Open source music hardware has gone from promising concept to practical reality. It incorporates not just hacker-friendly kits, but end user products, from synths to controllers to effects. And now, for the first time, you can find one of the biggest names in the musical instrument industry on GitHub. KORG and littleBits promised they’d release […]

A USB-connected step sequencer with controller is now improved, and open source. The Digital Warrior is a boutique hardware controller hailing from Cyprus, combining a 16-voice, 32-step sequencer with four pots and two three-color endless encoders, all attached via a driverless USB connection. It’s capable of acting as a step sequencer/controller with any tools you […]

Whether you’re building an experimental effect or performance tool or writing the Next Big Thing in Mobile Apps, you might need some signal compression. Working in Pure Data (Pd), it’s easy to create patches that get unruly, especially once you add live audio input. For mobile developers, things get even worse: you have to make […]

Gestural input is already beginning to make Kinect look crude, offering new three-dimensional sensing approaches that combine low latency with precise gestures. That offers tremendous potential for new interfaces, and could in particular finally help solve the problem of how to intuitively work with three-dimensional interface concepts that don’t lend themselves to traditional touch and […]

We are Bhoreal from MID New Media Design on Vimeo. Grids are suddenly everywhere – in music control, but also in visuals and art. And they’re lighting up in RGB. But Bhoreal promises to do some things other grids aren’t. Whereas the monome is a truly beautiful, handmade and rare object, its rarity – by […]

A hackable, playable drum synth not afraid to sound digital: count us in. If you liked last week’s Dam-Drum 2.0, here’s yet another grungy beauty with four triggers and knobs. The frauAngelico also features nicely-low-fidelity drum samples, performance controls, and a built-in sequencer, just like Dam-Drum 2.0. It has some tricks up its own sleeve, […]

Knowledge on how to build dazzling new interfaces for music is spreading. And because musical performance depends on sharing knowledge and practice, that could have a transformative effect. Literally as I’m walking out the door to leave for a showcase of gestural performance in Berlin, I get a chance to look at this team from […]

Got a copy of Reaktor 5, perhaps via Komplete, or an instrument or effect based on Reaktor (running in Reaktor Player)? Got an iPad, and want to start touching sounds with OSC? Great! We’ve got some powerful tools and references that will make it easy to get going – and, for those who want to […]

Synthesizers can sometimes seem stuck in a groove, an endless, repeating parade of identical virtual analog synths. If you want something different, the Hadron Particle Synthesizer could fit the bill. It’s a synth. It’s a sampler. It’s an effect. It’s a synth that can morph from synth to sampler to effect. Based on granular synthesis, […]

Human perception is capable of astounding feats of sensitivity in localizing sound – it is very likely an evolutionary trait. Yet musicians rarely tread beyond simple stereo, perhaps because it’s tough to be creative in space without something that’s visual and intuitive, something that looks like what you’re hearing. Spatium is an extraordinary set of […]