It was inevitable. With the likes of Radiohead doing “donationware”, DRM-free MP3 downloads, someone was bound to follow. (And, in fairness, Radiohead were by no means the first — this is something various artists have been talking about or doing for years. Updated: for some examples of other free albums through music history, see comments […]

For all of you who are considering participating in this weekend’s Circuit Bending Challenge, I thought I’d offer a few tips on getting started and some creative/low-budget ideas. Finding that special device What makes a device bendable? Two words: cheap construction. Most toy musical instruments are made very cheaply and operate on somewhat simple principles […]

We’re aware that we have a site outage on the domains createdigitalmotion.com and createdigitalnoise.com. Thanks for everybody who’s noticing, it really does make us feel loved. We’ve had ongoing performance and reliability issues from the host (site5) on which those domains are located. We’re working now on migrating them off that former host (cdmusic itself […]

So, you thought only Americans would be the target of anti-piracy crackdowns? Think again. Shortly after the raid of popular music torrent swap site oink.cd, British authorities now say they’re looking for a legislative anti-piracy remedy. They’ve got the backing, not surprisingly, of the British record industry, and it seems continental European nations might follow. […]

The classic SM58 vocal mic has stood up to abuse before, but the Scandinavian-based Studio TV takes it to a new level. Photo of another well-used SM58 by Trendwhore, via Flickr. Us Americans are wimps. Scandinavians know how to test music gear. As a metal soundtrack pounds away in the background, a Shure SM58 gets […]

Pirates, caught by pigs? Pigs, walking the plank? Sorry, this is so metaphor-laden I’m stumped. Photo by frogmuseum, via Flickr. PS, the fact that I’ve made this torrent site look so darned cute is not me advocating piracy. It was either that or a dirty pig snout. Several readers have written in to say that […]

What exactly went wrong at this botched Van Halen performance of Jump? The discussion continues, though the current running consensus is that a guitar tuning was screwed up, not the sample rate on a performance. (It’s not clear why Van Halen transposed the track from the album version, but that’s near-certainty.) Even the creator of […]

The Monome‘s clean-slate grid of light-up buttons has proven a huge hit, not only among musicians but multimedia artists in general. It’s been such an Internet sensation that many people assume some significant company is behind it. In reality, part of the clarity of the design comes from the homemade approach to design and construction, […]

basic64 is a free (donations accepted) VST plug-in for Windows. You can see the full specs on the developer site, but let’s skip straight to what sets this one apart: Oscillator sync Ring modulation Pitch envelopes Tempo-synced arpeggiator MIDI learn on everything Pretty powerful for free. It’s not a full SID emulation, but then, I […]

Seeing through walls in Chris’ Out of Bounds. Photo by the artist, via Flickr. Chris O’Shea (also of the blog Pixelsumo) has a brilliant installation that allows people to see through walls. It’s an idea I’ve seen done before, but Chris actually makes the effect convincing, by giving visitors an infrared torch (what we’d call […]