How to do mpc pad finger drumming from Brandon Murphy on Vimeo. Composer, musician, and drummer Brandon Murphy has put together a how-to video on playing and programming beats with a 4×4 grid. One reason to pay attention: he’s a real drummer, and had been just as skeptical about the value of all this as […]

The monome meme continues to spread virally through your music gear. With some custom code (made freely available) and a little assistance from the free Arduino platform, Philly-based hacker Wil Lindsay has converted the $50 Bliptronic 5000 device from ThinkGeek into a monome. That gives you full compatibility with the community-made patches that support the […]

Take voxels (a way of representing volumes in pixels), add a little of John Conway’s legendary Game of Life system, and make architecture. The result: crazy-delicious generative urbanism, built in Processing. Like its precedent, Voxopolis begins with a set of conditions and variables that, when implemented, require no further human input for its subsequent generations. […]

Tired of needing xx more knobs or yy more pads or a specific feature in your control hardware? Ready to dive in and build your own? You’ve had a variety of options for some time that can help get you started, but Livid’s new Builder set of modular platforms is uniquely well-suited to the kinds […]

Making your own instruments may not be for everyone, but getting to witness the bleeding edge of musical DIY can give real insight into how electronic music performance can work, and what matters in sound. Last week, the famous sound research center in Amsterdam STEIM generously hosted an edition of Handmade Music, inviting inventors to […]

I posted this last night on CDMu, but thought it would be worth mentioning here as well, for those hard-line visualists who don’t read both sites. VJing is an extremely varied art form, but long sets is one thing most visual performers have in common. Whether at a festival, or playing club nights, it’s not […]

No comment on this one just yet; I’ll have to pick my jaw up off the floor. Amidst a sea of new robotic percussion, this Wii-remote-controlled, Max/MSP-based mini-ensemble of wooden African percussion is musical, expressive, and downright stunning. I love the mechanical (literally and musically) grooves, and with a single human controlling it live, it’s […]

52 Reason and Record Tips by James Bernard Week 1 from James Bernard on Vimeo. I’m writing this from the wintry wonderland that is Stockholm, Sweden. How geeky is this country? Geeky enough to use their entire nation’s terrain to construct the world’s largest scale model of the solar system. And they’re the home of […]

I don’t think it would be presumptuous of me to think that readers of this site probably spend quite a lot of time at gigs. Whether on stage or in the audience, musicians (and VJs) spend plenty of time in loud environments. I find it quite surprising then, that relatively few of the artists I […]