sequencer on technabob...

For digital musicians who have longed for a performance controller for Ableton Live, you’ll be totally stoked to check out this cool new control pod that lets you interact with Ableton Live in real time.

Designed as a collaboration between Ableton and Novation, the new Launchpad is a dedicated controller that offers a 64-button grid…

Here’s a cool little PC program for creating ambient electronic music. And it sure looks purty while it’s doing it.

The setting for Andreas Illiger’s Microsia is inside of a virtual “plant cell” of a leaf. As you move your cursor around, you touch “cellular particles” which will be used as triggers for the ambient…

Want to do something creative with color-changing LEDs? This new programmable LED module might be just what the doctor ordered.

The BlinkM from ThingM (I just love saying that) is a compact module that contains an ultra-bright RGB LED and a microcontroller that you can program from your computer.

You’ll need an Arduino I/O board…

What do you get when you take four of your closest friends, attach electrodes to their faces, and then fire off small jolts of electricity to the beats of electronica? Video genius, I say.

Tokyo electronic artist / programmer / composer /DJ Daito Manabe connected each of his four friends to the business-end of his…

Already sick of playing the piano on your iPhone? Maybe it’s time to hit the drums.

Developer MooTheCow has created this homebrew drum machine application called “Drummer” that runs on the iPhone or iPod Touch.

Drummer can play up to 15 unique audio samples (one on each finger touch pad), and takes advantage of multi-touch capabilities,…

So what happens when you take the system sounds from Windows XP and Windows 98 and carefully arrange them in a music sequencer? Something pretty unexpected, I’d say. This is truly a case where the whole is definitely greater than the some of its parts.

UK electronic music hacker Robbi-985 managed to take the usually…

This music sequencer takes the same basic interface concept as the ball bearing sequencer I recently showed you, and makes it deliciously chewable. Instead of shiny metal spheres, this sequencer uses a bunch of colorful candy-coated gumballs to make a beat you can dance to.

 
Designed by Hannes Hesse, Andrew McDiarmid and Rosie Han…

Here’s an interesting new tangible interface design for a music sequencer. Rather than using an array of buttons or a 2-dimensional control screen on a computer, this one generates rhythmic patterns using ball bearings.

Sequences are composed by placing the metal orbs in a grid of receptor cups which represent the different rhythm tracks (kick,…

What’s got 8 tentacles and the brains of a Nintendo GameBoy? It’s an 8-bit music maker’s dream, that’s what. Electronic musician Joey Mariano (aka “Animal Style“) took an old GameBoy Color system and built a custom controller for it that uses 8 individual foot pedal controllers to jam out on the device.

Using a series…

I recently came across this rather cool user interface for a music sequencer called the ReactOgon. Looking like something you’d find on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, the instrument uses a large tabletop multi-touch interface to create music sequences in real time.

The creators of the ReactOgon call it a “chain reactive performance arpeggiator”,…

Australia’s Mungo Enterprises has engineered the “Infinite Horizon“, a concept device capable of programatically generating modern dance/trance music with, literally, the push of a button. Just press the BIG RED BUTTON, and out comes a track.

There are a handful of additional controls to influence the direction of tracks, such as when to kick in bass,…