The uber-hip Monome controller is some of the new hotness to grow out of OpenSoundControl support. Photo: George P. Macklin, aka Granular Matter. You hear plenty of chatter about the powers of OpenSoundControl, the open, high-res, network-savvy control protocol for music and visuals. But standards are no good without implementation — and some implementations just […]

Batchass has added a new blog which will feature new plug-ins for Onyx VJ, the free and open source VJ app built in Flash / Flex / AIR. With the possibility of support for Adobe’s new Pixel Bender, this is all getting pretty interesting. (And because of the Adobe architectures beneath, that means creations can […]

So, you’ve got a shiny new MacBook / MacBook Pro — or any number of newer PC notebooks — and suddenly you realize you have no analog video output. Sure, you might be happy to output to VGA/DVI or even HDMI when you can, but for those Special Moments when that isn’t possible and you […]

Well, this is the first time I can remember this happening. Tuesday, I covered a GBP20 Max object for independent tempo and pitch modification in Max 5: elastic~: Pitch, Speed Control Module for Your Max 5 Patch I wasn’t personally so blown away by it, but it looked interesting, and it uses algorithms used in […]

We all live … here. Photo: “DJ” Dave Whelan. It’s official: we had heard rumblings that game maker Harmonix was about to announce something, and it’s here. It’s a collaboration directly with the Beatles to make something that isn’t Rock Band or Guitar Hero — something completely new. And something completely new is exactly what’s […]

Robotspeak video window (Director’s Cut) from Donald Bell on Vimeo. Take on Make Controller Kit, one copy of Max/MSP/Jitter, one ultrasonic sensor (deliciously superior to infrared sensors in my opinion), a projector, and a storefront window on Lower Haight in San Francisco, add in some music tech shop geeks, and you get some good fun. […]

What do you say when it’s all been said? We felt it was time for a fresh perspective on the MPC phenomenon — one a normal review couldn’t provide. So we got the opinion of our friend, samplist/producer and Segue member Dave Dri. And the verdict: there’s still something about an MPC — even if […]

Photos from Berlin’s fantastic Dense Record Shop by MPC2000xl / MIDI Mechanics, from his blog. To me, the ideal kind of music tech writing is when you get to spend quality time with tools for musical reasons – not simply to talk about the technology, but to make stuff. Over the past weeks, we’ve been […]

Ah, the BBC. Their world news sounds like an apocalyptic rave and their inexplicably long-running, trippy strange “children’s” sci-fi show has one of the greatest pieces of synthesized music ever. I’m running out of ways to say Delia Derbyshire is one of the most brilliant composers ever to use electricity, so let’s just get straight […]

Well, it was fun while it lasted. Hey, my Apple IIc at least still has a composite TV out (and nothing else, as it happens). Photo: Daniel Höpfl. It’s long been accepted tradition at VJ events: the lingua franca of video interconnects is good, old-fashioned analog S-Video and composite. Add an Edirol V-4 mixer, or […]