Ableton alone can’t take you mobile, apart from bringing your MacBook running Live on the bus. But now KORG is ready to take your Ableton Live work on the road. Apart from adding native Live set export to their electribe and electribe sampler, the new versions of KORG’s iOS apps Gadget and iKaossilator do export, […]

The KORG volca sample is a fun-looking sample “sequencer” – it can play back, modify, and mangle pre-recorded samples in a step sequencer. But it requires a dedicated iOS app to do the actual sampling. That makes for a mixed bag, straight out of the gate. As KORG says: “The new volca lets you recapture […]

Akai’s Rhythm Wolf looks good. And its US$199 price impressed. But when we finally heard some noises out of it back in July, many were disappointed. And, as so often happens with music gear, we’ve mostly following a non-functioning unit at Musikmesse (certainly unfinished and possibly even damaged at the show). A new $200 drum […]

Jesse Abayomi, Ableton Product Specialist, is one heck of a virtuoso Push player. And you can learn something from him, too. Performance technology doesn’t always add to performance, it’s true. But when the machine and human are in sync, it’s beautiful. People can develop their musical chops and machine control chops at once – improve […]

As if Amsterdam Dance Event, the electronic music mecca of Europe and the world’s largest festival of its kind, weren’t packed enough already – there’s more. Tucked inside the festival we’ve got five days of programming devoted to spatial audio, on the 4DSOUND system. As part of ADE Sound Academy, itself focusing on threads between […]

cyrusrex + Baseck – #DBC611G-1D from Muff Wiggler on Vimeo. Pulsing, rattling, buzzing, quivering, the music of LA-based artist Cyrus Rex is a sumptuous feast of sound. Here’s a musician who connects massive arrays of gear, like some post-apocalyptic robot dream, and then makes it sound like it – rapid-fire machine reveries set in motion […]

Welcome to the 21st Century. One day, you’ve got no radio, and you’re dubbing music onto cassettes – if you’re rich. The next, you’re part of a wired global music phenomenon dancing to avant-garde electronic noises made by machines – and you’re learning how to make those sounds yourself for an audience back on the […]

Brian Crabtree, alongside partner Kelli Cain, nicely exemplifies a lot of this site’s raison d’être over the the past ten years. Artmaker and toolmaker are indistinct roles; they’re both flipsides of the act of making. The monome, the invention for which Brian is best known, is at first blush nothing more than a box of […]

The Riser, the new synth from German developer AIR, isn’t shy about what it’s for. This is a synth to make rises and drops aimed squarely at EDM fans. Dial up presets, turn some knobs, and sync up absurd rhythmic builds, like pumping chart-topping performance-enhancing drugs into your music. What makes it interesting is, it’s […]

Convincing musicians to make use of sound is easy. And electronic musicians are even content with stunningly-complex interfaces, in exchange for deep control of sound. But what about everyone else? Users on mobile are certainly uploading sounds. Part of the intense interest in SoundCloud even outside music and audio audiences is simple to explain: the […]