In a marvel of DIY engineering, one intrepid user of the tracker-made-modern music making environment Renoise has reconstructed the basic elements of the Ableton Live interface. With quantized clip launching on channels and even a crossfader, it’s unmistakably a copy of what Ableton does. I don’t think you’d dump your install of Ableton for this; […]

“Folk music of the 21st Century” – radio broadcaster, jazz aficionado, and jazz-based Ableton Live instrumentalist / remix artist Nick Francis really sums up what this whole site is about. As he chops up jazz greats in Ableton, his mash-up music chops are as much musical analysis as they are performance. He walks through his […]

More than anything, a tablet resembles a piece of paper. Apple’s iPad rests easily on a music stand, and – while in this generation, it’s a bit small and low-resolution – is at least the beginning of an ideal score reader. We took a look at Avid’s Scorch, a leading contender for your iPad score-reading […]

Mapping Festival is a real-world hub for visuals, a place where photons against surfaces and human visualists converge in the physical realm, and not just online. So, we’re very excited to see what happened in 2011 – and to look forward to 2012. We’ve been watching some of those videos in the past two months: […]

3D developers had real reason to be thankful last week, on the occasion of American Thanksgiving. Doom 3, after some wrangling, was set free with a GNU GPL open source license. The game data itself isn’t free, covered by the existing proprietary EULA, but you get all the logic and rendering of the game on […]

The stream of iPad and iPhone apps for musicians gushes endlessly, but among that river of software, there are some visible trends. Demanded by users, features for sharing between apps – and other mobile artists – flourish. Hardware heavyweight KORG has been one of the developers that’s been especially good at offering that kind of […]

Revealing a deeper understanding of what sound means in our world, how it works as “currency” and “ghost,” Performance Artist Christine Sun Kim explores sonic media without the benefit of hearing. She finds how to make its presence more physical, to find greater dimensions of movement, and to make a personal connection beyond what most […]

Disco Christmas! Photo (CC-BY) paparutzi. Yes, it’s that gift-y time of year again, which naturally means among lovers of music technology, thoughts turn to gear wishes and dreams of new hardware. We’ve asked in the past what readers want in their stockings and presents – and, just as interestingly, what they’d give to others. And […]

Diaspora is an attempt to build a social network that contrasts with the locked-garden vision of Facebook, one built on open source software, open exchange of information, and distributed – rather than centralized – communication. I already let slip that we’ll be rebooting our own social endeavor, Create Digital Noise, in the new year. But […]

You’ll find plenty of contact mic tutorials floating around the Web, but bassling (Jason Richardson) – working with a learned technique – has what I think is a really nice example, one that sounds really good. It’s easy to do, but unlike a popular tutorial (and one I’ve tried myself), you won’t wind up dis-assembling […]