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 […]

I got a disturbing comment on a past story on Brian Moore Guitars working on hybrid MIDI/audio USB transmission for guitars. The poster suggested Brian Moore was no more. That would be sad news, as Brian Moore makes some fantastic custom instruments with MIDI and USB interfaces, top-notch stuff. Fortunately, a company spokesperson has confirmed […]

JazzMutant’s Lemur touchscreen turned a lot of heads, at least as a concept: precise, multi-touch tracking that could follow all ten of your fingers independently, and interactive, custom controller touch layouts looking like something out of Star Trek: The Next Generation. That was the good news. The bad news: difficult assignments for OpenSoundControl (OSC), extra […]

Me-too 49-key controllers have been mind-numbingly dull for the most part. The new Akai MPK49, revealed in Frankfurt at Messe, easily qualifies as different. Not only does it add trigger pads as found on the MPC line, but there’s an onboard arpeggiator, functionality borrowed from the MPC, and additional MIDI control options, as well. It’s […]