Clean is overrated. If you’re ready for a little digital dirt in your synth life, powered by the open-source Arduino hardware, Marc Nostromo’s Squealer is for you. Built atop the wonderful, Arduino-based Pocket Piano kit by Critter and Guitari, it’s a full-blown, simple, digitally-gritty synthesis engine. You get a monosynth, some fixed waveforms, a resonant […]

Novation’s Launchpad, its affordable (

OpenCV powers a multitouch interface, built in openFrameworks. Project by / photo (CC) Todd Vanderlin. When Thanksgiving rolls around, OpenCV will be one of the gifts for which I’ll be thankful. OpenCV is a “computer vision” library, capable of tracking motion and analyzing images, but generally useful as a pixel-crunching video library for many tasks. […]

An 8-bit Black Mage graces a very special Jack-o-Lantern. Photo (CC) Kevin Meehan / Coldways. If 16 bits spoil the mood of your All Hallow’s Eve, and you need some chips with your treats, the good peoples of the chip music community are hear to make sure the celebration of the visiting dead are properly […]

The veil between the living and dead is growing thin, and I… uh, have some free music for you. Sorry, it turns out I don’t have a clever lead for this story, and my segue makes no sense. So let’s get to it! Friend of the Site Liz McLean Knight aka Liz Revision aka Quantazelle […]

Photo (CC) Brendan Dawes. It’s round, it’s mechanically-resistant, it’s tangible, it supports multi-touch and gestures. Yep – it’s the turntable, and outdoing it would mean reinventing the wheel, literally. And so it is that more than a few Ableton fans have wondered how they might work vinyl into their software axe of choice. Ableton and […]

“Drum Machines Have No Soul.” Wait — “Drum Machines Have Soul, Ableton Has No Soul.” Photo: Leo-setä. Given a choice between boring and crazy, I always choose crazy. After all, craziness is part of the artistic persona. So bring it on. It’s been a while since we had a celebrity saying things that didn’t really […]

Commercial developers are now releasing music creation apps for mobile game systems, in the form of the KORG DS-10 for Nintendo DS and Rockstar’s Beaterator for PSP. But some of the best ideas still come from the homebrew community. What’s most impressive about ToneSynthDS is not so much what it does as its interface, fitting […]

I think that live streaming will play a big part in the future of music performance. Having spent an entire year of my life driving and flying around just to be able to reach new audiences in a single country, it pains me to think how comparatively simple it would have been to organize streaming […]

Ron from Indamixx has a mobile music making setup for a reason – it can run on Venice Beach, literally. Netbook + Renoise means this rig is a capable music production workstation. It’s nearly Election Day again here in New York. But it’s also Musical Election Day worldwide for the Efficient Music Competition with CDM, […]