Our friend David Phipps of Sound Tribe Sector 9 (STS9) has posted video of how he’s using his custom-built Monome, as featured in a tutorial here on CDM a few months ago: In this application, the Monome is effectively an interactive sequencer; it works very elegantly in that capacity. Next step: David, in the spirit […]

Kids get hands-on with the music, touching materials found on-location at the installation site. Eat your heart out, Microsoft Surface! Musicians are taking up interactive tables as new ways of making their creations physically accessible, so listeners can reach out and touch the work. Etiquette is a new interactive installation at the Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, […]

It’s no secret: I’m a huge fan of Novation’s ReMOTE SL line, and they’re becoming very popular with live laptop users, soft synth lovers, and users of software like Ableton Live and Reason. Put aside for a moment the whiz-bang Automap features, which automatically assign controllers to software (both plug-ins and hosts), and the physical […]

Ilan Katin, a close friend and GarageCUBE employee, has let me know that the developers of the Mac VJ application Modul8 are looking for a new programmer to help with the next version of their software. Think you have what it takes? OpenGL shader chops? C++ skills? Interface design? Performance optimization? The list goes on […]

MP3s, bad because they have less music in them. So much less music, in fact, that your brain loses the ability to feel emotions listening to them. Okay, sure, over-compressed MP3s sound awful, especially at lower bitrates. But get ready for some strange psychoacoustics here, folks. Producers howl over sound cut out by MP3 compression […]

DIY Gorillapod with parts from Home Depot with a Cannon HV10 attached. I like to shoot video, but I rarely ever plan my outings – so this means I’m either carrying a lot of gear, or I’m always ill prepared. I was pleased to stumble upon some instructions for building a Gorillapod and a String-tripod/monopod […]

Nice work if you can get it: visualist Toby / tobyz, aka *spark, had one heck of a live visual rig for the Geneva Motor Show’s Ford booth. One ongoing challenge for live VJs is making it clear what they’re doing. Solution: “VJ Crew” t-shirts, lovely women (can’t hurt), and, of course, giant touchscreens for […]

In the New York area (or within Amtrak distance)? Mark your calendars for August 23. We’re teaming up again with Make Magazine and homemade marketplace/community Etsy to host the second evening of handmade musical creations at Etsy Labs in Brooklyn. This means software and hardware, sensors and controllers and game systems, custom Max, Pd, and […]

Ardour, the free and open source DAW for Mac and Linux, has already won some fans by providing robust audio multitrack features in free software, along with some unique innovations (like robust support for inter-app JACK audio routing). But one major complaint has been a lack of serious MIDI tools. MIDI functionality is baked in, […]

What’s that flowing out of this classic synth? Could it be a ghostly life force, ready for incarnation into a modern Prophet — erm, synth, that is? (Hooray for bdu’s lovely Flickr collection of synth ephemera. Dave Smith Instruments, the boutique synth shop responsible for the beloved real analog-meets-digital Evolver line, have been hard at […]