Multitouch Prototype 2 from Randy Jones on Vimeo. 2008 has been an amazing year for music technology. But I can’t bring myself to look back on it on this New Year’s Eve: not when there’s so much to look forward to in 2009. Case in point? An extraordinary, innovative new controller that in a matter […]

  It’s the next New York’s DIY music tech party, presented by CDM with Etsy.com, Make, and XLR8R.com, and now sponsored by Pabst Blue Ribbon! Handmade Music is now a monthly affair at the wonderful 3rd Ward in Brooklyn, and increasingly, I want to work on adding an online, virtual component for the rest of […]

Doing live visuals and other projects means sometimes endless conversion and editing tasks, but many of the dedicated tools for the job are just too much. I’ve been playing around with Video Converter from Extensoft, which is about perfect I think in terms of what you most often need to do. It’s an ideal companion […]

Sophisticated drumming is here. Practice your polyrhythmic ideas, folks. Image: Julián Rodriguez Orihuela. DIY lovers and drum machine nuts alike should be very excited by what our friend Wesen has been up to lately. Working on his projects MidiCommand and MonoJoystick, two hackable boutique music hardware gadgets for MIDI control and joystick manipulation of MachineDrum, […]

  Move over, Manchester Boys Choir. A computer can allow you to hear the digitally-reduced essence of all of these songs at once. Album image from Jacob Whittaker, who also offers some videos. It’s an old piece (Christmas 2004), but if you find your ears are ringing with retailers playing Christmas tracks on endless loop […]

You’ve likely seen impressive sequenced Christmas lights in videos before. Very often, though, these setups use proprietary systems. Here, Processing makes it quick and easy to code lighting effects in a friendly, open-source environment. And, naturally, if you think you might want to do something like this and don’t want to wait for Christmas 2009, […]

We are truly entering a glorious era of visual effects, one in which you won’t have to wait for epic, budget-blowing fantasy box office train wrecks (ah, Willow) just to see eye candy onscreen. Now you just need to wait for someone to blow a massive budget on a music video. Want proof? How about […]

We’re in the middle of a snowstorm of holidays (most definitely plural), and, for many of you, possibly also a snowstorm of snow. So, gather by the fire with your robotic DIY carillon and bask in the warm glow of gorgeous, chimey Prokofiev. What? Haven’t got a DIY bell-playing construction of your own? It’s not […]

Sequencing – the collection of techniques that actually assemble events in our music – seems to get far less attention than it deserves. After all, there are fairly accepted ways of synthesizing sound, but as many ways of thinking about musical events as there are ways of thinking about composition. Among the big DAWs, you’ll […]

Here’s something I’d very much like to see: a hackable, kit step sequencer. nostromo tips us off to a blog item on his site on the project. The creation of Monowave maker Paul Maddox, the 8-step sequencer is based on an Atmel Mega16 micro chip. The whole thing is looking very compact, which could make […]