Speaking of the folks at DJ Tech Tools and modding controllers, my friend Matt Moldover is pushing a new term he’s coined, “controllerism.” Moldover, pictured here with his hacked-up Novation ReMOTE keyboard at the last Handmade Music event from CDM, Etsy, and Make, has a rig that combines custom Reaktor ensembles, Ableton Live, and modified […]

Finding the perfect controller for DJing, laptop music, and so on has tended to mean either buying an off-the-shelf solution, or building one from scratch. But a growing number of users is choosing a third way: find a nearly-perfect controller and mod it to perfection. DJ Tech Tools, a new blog from three DJs that […]

Ah, YouTubers. While the rest of us pontificate endlessly, the unfairly-maligned YouTube community painstakingly assembles evidence to prove their point. Lonely girls need outing? YouTube is there. Can’t tell what’s wildly out of tune in a botched Van Halen “Jump” performance? Let’s just listen, shall we? (Too bad, as I had just worked out a […]

Boy, there isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think how much more productive I could be if every single one of my creative apps ran online. Wait. Scratch that. No, I’ve actually never thought that. Online applications can be fantastic. I’m using one right now. Having Flickr for photos and Vimeo for […]

There are few names who have had so profound an impact on music technology as Dave Smith. Three decades after the introduction of the Prophet-5, and nearly 25 years after the first MIDI product shipped, his new creations remain some of the most sought-after musical instruments available. The new Prophet ’08 is capable of producing […]

Digitalists can’t be satisfied with the aural alone, so for visuals, here’s the latest from CDMusic’s sister site: UnitedVisualArtists blow us away with more elegant digital art, including the new generative visuals seen above for Chemical Brothers. Jaymis has good times experimenting with slow motion on his new Sony camera; now gorgeous motion from butterflies […]

Want a killer app for Nintendo DS music making? How about scratching, digitally downsampling, and transmitting MIDI wirelessly (for sync to other effects on a computer)? Yeah, thought you might be interested: Features: load .wav file or live-recorded audio scratch pitch control FX “Retrig” FX “DownSampling” Midi OUT (wireless) stylus control NDSMotion control I love […]

Here’s the latest from visualist superstars UnitedVisualArtists. UVA is “producers, directors and designers of performance video, environmental graphics and real-time software and for a variety of media.” They combine “art direction, production design and software engineering.” Oh, and they’re really light sculptors. And installation/media artists. And live performance visualists. Their most recent performance collaboration is […]

Here’s the latest from visualist superstars UnitedVisualArtists. UVA is “producers, directors and designers of performance video, environmental graphics and real-time software and for a variety of media.” They combine “art direction, production design and software engineering.” Oh, and they’re really light sculptors. And installation/media artists. And live performance visualists. Their most recent performance collaboration is […]

Spinal Tap has nothing on this. Via RW70, aka Rob Warmowski: So what happens when you’re Van Halen, the last song in your set list is the million-seller “Jump” with its synthesizer-keyboard opening…and the recording you’re using to play back the synth is accidentally run at 48K instead of 44.1K? What happens is exactly this […]