Electronic Music & Recording Gear

Interesting look at the history and significance of the Akai MPC, with an emphasis on hip-hop, but it also looks at some experimental stuff.
Current via Crate Kings

At oobject, you can vote for the worst keytar video ever, and see some fun keytar videos in the process:
This list is a warning reminder of what people really look like when they play Rock Band. It features keytars from their earnest debut to parody, to some kind of post-post-modern resolution with self aware but [...]

Jack DeYoung has posted his take on the Weirdest Guitars In The World, and after taking a look, all I can say is that guitarists are a pretty conservative bunch.
You haven’t seen weird, until you’ve seen some of the bizarre synth contraptions that keyboardists and electronic musicians have come up with.
In fact, some of these [...]

David Battino has documented a boot-up hack that lets you create 4-bar loops with the Korg Kaossilator:

While holding the Tap and Loop Rec buttons, slide the power switch from Standby to On. The display willl show DLY (delay) to confirm you’re in bufferless mode.
Release the buttons.
Hold down Loop Rec and Tap again; this puts the [...]

In this Big City Music demo, the Analogue Systems RS300 CV/MIDI Eurorack module is used to take a control voltage and convert it into MIDI messages:
In this case we’re using the Analogue Systems RS35 External Processor module to convert the Moog Cherry Etherwave theremin audio into a pitch control voltage. That control voltage in turn [...]

It’s 8/8/08 - so Experimentalists Anonymist has pointed out that it’s 808 day - a day to celebrate one of the two most important drum machines in electronic music, the Roland TR-808 Computer Controlled Rhythm Composer.
The Roland TR-808 Rhythm Composer was one of the first programmable drum machines. Introduced by the Roland Corporation in late [...]

 

 Roland TR-808 Sounds [0:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Alfred Darlington, aka Daedelus, charts the evolution of his love of electronic sounds and gives us a private performance on his famous future toy, the Monome.

This video, from the latest issue of Computer Music, demos several Monome applications, including mlr, flin and Stretta’s Press Cafe.

TASCAM has announced three recording bundles designed to offer everything you need, besides your computer, to record high-quality audio.
TASCAM’s hitting several different price points, to appeal to different budgets and meet different requirements:

The Track Pack T1 combines the US-122L audio interface with a dynamic microphone, headphones and Cubase LE4 recording software. Track Pack T1 sells [...]

Hack A Day has a nice DIY project tutorial on making a simple digital synthesizer.
The final result is not much of a synthesizer - but it’s cheap and it makes some noise:
This simple guide will show you how to build a digital synthesizer that generates and manipulates square waves. Your synthesizer will have one oscillator, [...]