Bliptronic 5000: Tenori-On, monome, Meet Your $50, Hackable Clone

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 […]

faderTouch: Pico-Powered Mobile Multi-touch Projection Controller

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 […]

Max for Live Comes with Some Strings Attached for Creators

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 […]

Eclectic Method ACID + Vegas Visual Beatmapping, Remixing How-to

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 […]

Artists We Love: edison is monome Instrumentalist; Look Ma, No Loops!

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 […]

monome News: Max for Live with 7up, New Grayscale, Mass Kit Builds, NYC Fest

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 […]

Pd MLR Tutorial: Learn monome, Sample Slicing, OSC in a Free and Open Source Tool

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 […]

Video: Modeling Vipers for Battlestar Galactica, in Near Real-Time

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 […]