After twenty years or so of music software, you’ll often find that what you need to do is creatively satisfied by what’s available in pre-built tools. But video is often another matter: even if a VJ tool does what you need some of the time, there are times when you need something that doesn’t exist […]

Darth Vader, your garage door opener has arrived. We first took a look at the Pacemaker DJ when it was announced in May. The idea is interesting: it’s a mobile 120GB hard drive with touch controls for internal mixing/cross-fading, effects, a separate cueing output, and pitch control, along with rich format support (even OGG, FLAC, […]

Circuit Bent Casio SK 1 from Gijs on Vimeo. Note: we are temporarily having problems with Vimeo’s embedded video. (So is MAKE, evidently, so it’s not our fault!) Click through to see the video, or enjoy the lovely garbled characters if they’re there. Regular followers of the music tech blogs know the wild and wonderful […]

If you missed Bill Gates’s keynote from CES, you didn’t miss much — aside from an uncomfortably-close-to-Terminator image recognition demo, technology Microsoft says they won’t productize. (That’s good, because otherwise a robot from the future might have killed all the presenters on the spot.) But Microsoft did stage an Oscar-style spoof video, complete with celebrities, […]

The Light Surgeons are an eminent, inspiring AV UK collective whose latest work, New Adventures in Folklore, fuses documentary filmmaking, live music and visuals in an “eye-popping performance of epic proportions”. They kept a blog and posted many gorgeous photos and video excerpts (see embedded slideshow and video below). See their main site for more […]

The Light Surgeons are an eminent, inspiring AV UK collective whose latest work, New Adventures in Folklore, fuses documentary filmmaking, live music and visuals in an “eye-popping performance of epic proportions”. They kept a blog and posted many gorgeous photos and video excerpts (see embedded slideshow and video below). See their main site for more […]

Photo by Andrew. I totally need to see this episode (S18E07). Hmm, someone want to send some Simpsons box sets for my birthday? No? The typical user likely has no idea that Flash is even supported in QuickTime. But VJ apps like ArKaos VJ and other applications (like Max/MSP/Jitter patches that use this support) rely […]

NAMM supposedly stands for the “National Association of Music Manufacturers.” It’s purportedly a trade show for music instruments and technology. But, for brief but glorious moments, “NAMM show” translates in English to “ridiculous musical stuff.” Just how ridiculous? We’re talking guitars made out of football helmets. Just in case you think you might extract any […]

From ribbons to multi-touch, musicians are looking for expressive controllers, ones that allow continuous control for performance. Oh, yeah, and it’s like totally super-cool on the original Star Trek when people run their hands over the Transporter controls and the blinky lights move. I mean, like still super-cool, even in 2008. (Hint: try to look […]

The world’s smallest projector is dead — long live the world’s smallest projector! PC Magazine reports from CES 2008 that Microvision’s PicoP projectors are smaller than an iPod, battery-powered, and make teh visualz with fricking laser beams. Max resolution 848 by 480, zoom 1:1, brightness and frame rate unknown. From Microvision’s marketing materials, it seems […]