Wheels were never as big as grids. Well – in this context, anyway. The arc was the spiritual successor to the monome from designer Brian Crabtree – ultra-high resolution encoders for turning, with lights, as continuous as the monome grid was binary. But despite some poetic, meditative videos the monome project produced, the arc was […]

What do you get when you cross a tiny patch bay with total mayhem? Well, the bitRanger, apparently – a limited-run collaboration of Bastl Instruments and Casper Electronics (Peter Edwards), and possibly the most interesting surprise to come out of Moogfest this week.

It’s not so much how complex or simple an instrument is – it’s how much you can make it feel your own. We covered a series of updates last week to Novation’s Circuit hardware. This week, as part of a collaboration with Novation and their product specialists, we’ve put together an exclusive hands-on guide to […]

There’s a Eurorack craze on. Synth fever continues to spread. Instrument and software makers keep innovating. And there was reason to time all of this new gear madness to the beginning of this month – with not one but two massive trade shows, each a short Bahn ride away from one another in Germany. It’s […]

If it feels at times like everything has been done in sound synthesis, every new sound uncovered, then look to physical modeling for a way forward. This collection of techniques simulates the way sound is produced by acoustic objects. Applied Acoustics Systems (AAS) of Montreal has been one of the leaders in that field – […]

Now, following a century of recording and broadcast, where does musical performance go next? That challenges not just space or culture, but reimagining the place of time itself in the performance. Berlin is a fitting place to contemplate time. Once home to Albert Einstein, it helped incubate modern general relativity. At its southwest is Mendelsohn’s […]

SoundCloud has become a popular punching bag for the music press. The formula runs something like this: choose a screaming headline predicting the company’s doom, run some out-of-context business numbers and some negative quotes by an unnamed source, then (presumably) rake in clicks.

Let’s be clear: there should be no excuse for the press in our sphere, including this outlet, to treat International Women’s Day as a chance simply to talk about women in music. That obligation is year-round and daily, or we simply aren’t doing our jobs. But that’s not the origin of Women’s Day, anyway. The […]

By letting you get creative with audio, Ableton’s Simpler and slicing workflows have always opened up musical possibilities, and they got a lot more powerful in Live 9.5. But it could do even more. Developer Mark Egloff has released four clever Max for Live patches that let you slice without Push, chop in new ways, and more. 

With galaxies of new sounds out there, we return to certain hubs to point us in stimulating new directions. And Daniele has done it again. We’ve heard some of the upcoming noises from Holotone, a label whose name (no kidding) draws from particle physics, and we have reason to be excited. CDM’s Zuzana Friday goes […]