A toy controller – in a good way. The Mustang Pro guitar controller for Rock Band 3 is equipped with a full MIDI implementation and standard 5-pin port to connect to synths and computers. Since the very first Guitar Hero game, musicians have found ways of converting game music controllers into genuine music controllers, through […]

Bridge Invaders Basics from Momo the Monster on Vimeo. Today, Adobe announced the availability of AIR apps in the Android Market. A quick refresher: AIR is Adobe’s runtime environment for Flash Platform applications. It allows Flash movies to run as closer-to-first-class citizens – they can get access to system hardware like the accelerometer, save/load files, […]

mtn, at work in his bedroom studio, in medium-format film glory. All photos courtesy the artist. Artists and engineers, coders and musicians – maybe once these were perceived as separate cultures, but today, you can find people tap-dancing across the categories with ease – people like Adam. Adam Ribaudo, aka makingthenoise, is known in the […]

There’s obviously something about big. In the 1988 film Big, the iconic scene featured Tom Hanks and Robert Loggia tapping their way across FAO Schwartz’s oversized piano. Now, it’s the drum machine’s turn. David Crowder*Band drummer Bwack made the oversized stage version of an MPC-style set of drum pads, seen below and on CDM in […]

To start our Monday morning right, here’s some nice, rhythmic glitch in the Mac tool Quartz Composer, using a combination of custom and off-the-shelf plug-ins — bless you, modularity. It’s a lovely demonstration of how having an ample set of pluggable tools can help you to produce the results you want. PXN_richterizz from pixel noizz […]

While out of the budget of many home musicians, Pro Tools HD remains the lifeblood of the studio, broadcast, and live worlds. Make no mistake – even in a slow-moving economy, that’s still big business. Users sometimes accept Avid’s hardware grudgingly, but revisions are significant news. Avid has promised a series of new products for […]

All photos courtesy/(C) Alessandro Cortini, for CDM. Call it cable addiction. Italian-born musician Alessandro Cortini, known for his live keyboard work with Nine Inch Nails, retreated into the studio with classic and contemporary Buchla modular synths to make “SONOIO.” Guided by his uniquely personal compositional style, he was able to wrangle that mess of chords […]

From our call for CDM reader studios, Eric Beam’s studio. In his setup: Windows 7 64-bit, Cakewalk’s SONAR 8.5 DAW (with native 64-bit support), and the excellent modular patching environment Plogue Bidule. Click through to Flickr for a closer look. Photo (CC-BY) Eric Beam. This week, while we poll readers to find out what platforms […]

“Your kids will love this Saw figure.” So, too, must have been the calculation of the person who decided to immortalize the film Saw with little toys and figures containing 30 seconds of voice recording, because this toy is now available in quantity for — wait for it — US$2. A $2, 30-second sampler? Now […]

VirSyn have announced one of the nicest effects I’ve seen yet on a mobile platform in the form of iVoxel, a vocoder for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. On the handhelds, it looks like something you could easily hold up to your mouth and rest atop a synth; on iPad, you get a nicely-sized touchable keyboard […]