It’s an old cliche to associate Theremins or electronic music with Halloween, and an unfortunate one — Theremins, for instance, are expressive inventions that can rival Classical acoustic instruments. But do electronic and digital instruments have the potential to create spooky, ghostly new musics? Absolutely! Artists in NYC area Saturday – Etsy party!: If you’re […]

Photo: Donald Bell, via Flickr. By the way, USB ankle plugs aren’t just for women; I have one. It’s a huge boon while traveling, though I wish I were getting lower audio latency. Expressive technologies, like any other media, will say whatever their creators want them to say and do what their creators want them […]

My friend and Keyboard Magazine colleague Francis Preve, an experienced remix artist and sound designer for the likes of Korg and Ableton, is writing a new overview of synthesis techniques. The series is published by Beatportal, from the online music store Beatport. Here are the episodes up so far: Introduction to Synthesizer Programming Part 2: […]

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 […]