Allmusic.com’s blog is doing vintage music-related ads. A true classic: this ad for Casio keyboards. Grab an MT-100 and some hair product, hit the NYC subway, crank your volume, and pick up trashy 80s women! The NYPD will nod in approval. Wow, now I know how to supplement my income. Retro Ad of the Week […]

Photo: WadeB. Caution: piracy can make you … queasy / vomit-y. Discussions about music distribution, sales, and piracy often return to that time-worn theme of “supporting artists.” Of course, what usually gets left out is what actually supports the artists. Sure, it’s lovely that the industry likes this theme — maybe you imagine an ingenious, […]

Squarely in the “things Ableton Live was not necessarily built to do”: animating visuals, one frame at a time. Cousin Throckmorton whipped up a retro visual feast of Space Invaders, Pong, and other games classics, using MIDI to step through frames individually. You can MIDI sequence Live’s locators to jump between frames, thereby giving the […]

Luigi Felici and the folks over at Nusofting have put the finishing touches on Broken Drum Machine– a VST synth that emulates quite well the sounds and function of a circuit-bent or otherwise broken drum machine. As they describe it, “To the fact that the broken sound is desirable. Yes! Knobs turn for satisfaction defective!”

What is the sound of an invisible hand playing a MIDI controller? Yes, in the latest evidence that the Interwebs really are Douglas Adams’ imagined Infinite Improbability Drive, a conversation from CDM’s humble forums about the economics of Radio Shack and MIDI jacks has led to a blog response from a non-musician defending the true […]

It’s a beach. Now, it’s a more longer beach. Hmmm… too bad you can’t do this to the real world. “Content-aware” image resizing — the ability to stretch images without distortion — is all the rage. vade covered the technology at last summer’s SIGGRAPH, and we’ve since seen publicly-available tools. But the New York Times […]

HypnoSapien (aka Patrick Petro) loved the Zendrum, the cult-hit, ultra-sensitive, boutique drum controller. But he wanted something compact with a specific configuration. He writes: Check out the new Zendrum ZAP desktop midi percussion controller, the first truly professional level instrument of its kind. I contacted Zendrum about custom building this particular model for me with […]

We live in an age of disposable electronics. iPod battery wears out or new prettier iPod arrives, and old iPod gets tossed. Or, if you’re Norwegian sound artist and musician Espen Sommer Eide, your iPod could live a second life far more interesting than its first. The SlÃ¥ttberg is a custom musical instrument fashioned from […]

To distract from their intensely repetitive subject matter, skateboarding videos have used a variety of techniques, from blooper reels showing people hurting themselves, to Spike Jonze post-producing the decks to invisibility. The latest iteration of this process I will let speak for itself: Updated: Lakai had the video removed from Youtube. Does anybody understand why […]