement of the Octatrack. Coming later this year, but shown in […]

With full-blown computers as competition, how do you make sequencing with buttons irresistible? While I was in icy Stockholm last month, I got a look inside Teenage Engineering’s studio, where their upcoming OP-1 instrument continues its gestation. The (literal) garage workshop is the sort of thing a lot of us dream of having: a room […]