Checkerboard Step Sequencer V2 from Josh Silverman on Vimeo. Shall we play a game? Have your checkers chops ready, because Josh Silverman’s Checkerboard Step Sequencer, a tangible interface for music, will test both your game mettle and your grooves. Built with the open source coding tool OpenFrameworks and Ableton Live as sound source, the checkerboard […]

Making music, making blips and bleeps, turning knobs, plugging in keyboards, and having the freedom to modify your gear – these are good things. And that’s why I’m so excited that today is the day the MeeBlip launches. It’s been several years in development, but now it’s finally here. It’s a hardware box that makes […]

Love patching. Hate running out of patch cords. For all the quantity and inventiveness of iOS music-making software, only a few titles have become contenders as must-have apps. KORG’s iElectribe often tops those lists. What makes the iMS-20 especially interesting news is that it may have a bit of an edge even on hardware. Touch […]

Shigeto – “Escape from the Incubator” from Ghostly International on Vimeo. As I noted in the opening for my recent Processing for Android tutorial, there’s no substitute for the immediacy of drawing with pen and paper. Even as digital artists, it can be a necessary first step to wiring up the visual parts of our […]

The tracker for the rest of us – now more customizable. Click for full-sized version. Ever wish your music software could do something your way, something it can’t do now? Wish you could just get in there and change it yourself? That’s some of the ambition of Renoise 2.6, the multi-platform music creation tool. By […]

Earlier this week, I took a quick overview of what options you can choose for connecting MIDI to the iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad. Make no mistake: the coming of iOS 4.2 will broaden your options for mobile MIDI on Apple gadgets. But I realized a somewhat glib comment in my story made some folks […]

To many users, it’s been a long time coming, but using Pro Tools software no longer means working exclusively with Pro Tools hardware. Pro Tools 9, announced today, is a “software-only” version. That is, you can use it with your hardware – your audio interface, your DSP tools of choice, even the built-in audio hardware […]

For anyone waiting to hear some news, Avid is live-streaming their press conference from the Audio Engineering Society (AES) convention in San Francisco, at 4PM California time (7 PM Eastern). Okay, they’re not quite Apple – I’ll be seriously freaked out if CEO Gary Greenfield showed up in a black turtleneck – but it’s an […]

Syphon VDMX 5 Beta 8 integration Demo from vade on Vimeo. Once upon a time, we imagined a future in which computer applications shared content, media, and data effortlessly, where different tools all coexisted. The reality we got was, in almost every category, far more monolithic. By exploiting a little-known feature of the Mac’s graphics […]

Over 25 years later, portions of MIDI introduced early on in the spec remain relevant. And if you want to connect your MIDI-equipped gear to Apple’s iPod touch, iPhone, and iPad mobiles, you will soon have an array of choices. In iOS 4.2, best known for leveling the playing field between Apple’s handhelds and tablet, […]