Call it future shock. Love of retro gear is more than nostalgia; sometimes it takes time to appreciate what technology means. And so, today, classic digital samplers and drum machines like the E-mu SP-1200 and SP-12 can inspire even greater passion than they did when new. Today, producers can feel love not only for retro […]

The need is simple: musicians want to sketch ideas on the go, then craft them into finished tracks with their familiar arsenal of sound tools at their desk or studio. Yet for all the mobile music software on iOS — and need to differentiate your offering — we’ve seen relatively few music tools that make […]

MIDI in Ardour – and now, Ardour suddenly becomes viable for a wide swath of users. If a free and open source DAW sounds like a tall order, it is. And so it’s little surprise that Ardour 3, the biggest upgrade to this solid music production workstation, has been a long time coming. What might […]

While the object of both vigorous praise and criticism, music games have helped people see music and musical interfaces in new ways. Masaya Matsuura (PaRappa the Rapper) is known as the father of that genre. With a new title, you can try out his latest music gaming concept for free, on iPod touch and iPhone. […]

Retro chip music appeal and the occasional Super Mario Bros. game aside, you probably think of the Nintendo NES and Famicom system as something collecting dust at garage sales. You probably don’t think of this NES running as a self-contained music production workstation, syncing to MIDI and Android, or exploiting new software for producing elaborate […]

Made In Iron 2 from Matti Niinimäki on Vimeo. Matti Niinimäki of Finland has combined a common household chore with music control. He transforms an iron and ironing board into a wireless music controller, capable of generating wobble bass, slicing beats, sampling, and anything else he might devise. The ironing board itself is self-contained, sensing […]

Procrastinatus Part I from procrastinat.us on Vimeo. Procrastinatus Part II from procrastinat.us on Vimeo. A/V crew Procrastinatus send us their latest: it’s over an hour of a live set, fusing stylish silver-and-monochrome abstract visual loops with tightly-composed sounds. The project is the work of Emil Bardh, Olof Schröder, Emmanuel and Jonatan Moreno, working in the […]

Photo (CC-BY) JD Hancock. We users may sometimes gripe, but music technology gives us an impossibly wide variety for which to be thankful. From free (as in beer, as in freedom) to high-end and spendy, from software plug-in to acoustic instrument to solid-state electronics to toy, you’d run out of time and money long before […]

Tim Exile, laptop virtuoso, vocalist, and Reaktor software creator, has apparently taken a liking to the recording features SoundCloud is touting. He’s got a novel idea: you record samples into SoundCloud, he takes your samples and incorporates them into his set. It takes someone like Tim to pull that off; it should be a good […]

If it’s an iconic piece of hardware or software, there’s at least a decent chance you could be seeing it in virtual iPad form soon. Tascam’s Portastudio, released today, is a particularly striking example. The famed, budget cassette multitrack recorder, the box on which countless demos and quick songwriter creations was forged, appears on Apple’s […]