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 […]

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 […]