My friend Francis Preve, tech author and electronica producer / remix artist, has a new title out on Backbeat Books assembling a broad range of production tips, tutorials, and anecdotes from artists. (He’s pictured here, though that’s not actually his pool.) You may know Fran’s writing from Keyboard; for The Remixer’s Bible, he’s assembled Keyboard’s […]

Novation is hoping you’ll bring their new Xiosynth mini-synth keyboard home, and to help give you an additional push, they’ve got a new online sampler keyboard plus lessons for learning synthesis techniques. Have a listen to the patches on the Xiosynth with the Flash player below; try the z, x, and c keys on your […]

Whether using your home MIDI gear and software or building an elaborate DIY MIDI project, better understanding MIDI is essential to getting the results you want. Many musicians are aware that the applications of MIDI aren’t limited to traditional musical implementations, but a broad range of creative DIY projects. Explaining what MIDI is, how it […]

It’s been a week now since Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 for Windows was released. In that time I’ve had some a bit of confusion, some fun, productive times, a couple of epiphanies, plenty of crashes, and have eventually developed a bit of a geek crush on this new software from Adobe. A little background: I’m […]

I love controversy. But after a week in which US politicians were talking about World War III (or was that IV) and somehow CDM’s great comment threads wound up on the topics of whether hardware or software was better (discussion = not allowed on this site), and whether starving children would be able to eat […]

Multi-samplers need good sounds to be useful, and while the new Ableton Sampler looks like it’ll have the same drag-and-drop integration with Live as Simpler does, Live users are sure to want multi-sampled content in the new Sampler. So it comes as little surprise that Ableton is partnering with huge soundware house SONiVOX (formerly known […]

In our last episode, I was assembling my fantastic new portable Shuttle PC in glorious comic book form. I got as far as booting Ubuntu Linux off a CD, but obviously I wouldn’t want to stop there. Next steps: getting the onboard NVIDIA RAID working, and making a lean, livable Windows XP install I won’t […]

One major carrot Microsoft is holding out to convince people to upgrade to Vista some time next year is the broadly-overhauled DirectX 10. I’m skeptical about many of the new features in Vista, but I have to say, DirectX 10 is tempting, at least based on what we know now. Details are somewhat sketchy, but […]

What are you going to do when the revolution comes and power goes out? You won’t be able to fire up your small form factor visuals bomb and knock out storyboard cells for that zombie/nature documentary that’s been orbiting your head all day. Don’t worry though, the GTD nerds have visualists covered too. D*I*Y Planner […]