We’ve seen a minor renaissance in mobile music gear – KORG’s volca series, Teenage Engineering’s tiny Pocket Operators, the Gakken synths, Roland’s boutique series, and more. (We’re a believer in this – that’s why CDM co-produces the MeeBlip synth.) But while these small instruments are great, they wind up getting tossed into a bag. That […]

PPG’s Phonem vocal synth for iPad is one of the nicest synths to come out this summer. So, let’s get straight to using it. Our friend Jakob is here with a great tutorial: It’s a nice introduction to the architecture, by way of a drone sound design. Also, I can’t say enough good things about […]

We’ve reached the point where your identity, your nationality, your genre, your gender could be … the Internet. We interviewed Born in Flamez recently. But I really appreciate the new video for Electronic Beats, in that it’s not so much an artist feature as a manifesto – and a challenge.

“Electronic music needs to be wilder” was the challenge issues by Matt Black (NinjaTune, Coldcut) last year at Ableton Loop at a talk I moderated. But maybe this could be interpreted as “into the wild” in a difference sense. At the moment, I’m part of an ongoing series of residencies that takes that in a […]

It’s time to get beyond the geographic bubble – without resorting to narrow expectations of “world music” – and really appreciate the wide-open world of music making in which we now live. To take us there, CDM’s Zuzana Friday talks to Cedrik Fermont, who is evangelical when it comes to breaking apart old stereotypes and […]

Years ago, when Ableton’s Operator FM synth designed by Robert Henke made its debut, it was a revelation. Its clear panel design and flexible architecture made FM synthesis more accessible to countless Ableton Live users. But now Operator, while still a great go-to instrument, certainly deserves some competition. And that makes Bengal special. The production […]

Now, it comes in colors. Novation’s Launchpad app has a new UI that shows in colors – and matches colors on connected Launchpad hardware. And with this latest update to the iOS apps from the Blocs team at Novation, you’ve got a more viable option for making music and jamming without the laptop.

A piano keyboard or fretboard is set up with a particular mapping of pitch in mind. But the major advantage of any undifferentiated grid is the ability to work with scales. You can have any tuning and modes you like. A new free update to Novation’s Launchpad Pro adds that functionality to their grid controller […]

You’ve been watching those wild YouTube videos of people performing tunes with hacked floppy drives – most recently Star Wars and Nirvana. Now get those sounds in a sample library for nearly-free donationware.

Okay, enough teasing already. Behringer has a 12-voice polyphonic synth called the DeepMind. And now let’s talk about exactly what to expect, in one place.