Whoa. I was recording a great-sounding hardware synth last night and noticed that my USB audio interface was picking up some digital grunge. Today I tried using the Mac G5's built-in audio input instead. Not only was the sound cleaner, I found could crank the input latency down much farther before getting glitches. For years, the computer audio mantra has...

Summer NAMM-watcher Mark Vail just sent me a link to the gorgeous TonePort KB37 from guitar-processor manufacturer Line 6. In fact, it's a guitar processor with keys and a 24-bit USB audio interface. In a world of square, gray MIDI controllers, this guy really stands out. And the audio I/O looks pretty flexible. You get two mic inputs with...

Mix magazine has an intriguing interview with Gina Fant-Saez, who has written a number of popular articles for the O’Reilly Digital Media site. (Her controversial tutorial about setting up a laptop music production system, "The Ultimate Portable Studio," has been the #1 Google hit for "portable studio" for the last year.) In the Mix interview, Gina shares more details about...

For almost a century, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov's Principles of Orchestration has shown composers the secrets of arranging music for orchestral instruments. Thanks to Garritan's new Flash-based version, you can now see and hear the examples play back for free. About a year ago, composer Greg Moore recommended I check out the work sound designer Gary Garritan was doing, including his...

Talk about happy coincidences: About the time my analog desk phone died last month, Skype made computer-to-telephone calling free. (Computer-to-computer Skype calls have always been free.) Because I'd bought the old phone specifically to work with a telephone tap, I started looking into ways to record Skype-based interviews. I found an easy and inexpensive solution called Ecamm Call Recorder. My...

Visionary architect Buckminster Fuller reportedly liked to jumpstart his creativity by grabbing the magazine at the top right corner of the newsstand rack, no matter what the subject was. I'm trying the same experiment this week by attending O'Reilly's decidedly non-musical Where 2.0 Conference. Where 2.0 is all about digital map-making. The stars here are the creators of Google Earth...

I just heard a fascinating podcast interview with Michael Chorost, who had a computer implanted in his skull to regain his hearing. Chorost went completely deaf shortly after he completed his Ph.D. in English, and he speaks eloquently about the experience of losing an organic sense and gaining an electronic facsimile. Bionic hearing, it seems, is impressionistic. I was...

Want to show off your music and graphics skills? Check out CME’s UF Design contest. CME is a new manufacturer with some innovative music-technology ideas. We covered its Mobiltone U-Key keyboard (based on a cell-phone synth chip) in our 2006 NAMM Show report. The UF-series keyboard controllers are more upscale, with metal casings and cool features like motorized faders....

Even if you don't DJ, knowing the tempo of your music collection opens creative doors. For example, slide shows come alive when you synchronize the slide durations to the tempo of the background music. (See my tempo sync tutorial.) And playlists seem to flow better when you group songs by tempo. I'd been eyeballing the BPM field in iTunes...

BBC News recently ran a wonderful article on the tritone, beginning, “A new film about the history of heavy metal highlights the so-called Devil’s Interval, a musical phenomenon suppressed by the Church in the Middle Ages.” A tritone, as you probably know, is the interval from C to F#, which spans three whole tones. Subjectively, it has an unresolved...