I love Roland dearly. But the $4,000 Roland E-80 keyboard looks like it might actually be capable of destroying the planet Alderaan. There’s a breed of mega-arranger-keyboard-organ-appliances that seems spawned on some alien planet, on which giant cyborgs with eight arms play Sunday church music with fourteen-way splits and layers of thin preset sounds. These […]

Yes, now not only will Jessica Simpson be able to sing in tune, she’ll be able to be tuned to an Indonesian pelog scale! AutoTune, the ubiquitous and now pretty ridiculously powerful tuning software, has some major new improvements in AutoTune 5. Central to the upgrade is a graphical mode that lets you draw pitch […]

Automapping, the ability to automatically assign controls on hardware to software parameters, is a big draw for a lot of users, and a new upgrade to the ReMOTE SL keyboard brings this feature to Pro Tools for the first time — while smoothing out the rough edges in support for other software. The ReMOTE SL […]

Drummer John Emrich loves the Zendrum, the unique, handcrafted MIDI drum controller featured on CDM previously. Here’s what he has to say about it: “Without a doubt, this is the most dynamic MIDI unit available for percussionists. You’re not going to find another trigger unit for drummers that will give you this much control over […]

Okay, circuit benders: a key part in warping electronics to new and strange places has vanished from the face of the Earth. Reed Ghazala, father of bending and the field’s best-known personality, writes CDM with the news as he passed it on to experimental/bending music forum oddmusic. That’s the bad news; the good news is […]

The Processing gang have just released a new version. Syntax changes and bugfix details are here, and there’s a new thread on tutorials and resources in the Processing forum. Download link! Or of course you could just start Processing, it will tell you all about the download page. via Random Etc

Adobe’s Bob Donlon has a great step-by-step tutorial on putting together 3D Pan & Scans in After Effects. This is a great weapon to have in your visual arsenal. Generally clients seem to be getting better at providing reasonable amounts of raw materials and resources for visual gigs, but occasionally you’ll get someone who emails […]

Make:Blog’s current weekend project podcast is revisiting their high speed photography project. Interesting, but not really the hottest thing for visualists as the process only yields one frame per event. However, if you combine this with group of low cost cameras, you done got yourself some animation. Ever want to freeze a rose in liquid […]

If you’re planning on diving into Ableton Live this weekend, Ableton’s new YouTube video channel should give you some inspiration, ideas, and advice: Ableton YouTube Videos Many of these have been available for a while, but it’s nice to see them in one place. You also get Ableton “outtakes” like a Robert Henke (Monolake) video […]

Ableton promised they’d ship Live in September, but as the final days of the month waned, I’m sure at least some of you wondered if they’d make it. Just under the wire, the Berlin-based software maker made Live 6 and Sampler available online late in the day Friday, September 29 US time. That means you […]