I love projects like this, especially when they involve MIDI. Check out “ARPIE” – a minimal, compact, hackable MIDI arpeggiator available as a kit. More details about ARPIE here
While guitarists enjoy a long history of manipulating their guitar sounds with guitar pedals, it’s nice to see a new type of gadget aimed at synth owners: the MIDIpal. This gadget can manipulate, tweak, filter, and generate MIDI streams to your heart’s content. For example, instead of pumping your synth through a delay/echo pedal, MIDIpal [ Continue ... ]
I recently picked up a very nice and lightweight pedal board made out of aluminum alloy tubing. This thing was a solid buy, comes with a softshell case, carrying strap, and some heavy duty two-inch velcro. As excited as I was to configure the order of my pedals and attach them to the pedalboard, one [ Continue ... ]
Apr 262012
When I got married in November 2009, my wife surprised me with a custom-made groom’s cake modeled after a Technics 1200 turntable (well, a 1210 actually). Easily the most badass cake I’ll ever eat. The cake was made by Luscious Layers in Chicago. (Click image for larger view)
Dec 062011
Musicians can be a difficult bunch of people to buy gifts for. After all, music itself is a highly subjective thing, so it should come as no surprise that musicians can be very selective about the musical instruments and accessories they use. I’ve tried to curate a list of instruments and accessories that cover a [ Continue ... ]
As an electronic musician, I always find it difficult to convey to a live audience what I’m actually doing behind my army of knobs and faders onstage. I mean, most people can relate the action of strumming a guitar to the sound that a guitar makes. There is an immediate and obvious connection between the [ Continue ... ]
Nov 022011
Often times, I feel that electronic music can feel a bit too rigid. One of the ways that I combat that robotic feel is by introducing tiny bits of imperfections in my programming. For example, most delay/echo plugins allow you to set the time between the delays in two ways, either synced notes (say, every [ Continue ... ]
Nov 022011
Looks like Korg is running a couple of nice rebates for this holiday season (Expires Dec.31, 2011).View the rebates here. Get a $20 rebate when you buy a Korg Monotron. Amazon and Zzounds carry the Monotron for $59.99 (both with Free Shipping), which brings your price down to $39.99. This popular little beast makes for [ Continue ... ]
Aug 192011
Back in 1988 or so, I started a hobby that filled most of my free time: I learned how to "mix", that is, I learned to DJ. The music I spun was mostly Chicago House Music and "New Wave" (as it was called, these days it is now referred to as Industrial, EBM, or synthpop). [ Continue ... ]
Aug 152011
Here is a five part series of tutorials for CoreMIDI app developers looking to get started with MIDI programming on iOS devices. The author (developer of the Little MIDI Machine app) has gone into great detail explaining the conceptual overview of MIDI development and best-practices relating to CoreMIDI for iOS. So far, only three parts [ Continue ... ]