Imagine the Apple TV as live music and visual instrument, and not just a way of watching archived Battlestar Galactica? Our friend Jeff Gambera has been busy hacking his Apple TV for just such unusual purposes. He’s gotten the real-time audio and music workstation Ableton Live working; even the demo song runs. (Plenty of people […]

Hispasonic has a hands-on video with the Dexter control surface. I must say, I’m impressed with how far the Dexter has evolved in its user interface over the Lemur. There are a lot of new widgets to support the DAW functions, and (finally) real interactive interlinking of control pages from the main screen, such as […]

Photo by Rainer Knobloch. Who woulda thunk it? Early 2007 has brought one big synth announcement after another. We’ve got some official details of the Nord Wave synth from Clavia, and this new keyboard looks like it may please long-time Nord fans and newcomers alike. Clavia has released “Musikmesse preview information”, so specs may change. […]

FM radio and electronic music making: they just go together. Sure, to Moog Music such combinations are the stuff of April Fool’s pranks. Yes, I’m late with this one, but that’s just what Moog came up with last week — and promptly leaked onto the Web before April Fool’s Day even hit. The MF/FM has […]

Stompboxes are back! Yes, software is great, but the gigging musician still loves something you can plug in and step on. The Messe show saw some traditionally rack-mounted gear reborn in stomp form. Sure to be a huge hit, Roland’s BOSS RE-20 takes the beloved RE-201 Roland Space Echo and recreates it as a stompbox. […]

Rather than launch into technical jargon, let me summarize. It’s giant. It has lots of faders and knobs and color screens and such. Not only can you not afford it, you can’t lift it, either. It has an insanely stupid name. But it’s quite beautiful, like a 1979 vision of the future dreamt up by […]

CDM’s friends at the Spanish-language Hispasonic run one of the best music tech sites on the Interwebs. They’ve been kind enough to share some of their videos from the Messe show, and you won’t have to speak a word of Spanish to follow them. (The Arturia Origin was later overdubbed with Spanish.) Of course, I […]

A new Nord: the Wave, keeping true to the red livery of its predecessors. New stuff with knobs, keys, and touchscreens: yep, it’s Giant German Music Tech Trade Show time. Our friend Rainer Knobloch got to spend a few hours on the Messe show floor, so we politely pointed him to some of the gear […]

Live visualism needs a format that a) isn’t so huge it eats your hard drive, b) can be decoded and processed by your computer without bringing your CPU to its needs (DV compression causes some issues here), and c) still looks good, especially when scratched. We’ve had a great discussion going on the forums, in […]

The Rest of the Messe As you know, the Frankfurt Musicmesse opened on Wednesday the 28th. There were quite a few exciting announcements including the Nord Wave, Arturia Origen Keyboard, the Dexter and of course the biggest announcement in my opinion, the Solaris hardware synth by John Bowen Synth Designs. If you haven’t already, be […]