This is about as affordable and easy as gestural interaction with music can get. The powerful Geco music controller app pairs with the $80 Leap Motion hand tracking hardware – and now the app is free. But it could be just the beginning. For its part, the Leap Motion is now sort of yesterday’s news. […]

The all-in-one mobile music DAW adds 80s drum machines, note repeat, and track and pad mapping shortcuts – plus a panic switch.

ROLI brings features that more tightly integrate Blocks hardware with the NOISE app for iOS, in a combo they hope makes it easy to get started making music.

Okay, so we know you can keep remaking classic instruments and give people a good time. But what if you want something new and crazy? Can you bottle sonic weirdness and make it work for other people? The first time I saw Peter Edwards play live was at an event we hosted in New York. […]

Elektron’s Digitakt may be small, affordable, and friendly. But Elektron followers couldn’t help noticing some features missing from the flagship Octatrack. The more elaborate sample mangling and manipulation features, plus advanced routing architecture, not to mention the crossader and signature form factor were gone. In other words, the Digitakt is cool, but it isn’t an […]

If only… If only that controller had encoders, instead of knobs. If only it had two more faders. You don’t need buttons. You do need buttons. Controllers are endless challenges in combinatorics and personal use cases. That makes the Tinami line of custom MIDI controllers one of the big news items this summer. Shown to […]

Everything about the iPad is about portability. Thinness. Ever-changing interfaces. Functionality hidden behind a pane of glass. But, hey, now that you’ve slimmed down your computational device, why not go hog wild with tangible controls and a sprawling DIY MIDI controller? That’s what Jakob Haq, the nearest thing to an iOS music celebrity we’ve got, […]

Let’s be clear: electronic music is what it is because of a spirit that emanated from people outside of what was popular, not inside. And underground isn’t just about what’s undiscovered. It’s also about people who are too often purposely sidelined: people of color, queer and trans and gay and bi- and lesbian people, people […]

Ableton Live’s dominance over a lot of workflows is unparalleled. But the software itself is looking long in the tooth. There are clearly some features long in coming, and despite some updates, the UI is still largely unchanged since the software’s debut over a decade and a half ago. That’s good in some ways, but […]

Paula Temple and Jem the Misfit are working on the latest iteration of a project about transformation. It melts and fragments, crystallizes and forms, from its rich palette of hybridized techno and ambient textures, sonic and visual alike. And now, it’s set to be involved in some way in transformation beyond just the confines of […]