We’re serious when we say laptop performances — the Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra (“CybOrk”), influenced by similar groups like Princeton’s PLOrk, uses laptops as instruments, augmented by alternative controllers. Here’s the surprise: when they record it, they intentionally treat it as you would an acoustic ensemble. Photo by Elena Krysanova. My feature story for Keyboard […]

200 frames per second: that’s the “smooth slow motion capture” speed of Sony’s rather affordable HVR-V1P HDV camera. It really makes slow-motion capture accessible to the rest of us. Jaymis has been testing this mode on his new camera. Here are some early results (all the more impressive if you watch through to the full-motion […]

One of the many terrific snaps by photomaven LauraLovesToPhotoBands. Pray she shows up at your next gig! We look forward to the day when visualists on music tours are norms, rather than exceptions. And no, playing lots of pre-rendered footage and/or hiding someone in the back of the house does not count. Fortunately, our own […]

You know how drummers tap desks, objects, and anything around them incessantly, often unaware of the fact that they’re doing it, until people get annoyed? Well, now you don’t need a drummer around: you can program a Game Boy to do the same thing. Jowan Sebastian has built a brilliant, elegant application for Game Boys […]

MOTU’s MachFive is an oft-overlooked software sampler option for both Mac and Windows. The sampler market is a crowded one, but MachFive does have some nice features, not least being a unique, one-screen interface. The sampler hasn’t quite kept pace with recent releases from Native Instruments, Cakewalk, and others, so this week’s release of version […]

If the readers here did, I suspect musicians and record labels would be richer, not poorer, music would be spread further around the planet, and policy might actually make sense. If you haven’t yet read comments on last week’s analysis of an industry push for DRM on radio, do it now. On second though, as […]

Wired doesn’t seem to care about anything musical unless it has the word “mashup” in it. But at least they get this right: Jamaican musicians understood the mashup long before Wired editors did. DJ Spooky is putting together a compilation to celebrate the 40th anniversary of reggae label Trojan Records, and as he talks to […]

One of the reasons to look beyond conventional controllers for music (like the ubiquitous, piano-style black-and-white keyboard) is that these controllers have a certain range of expression. But these constraints also impact people with different physical abilities. The piano assumes a certain kind of physical facility, and even as it makes playing easy for people […]

As noted last night — with some very witty responses from incredulous readers — the record industry is now pushing for DRM on all radio. It’s a bad idea to begin with, and they’re bringing it up in a context in which it doesn’t even belond, negotiations on royalty rates, at a bad time — […]

Deep in Tesla’s labs, Mark Twain discovers the awesome, destructive force of Windows Sound Recorder. Be afeared, intellectual property owners!) Act now, fellow musicians — before Sound Recorder destroys music! It’s amazing how complete and total crazies can suddenly wind up with the backing of organizations powerful enough to dictate the law. Witness the strange […]