After more than a year of relatively trusty service and a country-spanning tour, my BCD2000 has finally become too flaky for performances. I’ve been looking at the various DJ-style midi controller options, and was down to about 5 options when I was asked to play a set on short notice at a relatively big festival […]

Monome co-creator Brian Crabtree, sampling into Max. Photo by saguirl from Etsy. It’s time for the third-ever, semi-regular Handmade Music Night with CDM, Etsy.com, and Make Magazine. If you have friends in the NYC area, make sure they drop by. In the lineup: the first-ever public debut of the Monome 256, Richard Lainhart playing a […]

I may be the last person to notice this for all I know, but I just plugged my FireWire-based Focusrite Saffire into a MacBook Pro 17″ and was treated to a blinking light show. The solution? Don’t use bus power; plug in the Saffire’s power supply to an outlet to power it directly. The solution […]

I’ve found the Windows Vista Team Blog to be largely disappointing in terms of actual OS information, but they’ve got an interesting post this week from Windows Vista audio team Program Manager Richard Fricks: Using a microphone array to enhance sound capture Microphone array recording is a technique for improving recording quality by processing signal […]

Logic Pro Studio 8 is barely out of the gate, and it’s already got an update. MainStage 1.0.1 resolves stability and usability fixes, and offers to save parameters when you switch patches. Check out the update if you haven’t already gotten it via Software Update. (There are related application support fixes releases, so in general, […]

Click To Play Bill Etra, the analog video processing pioneer, has been posting some of his original works from the late 1960s through 2005 on video sharing site Blip.tv. It’s a sort of ongoing retrospective of his work. His techniques are varied, including Rutt-Etra processing (using the hardware he co-designed), hand-controlled oscillator-to-RGB inputs, and laptop-based […]

Click To Play Bill Etra, the analog video processing pioneer, has been posting some of his original works from the late 1960s through 2005 on video sharing site Blip.tv. It’s a sort of ongoing retrospective of his work. His techniques are varied, including Rutt-Etra processing (using the hardware he co-designed), hand-controlled oscillator-to-RGB inputs, and laptop-based […]

Sure, you have fun with your one projector. But don’t you sometimes want to add giant water fountains, with water projection? And more video? And fire? And lasers? And some creepy wizard guy? In South Korea, spending money on such things seems strangely commonplace, as at the multimedia/fountain installation at Kangwon Land / High One […]

Happily, despite this image, NI is not adding Apple iTunes-inspired CoverFlow to KOMPLETE. But they are refreshing synths and effects, updating to the shiny, new Kontakt 3 sampler, Guitar Rig 3 guitar rack, and Massive synth, and cutting the price. Lost in the shuffle: vocoding and spectral delays. Native Instruments remains the unchallenged heavyweight of […]

Some were disappointed that the Segway was not, as promised, “an invention that will “sweep over the world and change lives, cities, and ways of thinking.’” But there’s hope, in the form of Brisbane, Australia-based electronic duo Segue’s vision for the future. Clearly, the first Segway was just a 1.0 device. What it needs is […]