Ready for some superior German engineering in your controller hardware? Before the APC or the Launchpad, before the Kontrol X1 from NI, Faderfox was the underground, boutique choice for controllers. “Professionally” made in Germany, the devices really are little tanks. They have incredibly solid-feeling buttons and knobs, and as opposed to the sprawling form factors […]

Now that digital technology allows rapid creation of new interfaces for music and sound, the question of how to represent those elements visually has new life. But whether digital or not, practitioners of music have long been interested in applying further descriptions to music, from the Baroque Doctrine of Affectations to the involuntary association of […]

The grooves are fun, but the generated names for the groove are even more so. Need a new band name, anyone? Generative: the rhythmic frontier. These are the voyages of the starship MicroTonic. Its online mission: to explore strange new grooves, to seek out new beats and new musical cultures … Yes, Patternarium, by software […]

Anyone working in visuals is likely to develop a voracious appetite for video footage. So even though a phone will never be the optimal device for capture, having an always-present, lightweight, low-cost gadget is still a good thing. The problem is, with the exception of gadgets like Nokia’s premium N95, most phone’s camera features have […]

Ander sends us his creation, “Station,” a brilliant-looking MIDI controller built on the ucapps.de hardware platform. It could easily have qualified for the kinds of designs in the dreams competition – except he went ahead and made it. He filled it in with RGB LEDs, touch pads, and new SMD-based hardware. The impact of the […]

The Apple iPad has terrific, responsive multi-touch input, but for many, using it to control music would mean carrying an iPad and a computer. That’s a cheaper combination than using a JazzMutant Lemur with a computer, but it’s still two pieces. With a number of PCs gradually adding touch capabilities, it seems inevitable that integrated […]

As the iPad hits Europe and the world generally gets more time with the tablet, it continues to play host to new music software. I still have to wonder when some of its software design patterns – touch interfaces, big displays, and simplified, task-specific user experiences – will begin to influence other platforms. That is, […]

Nashville’s skyline, ringed in smoke from a fireworks show, in 2008. Photo (CC-BY) Jim Davenport. Nashville is a special place for music, and just as any natural disaster in the world hits musical communities, so, too, has recent flooding taken its toll on this American city. The NAMM summer convention, a top gathering for the […]