Every time Bjork drifts in a musical direction you don’t love, just wait. Her latest collaboration, Earth Intruders, with Timbaland producing, sounds utterly fantastic. Listen closely, and it’s also deeply disturbing, a bit like the violent lyrics of the early-century Italian Futurists (check them out if you don’t know them), but set in a terrifying, […]

Live visual instruments often lack that … certain something. Other than occasional oddities like the Livid Viditar, generally visual performance instruments just don’t have the panache of musical instruments. The solution: pack a bunch of hardware into the body of a white-lacquered grand piano, of course! (What, that seemed like a logical leap?) As seen […]

Native Instruments has tweaked their Elektrik Piano, finally adding Universal Binary support for Intel Macs. Unlike the Vokator and Spektral Delay updates, though, there are some new features for everyone to enjoy. The samples are the same, but everything else has gotten an update:

Imagine every single piece of gear you have on your wish list. Then imagine a baby grand piano, lacquered in white. Then imagine — you know, for the sake of practicality — you want to use the piano as a projection surface. And sound system. And then imagine you just mash all those ideas into […]

Next week in Brooklyn I’ll be collaborating again with MAKE:Magazine, Etsy, and Popular Science. This month’s theme: paper. Paper Projects Night [makezine.com] Even if you’re not in the New York area, if you’ve got a paper-based music project of some kind — instruments (working) made out of paper, interactive paper sculpture, whatever, drop me a […]

The tour with Bobby Flynn is hotting up now. Over the weekend we had two shows: In Brisbane and the Gold Coast, which meant that I spent about 8 hours of my weekend setting up and tearing down my rig, aligning projectors and screens, running cables, and running around. The tour map currently displays 16 […]

Shown above: Soundtrack Pro. But could we finally be seeing a glimpse of what’s coming in the next Logic? Contained in the Apple Final Cut Studio 2 announcement is a new version of Apple’s video-savvy sound editor, Soundtrack Pro. Unfortunately, Apple still hasn’t restored the a la carte, Soundtrack-only purchase option — you have to […]

We’ve already been exchanging some great tips for organizing your life, both musical and mundane. On the musical side, one of the most compelling software tools just got a big update today: Minim: Music Management for Musicians This elegant, very Mac-like utility organizes your songs, storing lyrics and audio/MIDI files and letting you track metadata […]

It’s already near-impossible to find a new computer that doesn’t have Vista already installed on it. As I’ve noted here, hardware driver compatibility can be a bumpy road. That’s the bad news. The good news is, application compatibility for Windows Vista is often not as big an issue. Music notation software, for instance, largely works, […]

The First Synth to… In case you missed it, Sonic State is running a video series on The Top 20 Greatest Synths of all time. About once a month they put up a video featuring three synths from the countdown. As you can imagine a few controversial pieces came up including the E-Mu Proteus, and […]