Ed.: Resident hardware hacker and sound artist Michael Una chatted via phone with the creator of ThinkGeek’s $50 Bliptronic instrument. We’ve already got some early tips on how you might hack this design into custom creations, which could make the Bliptronic 5000 an ideal hardware hacker choice. (And, because it is cheap, you may be […]

You know the grid craze is in full steam once ThinkGeek offers a $50 clone. The Bliptronic 5000 is somewhere between the Tenori-On and monome. It certainly looks like the monome, with an 8-by-8 grid of light-up pads in a square form factor. But like the Tenori-On, it has built-in sounds and speaker, it’s made […]

VJ Fader faderTouch Processing – BeiJing studio 1 from VJFader on Vimeo. Multi-touch projection is now easy to do with free software, a projector, and a projection surface. The trick is making a controller that is more portable. VJ Fader has a nice, home-built rig, seen here controlling Processing sketches. It uses a 10-lumen pico […]

Image (CC) akihiko.japan. Max for Live is a fantastic product that treads on genuinely new ground. Its level of integration with the user interface and operation of the host reaches a new high, it comes with a rich selection of instruments, effects, and tools to use as examples, and, in combination with Max 5’s re-vamped […]

One of the things I admire about audiovisual duo Eclectic Method is the way they work with audiovisual materials, slicing and mapping visual materials as though they’re sonic loops, all within the rhythmic grid. They’re also, as visualists go, able to carry a party on their own in a way that’s truly rare. So even […]

edison – tonka truck from edison on Vimeo. edison has become an underground sensation, a monome-playing virtuoso with soul. And now he’s just showing off. Sure, the monome lacks velocity sensitivity, but here, it remains an instrument, a 64-button sampler. It’s not so much the tool itself as the choice: edison has chosen to focus […]

SevenUpLive 2.0 Preview from bar|none on Vimeo. Planet monome is getting to be an exciting place. The biggest news: SevenUpLive, an extraordinary original application that melds the monome as controller with a set of Live functions, is getting a major rebuild and Max for Live support. Mapping the buttons of the monome to a set […]

The monome phenomenon in music making owes a lot to a combination of powerful elements: elegant, human-readable messages that describe button presses (using OSC), open software built with a patching environment that anyone can modify and customize, and sample-slicing audio playback mayhem with the popular MLR tool. In one tutorial, you can learn about all […]

Shuttle, the compact PC folks, have posted a step-by-step walkthrough demonstrating how artists model the Viper fighter craft for the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. (That might seem like odd timing, but Sci Fi Channel — now SyFy — continues to crank out spinoffs of the show, so there’s plenty of modeling work to be done.) What’s […]