The Amazing Musical Grid and Electronic Performance Made Modular

7up 2.0 – Introduction from makingthenoise on Vimeo. What if the world of musical performance suddenly started moving a whole lot faster? That’s certainly the case among a handful of monome- and grid-wielding electronic artists. In an evolutionary breakthrough, what previously had appeared in a period of months is showing up in a period of […]

Single Shot Perfection: Colourful Chromakeyed Delay in OK Go's "WTF"

OK Go have built a career around creative music videos, and their latest “WTF” is no exception: OK Go – WTF? from OK Go on Vimeo. This is a great example of a “high budget”, low budget piece. There has obviously been some investment in a nice chromakey studio to shoot in, and plenty of […]

Single Shot Perfection: Colourful Chromakeyed Delay in OK Go’s “WTF”

OK Go have built a career around creative music videos, and their latest “WTF” is no exception: OK Go – WTF? from OK Go on Vimeo. This is a great example of a “high budget”, low budget piece. There has obviously been some investment in a nice chromakey studio to shoot in, and plenty of […]

Processing Beats Keyframing: TypeStar Karaoke Machine Generates Kinetic Lyrics

Scott Garner has taken an effective and useful approach for his motion class assessment. Rather than do the assignment himself, he decided to program an assignment-completing robot! This is a screencast of a Processing sketch I developed called TypeStar. It’s basically a karaoke machine that renders lyrics in realtime according to a number of preset […]

5 Years of CDM NYC Party: Beats + Baile + Open Bar + Laptops + Twitter Twister

  Design: onetonnemusic. Link love, chip love, software love, music love – Create Digital Music is celebrating five years, and it’s time to spread some of the love back to you here in New York City. Wednesday night, we’ll be celebrating five years made possible by our incredible readers with a big party at Love […]

NYC in December: RjDj, Pd, in/out Fest Workshops + Performances, Blip Festival

monome creator Brian Crabtree at an early Handmade Music at Etsy Labs. Brian will perform under his name tehn, joining other artists with grids and patches and felt to talk about and play with alternative controllers at the in/out Fest. Photo (CC). It’s the most wonderful time of the year in New York. Mark your […]

Cyber Monday, Ongoing: Delicious Synths, Effects for $5-20 from audioMIDI

The EMS VCS3 has inspired a virtual synth. You can try to get someone to give you a hardware EMS for $20 – or you can take advantage of this deal. Photo: Rosa Menkman. Online retailer audioMIDI has begun a new sale I really love called the “No Brainer” series. They offer some carefully-selected instruments […]

Black Friday: $99 Each for Reaktor, Absynth, Massive, FM8

A Thanksgiving cornucopia of sound, made cheap. Photo (CC) Lawrence OP. Winter is coming. If you had to hole up with just one instrument, getting deep into programming sounds while venturing out of your abode only for essential supplies, any one of these instruments would easily fit the bill. Yes, Native Instruments bundles (nearly) everything […]

Black Friday: Free Synths+Effects from Cakewalk, Plus Steep Discounts

Take my synth, please! Grab this instrument, the sample playback plug-in SFZ+, free for Windows. “Black Friday” has become a traditional date for talking discounts, but one price you can’t beat is free. Cakewalk is giving away some of their older effects and synth plug-ins. These aren’t just hand-me-downs – Cakewalk forum members lamented that […]

Bliptronic 5000’s Creator: Hacking Tips, Prototyping, and the Switchnome

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 […]