Reaktor Blocks is already a lovely hybrid. It has the open-ended sound design possibilities and knob-tweaking delights of modular instruments, down to the look and feel of that gear. But it blends those design features with the sound-making capabilities of digital software – and you never run out of cables, space, or cash. Of course, […]

Urs Heckmann just combined “reverb” with “experimental, possibly sonically unstable plug-in with unpredictable results.” And it’s free. Urs – how did you know exactly what I wanted for Christmas?

In the past weeks, I’ve had the good fortune to talk to astronauts and aeronautical engineers, to artists in residence in space centers (with ESA) and aboard “vomet comet” airplane microgravity experiments (in Russia). A common theme has emerged. Just as images from space once transformed our perception, the next frontier is sound. From spatial sound […]

In an array of triangles forming trees and snowflakes, a festive holiday geometric pattern turns into a musical playset. It’s a free browser toy from Ableton, in celebration of the holidays, and a nice little diversion. Looks like someone had fun during a hackday or something. Of course, this is also momentous as we’ve never […]

Apple’s tablet has grown in popularity partly as a sketchpad for doing less, and focusing more. A clean slate for music, it’s also a clean slate for software design. Or, that’s its potential. But while the iPad has become a platform for extraordinary instruments and controllers, for many of us it hasn’t yet become a […]

patten has gone from CD-R releases to Warp, remaining anonymous all the while. But these secretive artists told us about where they find inspiration.

There may be an Ableton logo splashed on it and integration designed specifically for Live. But one of the nice things about Ableton’s Push and Push 2 hardware are that, at their core, they’re open. Everything sends and receives standard MIDI messages. As we’ve seen, even the display is hackable. And that is admirable not […]

For a lot of us, hands-on sequencing control is a boon to playing, even alongside a computer. So then there’s the question of which sequencer. The reason Arturia’s BeatStep Pro got so interesting this year is that it’s a right-down-the-middle option: not too expensive, not too complicated, and not too weird, but very capable of […]

Triple Sun – Sprint from Martin Blažíček on Vimeo. From Bratislava, the duo Triple Sun are making spontaneous, ethereal music with a combination of modular and computational tools. Against a flickering black-and-white film, this video last year is one of my favorites. We’re inviting Triple Sun this week to Berlin along with Jonáš Gruska as […]

As more people bring home hardware, the next question is how to get that running smoothly with software – for recording and control. We just saw a really great tutorial for doing it in Reaper, using our MeeBlip synth. Now there’s another unsolicited MeeBlip tutorial (really, I had nothing to do with this), this time […]