At work in Renoise. Photo (CC) Federico Reiven [blog]. If you’re ready to show your skills creating digital music, we want your work. UPDATED! New contest entry page, new deadline (10/25): http://www.renoise.com/competitions/indamixx/ Plus tips, tracks, and more to give you additional inspiration: More with Less:”Efficient” Renoise Music Tracks and Tips Renoise, the "bottom-up" music production […]

It’s a strange and wonderful sampling instrument and live rig, capable of mangling and remixing live, synced to tempo. It’s proof that live computer performance doesn’t have to be in only one tool, or use one technique. It’s a ready-to-play, affordable instrument you can pick up and use. It’s a Reaktor patch gurus can pick […]

Nodes of musical events, arrayed onto virtual tracks, in Jakob Penca’s iLoveAcid sequencer. Take a weekend, and make something: that’s the challenge behind the Music Hack Day, which joins a growing phenomenon of events built around collective creation. (CDM held its own tangible interface hackday online, which I definitely hope to follow up soon!) Initiated […]

We’ve been beating the notion that Blender is “not just for static modeling” like a dead horse. (An animated dead horse, anyway.) But here’s yet another example, just because it’s cool – and because following the video gives you a basic sense of how to replicate the effects yourself. I’m curious: any visualists out there […]

It’s a Mackie mixer! It’s an audio interface! It’s both – and now it works with Pro Tools, despite the presence of an M-Audio or Digidesign logo anywhere on the case? The Mackie Onyx-i (note that it still has a hefty bulge below the back of the mixer). It’s been one of the few constants […]

Photo (CC) sleepydisco aka David Wood. In pointing out Behringer’s clone of Apple’s homepage, I may have left some things unclear. I was honestly surprised to find a number of people rushing to Behringer’s defense. I wasn’t trying to score cheap and easy points against the brand, but while venting frustration, I may have underestimated […]

Here’s someone who really, really loves Native Instruments’ B4 (II) software rendition of the Hammond B3 organ. The work of Markus Berger, this dead-ringer for a real B3 is actually a carefully crafted replica with elaborate MIDI control inside. The body is built by hand from cherry wood. Electronics were prototyped with the open source […]

Pens and pencils out – it’s time to call back those art skills and start drawing tags. Computer vision is all the rage again. One assumption seems to be that you’ll know the technology has evolved when markers – graphical identifiers that allow the camera to more easily spot control points in the image – […]

Blender, the insanely-powerful free 3D modeling software (and compositing software, and animation software, and game engine) is finally coming of age. And with it, so, too, are some of its plug-ins. Witness the sophistication of Pyppet, a “digital puppetry” plug-in for Blender. It allows you to take 3D models you’ve created and “perform” them in […]

Ready to evolve past the mouse and keyboard? Squidy helps bind together all the possible “natural” user interfaces by putting touch, ink, speech, and vision and tracking together in a powerful set of libraries. In other words, if you’ve got a novel interface, Squidy will help you not only make sense of it, but use […]