Peter Kirn

Note 2.1, the iPad and iPhone app from Ableton, might not strike you as a big update. But new ways of working with Clips, Warp Markers, and a refined UI (Landscape Mode!) can make Note way more usable.

Now, we’ve lost Dolly Parton, which is a wake-up call to stand up for the values she stood up for—in music and in life.

Dennis DeSantis is known by a wide swath of the music production community as a face of education at Ableton, including the Making Music book. His new role is at the Eastman School of Music, where he's helming their new BM in Music Creation and Technology. Let's talk to Dennis about that program, and more broadly, how to think about music technology and education.

Reason Free brings some of the best of Reason to your DAW of choice, totally free. That includes instruments like the excellent Europa synth, effects like Audiomatic and Scream 4, and more. And there's especially good news for the Rack Extensions ecosystem: the full marketplace of third-party add-ons will run in the free plug-in, too.

From the makers of the utterly indispensable iPad app AUM (among other things), Luminate is a real-time visual environment for macOS and iOS, based on Apple’s Metal technology. You can approach this as a video synth or beat-synced animation tool for music, a shader playground with built-in library, editing, and live-coding — or find territory in between.

From the makers of the utterly indispensable iPad app AUM (among other things), Luminate is a real-time visual environment for macOS and iOS, based on Apple's Metal technology. You can approach this as a video synth or beat-synced animation tool for music, a shader playground with built-in library, editing, and live-coding -- or find territory in between.

KORG's phase8, engineered by the skunkworks office in Berlin, has found some visibility. But what does it mean as an actual electroacoustic instrument? What's it like to play? My Lemonade Stand video from Superbooth is out, along with others, so I thought I'd do some reflection.

US Labor Day looms. Summer days are waning. Sales are expanding. I am … barely awake because of ragweed/ambrosia pollen. It must be that time of year. Let me refocus my mind by sharing these sales with you quickly.

It's digitally controlled optical goodness: a humble Teensy translates analog knob turns into control of 4K displays, all built into beautiful mahogany enclosures and giant cranks. The result: elegant, precise fractals blossom out of 4K displays by literally tweaking the knobs on the units. Behold, The Light Herder!

Geert Bevin's terrific MIDI Tape Recorder precisely captures MIDI performances, including MPE, verbatim -- not the slightest variation in sound. v2.0 adds a host of new features, plus a standalone version alongside the existing AUv3 plug-in. It's low-level, direct CoreMIDI capture of what you played, exactly as you played it, with every expression intact. And it's and open source.