wax&wires

If you’ve got an iLok or are a registered Line 6 user, you can snag POD Farm for free through the month of September.

Find out what Reason patches some of today’s top artists and producers are using!

Indaba is a DAW that works with Java within your internet browser. We’ve all seen a million little audio flash apps, but this is the first browser-based Java audio tool that shows a bit more promise because of the high quality audio, non-destructive editing, and integrated social element.

From the makers of GlitchDS, the awesome little music making app for the Nintendo DS, comes Glitch-Sequencer for Mac and PC. Check out this video of GlitchDS fed into Reactor with RepeaterDS.

“Record” is here. I caught up with Gerry Basserman, Propheads’ director of North American Markets at the Reason Producer’s Conference this past Saturday to get a quick video snippet for you all.

If you’ve been eagerly awaiting Plogue’s ChipSounds, you’ll be enthused to know that De La Mancha has several free VSTs for chip emulation.

Experimental Scene has released a cool little program called DarkWave Studio, designed for the composition, synthesis and recording of music.

Are you everybody’s designated musicman, the default iPod DJ at every party you go to, as if there’s some unspoken rule that you have the most complete and party-ready song library on your laptop? I’ve fallen into that role more than a few times, and if you care enough about music to read this tiny [...]

Everybody by now should be caught up on Microsoft Songsmith. If you’re not, you can take a gander at our post from a few weeks ago, Microsoft Releases Songsmith, Accompaniment Generator. So after it was announced, it was only a matter of time before somebody took a famous solo vocal and fed it into the innovative program [...]

Chip Sounds presents an easy way to get old school 8-bit sounds in your music, without the need to own an arsenal of vintage gaming machines or know how to circuit bend.

I’m excited!
So I’m still on Live 6 since I didn’t see anything in Live 7 that made me want to make the jump. Live 8 has wooed me over, and the update definitely earns the version change from 7 to 8.
There are far too many features for me to write an in depth take on [...]

I’ve been waiting for this one. Back when I had a G5 tower, it was no sweat to find DSP cards to offload the processing of really solid plug-ins onto a card instead of the host CPU. While there have been products that tried to so similar things on laptops through firewire units and such, [...]

Look what Guitar Hero started! As of this week, you can get celebrity music lessons from Apple, and now Microsoft has released a program that generates musical accompaniment with nothing more than your singing to guide it. The market for entry-level consumer music making tools is ever expanding, and I like it!
Songsmith is a PC [...]

Apple announced the new iLife ‘09 yesterday at MacWorld. One of the biggest features, from a musician’s standpoint, is the new GarageBand ‘09. In addition to some extra stomp boxes and amp models, GarageBand ‘09 includes the new GarageBand Lesson Store. This new feature allows users to purchase music lessons from popular artists, allowing users to learn how to play some of the artists’ most renowned songs via very slick and well-produced HD video.

Apparently, Apple didn’t get the memo about iVideoSongs.com, or perhaps decided to partner with them, as their products are eerily similar. Though stealing it’s name from what has become an Apple trademark, iVideoSongs did beat Apple to the punch with artist video music lessons…