Yeah, for a lot of the northern hemisphere, one of these kinds of weekends. Photo (CC-BY) Frenchman Julien Haler. (Oh yeah, we really don’t say it enough – thanks, France! In fact, jeez, double thanks!) Summer days and evenings for a lot of us are a perfect time for buying new records, listening to new […]

Guitarist Joey Mariano is making a unique hybrid sound, blending guitar chops with sonic techniques borrowed from 8-bit chip music. His latest adventure filters the sound of the guitar through pulse width filtering, the likes of which are used to modulate the sound of pulse/rectangle waves in chip music composition. The invention he’s devised to […]

SWEATSHOPPE-Whip It from SWEATSHOPPE on Vimeo. Visuals and audio frequently cohabitate, but assembling truly integrated audiovisual artistry remains a nascent field. When done right, it’s terribly satisfying. We saw SWEATSHOPPE’s Blake Shaw and Bruno Levy painting “graffiti” with video projection last year. They’ve been doing some other fantastic work since. At top, Whip It is […]

What’s the future of musician income? Crispin guitarist AJ looks on. Photo (CC-BY-ND) billaday/Bill Selak. An ASCAP Political Action Committee fundraising letter that seeks to vilify advocacy positions of organizations like Creative Commons has been circulating the Web. As I noted in a separate story, it’s not exactly news that ASCAP has taken issue with […]

Effect pedals on CDM? Heck, yes. Electro-Harmonix may have just stolen the show in Nashville with the Freeze pedal alone. Continuing our coverage with Nashville locals and musicians Tony and Jeremy, we have some hands-on videos, images, and impressions of the gear on offer. Don’t miss yesterday’s story on how the trade show helps Nashville […]

Nashville locals Jeremy Dickens (logickal) and Tony Youngblood were on-site this month for CDM to cover the Nashville’s NAMM show, the summer installment of the major music manufacturer trade show. The Summer 2010 edition of the North American Music Merchants trade show (Summer NAMM to most of us) has come and gone. For three days […]

Paraphrasing Mark Essen in the interview above: “it’s not nostalgia. I just like it.” Video game aesthetics have become a kind of naive, outside art for the digital age. Little wonder: the explosion of consumer digital products in the 80s left the children of that decade and decades after with piles of media. Someone was […]

dromama from Altitude Sickness on Vimeo. Wherever you are in the world, here’s some geeky inspiration to kick off this summer weekend. And if you’re in the Los Angeles area, you should absolutely, positively be on Venice Boulevard tonight at 8pm at hacker venue CRASH Space for Handmade Music, gone LA. In the lineup: circuit […]

The design of tools incorporates aesthetic ideas and values from the creator. With freer access to those tools, and easier creation of custom tools, the line between a music release and a tool release blurs. The difference: you can take someone else’s tool, and warp it to your own purposes. And so it is that […]

All hail HDMI! Photo (CC-BY-ND) Sam Catchesides. We’ve been waiting for this a long time: handheld visualism is finally here. Whereas once digital VJing and live visuals were the exclusive domain of laptops with video out, today various pocket-able devices come with video out. In fact, it appears we’re close to getting live visuals as […]