Photo (CC-BY) Valerie Renee. Musicians get loads of gift guides. Still photographers, too. Visualists – people who care about live visuals, fun synesthetic toys, experimentation for your eyes, and visual innovation – not so much. Let’s change that. Whether it’s a book about Nam June Paik, a set of lenses, a novel live controller, we […]

Therenect – Kinect Theremin from Martin Kaltenbrunner on Vimeo. Who says technology has to move fast and die young? Leon Theremin may have been a full century ahead of his time, before computers, before transistors, before jet engines or atomic power or rockets. ReacTable creator Martin Kaltenbrunner has a virtual Theremin prototype built with Microsoft’s […]

Photo (CC-BY-ND) Atomic Sprinkles. A man named Don Waugh, friend of a CDM reader, is facing some serious challenges. He’s just lost his wife, and faces severe, possibly life-threatening health problems. There’s a campaign underway to get him a liver transplant. But Don doesn’t only want to fight for his health: he wants to make […]

Photo (CC-BY) magma666 / Scott. What’s truly wish-worthy? Is it a manuscript paper notebook? An iPhone app? A glitched-out hardware effect? A DAW? A sample library? A CD or book? Before we put together some of our own suggestions for this year’s gift guide, we want to hear from you. You can add to your […]

X Racer from Gadget Gangster on Vimeo. The Propeller Platform is open-source hardware with a mighty 8-core Parallax Propeller chip as its brain. Like the Arduino, it comes as a simple protoboard. But unlike the Arduino, the Propeller board is loaded with I/O pins and can output video and audio without much modification. It also […]

Chronome Prototype from FlipMu on Vimeo. The monome is defined as much by what it isn’t as what it is: it’s monochromatic, it uses only on/off binary buttons, and that’s part of its beauty. But what if it weren’t that? What if a monome could do color, and velocity sensitivity? As both engineering problem and […]

Google Translate’s pronunciations may or may not impress you, but the thing’s got some beatboxing skills. Reddit user harrichr notes a fun result: 1) Go to Google Translate 2) Set the translator to translate German to German 3) Copy + paste the following into the translate box: pv zk pv pv zk pv zk kz […]

Hardware workflows can be musically productive and rock-solid reliable. But why choose between hardware and software? Combine them. DirectEMX is a VST Editor for a Korg Electribe MX. Now, why would you want to drag a mouse around when you have physical knobs? DirectEMX has a number of answers to that. You can copy and […]

Kflux looks like a killer patch for Max for Live, a granulator you can drop in for sound-bending effects and, if you’re decent with Max, open up to learn more about how it works or edit to customize for your own purposes. At EUR9,99, seems like a must-buy if you’ve got a copy of Max […]

Photo (CC-BY) Lululemon. (Bonus points if you spotted their logo, yoga fans, though “ohm” works well for us, too!) Black Friday, named originally for the day on which retailers typically broke even for the first time in the year (think black ink), has become a holiday for sales in the US. I’ve seen a handful […]