Tiny MP3 players have become ubiquitous, but MiJam thinks you’ll want to use pocket-able toy-like music gadgets that make music. At about US$20 each (according to Technabob, these odd little devices purport to behave as musical instruments, down to what looks like either membrane or very slim buttons for keys: miJamm Mini Lixx is supposed […]

Matrixsynth points to this gem, from the US educational kids’ program 3-2-1 Contact, produced by Children’s Television Workshop. (I can’t think of any science programs today for young people quite like it, sadly. Ordinarily I’d hold off for Matrix’s wonderful Week in Synths, but I just can’t wait on this one. Good Sunday evening watching.) […]

8-bit musicians appreciate their moms, too. (I hear nearly all of them have mothers. One or two were forged out of spare C64 parts, which is pretty cool, as well.) That’s M0M with a zero in it. (M0th3r’s D4y?) A group of chiptune musicians decided they wanted to honor their mothers this holiday with a […]

Ardour, the free, open-source audio workstation for Mac and Linux, received a major 2.0 release on April 30. Now, this is the point where you’d normally expect to see the same, boring list of feature improvements that commercial manufacturers release as bullets in each release. But when I asked the Ardour project lead Paul Davis […]

MAKE:Magazine and Create Digital Music will co-host the Chips + Fish + Music Maker Faire Party next Saturday in San Francisco. But before we get to that, I have to share the latest design from CDM’s visual artist Nat Jeanneret (the reason CDM looks the way it does, and the blogger behind onetonnemusic): If you […]

Massive musical makers meet-up! Clockwise from top left: the all-in-one sound suitcase AudioPint, ultrasonic Thereping instruments, Steve Cooley links sound and 3D image, and one-upping Nike with a sensor-driven performance shoe. Next week, all week I’ll be in the Bay Area, California for Maker Faire, the Burning Man meets Science Fair meets World Expo meets […]

AHNE 2007 – Happy Syntho De Mayo Every year synth die-hards migrate East for AHNE. It is an amazing gathering filled with vintage gear as you will see in the links that follow. This year’s event looks like it did not disappoint. Unfortunately I was not able to make it due to having to make […]

Digital process has often been the enemy of craft. Italy, once the land of highly skilled typographers, calligraphers, and music engravers, has given way to static, boxed-up, boring fonts like the rest of the world. It’s only fitting, then, that some lovers of type and digital media would fight back. Andren writes in to share […]

To illustrate Anton’s story on HD mixing, we proudly present uncompressed PNG color samples showing accuracy in Jitter, Pd, and Quartz Composer. Well, now we present it, anyway; I was messing around with Amazon’s S3 storage service and got the link wrong. Doh. Here’s the corrected link, in case you missed it. CDM Intensity Color […]

Sometimes an instrument you know can become something else altogether. Bob Collier has been constructing his own thumb pianos, adding amplification, effects, self-sampling features, and novel cases involving recycled camera bodies and faux fur. As Bob says, “Sometimes the crudest and roughest looking kalimbas can sound surprisingly good especially with the right context of fx […]