Archaeopteryx: Ruby Self-Generating Pattern Sequencer from giles goat boy on Vimeo. Who needs NAMM? Well, sure, you could wait 48 hours for the mind-bogglingly awesome announcements I’m sure we’ll be scooping on this site know absolutely nothing about. But that’s 48 hours you could be spending right now, coding your own sequencer. And unless Ableton […]

Much as I’m an advocate for live visualists becoming like musicians with eye candy, the needs of the VJ just aren’t quite identical to those of someone doing music, even DJing. But here’s the upside: I think people doing live visuals have even more reason to be excited about control possibilities with devices like the […]

“This is my tree. It makes music.” It took “actual 12-year-old girl” (as Microsoft described her) Sparrow to rescue Microsoft’s drab CES keynote (and drab tech news week) and get us back into the Future again. That future is one in which the dazzling interactive 3D world of games becomes a playground you can shape. […]

Artist and electronic media prof Fernando Orellana has created a treasure trove of whimsical and ingenious media art. So, give him a tool like coding-for-artists environment Processing, and you know he’ll do something unusual. So far, we have the game Chef’s Special. With lo-fi graphics that would make Videlectrix proud, a pirate ship sinks slowly […]

The microKORG is one of the great music instrument product hits of recent years. It’s a product that has managed to reach out of the claustrophobic, aging niche of traditional keyboard buyers to a wider audience of rockers and music enthusiasts. It’s not the only keyboard to be “cool” – hello, Moog – but it’s […]

Five hundred bucks. In music tech terms, that usually gets you, what, a single app bundle? Now, it can get you a whole computer, pre-loaded with a bunch of music software. It may not be as powerful as a modern laptop, but it’s also in a cute, smaller form factor you can keep everywhere in […]

I’ve personally always been happy carrying around any one of a number of portable USB/FireWire audio interfaces. But as readers pointed out following Blue’s announcement of the Icicle yesterday, various solutions have offered direct mic – to – USB hardware with preamps for connecting a single mic to a single USB port. And several tech […]

The Arduino Piano, as photographed here by neonarcade aka Aaron Rutledge, serves as a jumping off point for imagining the mobile music hardware machines of the future. Marc “Nostromo” Resibois, aka “m.-.n,” lives the digital life of computers. The Belgian musician and hacker [@MySpace] is renowned as a Game Boy musician, as the inventor of […]

The uber-hip Monome controller is some of the new hotness to grow out of OpenSoundControl support. Photo: George P. Macklin, aka Granular Matter. You hear plenty of chatter about the powers of OpenSoundControl, the open, high-res, network-savvy control protocol for music and visuals. But standards are no good without implementation — and some implementations just […]

We all live … here. Photo: “DJ” Dave Whelan. It’s official: we had heard rumblings that game maker Harmonix was about to announce something, and it’s here. It’s a collaboration directly with the Beatles to make something that isn’t Rock Band or Guitar Hero — something completely new. And something completely new is exactly what’s […]