We love you, old Casio (and Yamaha, and other) keyboards, hard-edged lo-fi synth patches, and strangely alluring stiff automatic drum parts. We love you in original form, circuit-bent mods, and free VST plug-ins. And, via Jaymis, we love people who build “very low-energy musical whimsy” performances on their keyboard, like David O’Doherty: Anyone have a […]

Ready to get in the holiday mood, but feeling Scrooge-like with your money? Here are some free tunes to get your Yuletide festivities underway: The Garritan Personal Orchestra forum has become more than a place for users of this sampled orchestra library to troubleshoot and ask questions — it really is a community in its […]

Electronics and physical computing is great fun to learn as you get tangible results from your progress. It’s simple and fun to grab a kit or a bunch of components and follow on with a blog or instructable. However, as you progress to designing your own projects and circuits (or to make following other people’s […]

No, it’s not from Gridiron, and it doesn’t do any of the cool preview rendering, but BG Renderer, from the AE Enhancers forum, does do background rendering, for free! Using the power of After Effects scripting, it opens a terminal or command line window to background render any queued items. It also had the added […]

The VSTi Emulation We’ve All Been Waiting For! The Casio Tone VL-1 Emulator is a Free PC VSTi that accurately recreates the sound, feeling, and most importantly the cheese of the venerable Casio VL-1. You remember that Volkswagen commercial with that “da da da” song? Have you ever heard someone sing a cheesy ballad at […]

And we’re off to the races. Last week, I wrote up a teaser on some of the new features in Windows Vista for audio, which launched a long and heated discussion of the new OS. (Read through comments for some specifics, including how Vista compares to Mac OS X and BeOS. Hint: BeOS wins.) Now, […]

In a crowded field of VJ apps, Modul8 stands out as the app Photoshop lovers would want to use onstage. A fully extensible modular compositing system lets you combine images with per-pixel transparency — now, more attractive and better-performing than ever thanks to anti-aliasing and hardware acceleration. Live visualists get one tasty upgrade in the […]

Microsoft tools make you happy! You put in happy, and then you make — happy things! Or I think that’s what this slide means. Photo by BIT-101. I’m plenty jealous of all the folks in the Flash community who got to hit Flash on the Beach — it sounds like a truly historic event for […]

I’ve managed to acquire a Wii remote — tricky commodity to find these days — and have gotten it up and working with both Windows and Mac. Here’s another quick teaser: Mac users are going to be in for a tougher ride as far as live music and visual control, as the BlueSoleil Bluetooth software […]

Finding the right tool for visual performance and VJing is always a challenge. Pre-built systems give you a few choices, but one doesn’t have the right kind of effects, and one doesn’t have the right routing, and one doesn’t have the interface or control you want, and none lets you use custom patches. Modular systems […]