Tag: Sequencer

Looking for the latest in fashion and technology? Check out these Electric Sexy Drum Pants. Their name is completely self explanatory, though the sexy part is questionable. This is a pair of pants with a drum controller pad in the crotch.

The Dato Duo combines a sequencer with a synthesizer. That’s no big deal, but what is different is that it is designed to be played by two people, making it perfect for musical collaborations. That’s a pretty cool feature, because two minds are often better than one when it comes to music.

Electronic musicians, here’s another new gadget you might just have to add to your arsenal of music-making toys. The Maschine Mikro is a moderately priced, but professional-grade music composition tool, designed for use in the studio or in live performances.

Digital audio workstations like Reason, Ableton Live and Apple’s GarageBand have made it relatively easy and cheap to make music. But even though these programs enable users to create tunes literally at the push of a button, their interface can be quite intimidating.

I still remember my first Apple computer. It was an Apple ][ with a whopping 16k of RAM and it didn’t even have a floppy drive. So the sounds that come to mind when I think of my old ][ are the squeals of program data loading from cassette tape.

Live audio-visual artist VJ Fader tipped me off about this cool visual interface he built for manipulating music and images in real-time. The faderTouch 3.0 isn’t just your run-of-the-mill sequencer. Nope, the unique portable device features an innovative rear-projection system that allows not only VJ, but his audience to watch the on-screen action.

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 of backlit buttons which can be used to create and display music sequences using the same sort of interactive interface you might find in a Monome or a Tenori-On.

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.

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.

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 “Face Visualizer” device, which shoots computer-controlled myoelectric charges through the wires.

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 you can play up to five sounds at once.

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.

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.

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, snare, hi-hat and cowbell) along the vertical axis, and beats along the horizontal.

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.

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.