Novation’s SL series seeks to finally liberate us from manually assigning MIDI controllers to software, by automatically assigning its generous set of controls and displaying parameters on a lovely high-contrast onboard display. It could be just the thing for laptop-based performers, but a lot of us already have more keyboards than we need. If it’s […]

Apple’s Logic Pro and Express 7.2 were the first major music applications out the door with support for Intel Macs when they came out early this spring. As a result, though, Apple was a bit ahead of the curve: the Intel Mac ReWire SDK wasn’t available yet from Propellerhead, so Apple couldn’t include support for […]

Native Instruments’ hotly-anticipated solution for playing soft synths, cataloging sounds, and performing with software in the studio and onstage is here. KORE is now available in stores and shipping, with a street around US$500 (just under US$1500 buys you KORE plus Native’s insanely massive Komplete collection of instruments as part of a special intro). Native […]

Tonight here in New York, I’ll be presenting a free workshop on detecting and visualizing motion from camera inputs, which may be of interest not only for those of you eagerly anticipating the new Create Digital Motion site, but also anyone who’d like to use cameras as controllers for music. Full details after the jump. […]

I don’t care how great your touch typing skills are, when you’ve been drinking beer and jumping around on stage for an hour you’re going to need some light to help you trigger that next sample. Fortunately for laptop performers an increasing number of current machines are coming with integrated lighting solutions. Whether it’s the […]

Being behind the scenes on a website is great fun when everything is working. Site admins can have an overview of everything going on: Instantly seeing new comments, forum threads, incoming links, spam forum signups and reader feedback gives a faint feeling of superiority which is just delicious. With CDM2.0 we’ve tried to bring some […]

Ah, sweet, sweet mono: because two speakers is really too many. Part of the idea behind the Reason Drum Kits 2 was providing alternative sampled drums with different miking configurations for different sounds, so in that spirit, the Props are giving away a mono set to registered RDK users. (Hey, why not give it to […]

Now that the rest of our studio has gone digital, the approach to producing score for acoustic instruments has changed, too. Here’s a look at some of my favorite toys and tools for keeping music flowing. You’d have to be a true Luddite to argue that word processors are bad for writing. Blogs, perhaps, sometimes […]

Ever suffered garbled audio on Windows and couldn’t figure out why? Driver settings were likely to blame. Audio on the Mac is now essentially plug and play; I don’t remember the last time I even touched an audio driver setting other than to switch from one device to another (switching between devices also works better […]