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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]