MIDI Polyphonic Expression, once considered exotic, is now in favorite tools like Ableton Live 11, Xfer Serum, and Arturia Pigments. So where to get started? Our friends at Sensel just made a handy free preset pack.

The post Here’s a free pack to get MIDI Polyphonic Expression under your fingertips appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

It's a procedural visuals dream team. It's what would have happened if Darth Vader and Leia actually teamed up and overthrew the Emperor. (Come on, you know you wondered.) And if you're curious why, there's a free talk.

The post Chocolate and peanut butter for visuals: Houdini and TouchDesigner, in a free talk today appeared first on CDM Create Digital Music.

Oscar-winning Japanese musician says he is undergoing treatment and ‘hoping to make music for a little while longer’

Oscar-winning Japanese composer and pop musician Ryuichi Sakamoto has been diagnosed with bowel cancer.

In a message on his website, the former Yellow Magic Orchestra member said “the news was disheartening, but thanks to the excellent doctors I met, the surgery I underwent was a success. I am now undergoing treatment.”

(Ninja Tune)
The Northern Irish bloggers-turned-DJs-turned-producers kick over the dinner-party table with an album that matches the scope and ambition of 90s dance artists

The progression from record collector to DJ to artist is a common one in dance music: the difference with Northern Irish duo Bicep is they have done it all in public. They first emerged 12 years ago among a plethora of late-noughties bloggers devoted to digging up musical obscurities of varying hues and presenting them to the public. Their Feel My Bicep blog began as a means of keeping in touch with record-collecting friends from Belfast who’d gone off to university. Within a couple of years, it was attracting 100,000 visitors a month, and begat a DJing career, a Rinse FM radio show, a record label, a succession of remixes and productions and, ultimately, a deal with Ninja Tune, the venerable dance label run by Coldcut, who presumably recognised kindred spirits.

The early posts on their blog are long gone, but you get a flavour of its eclecticism from a mammoth 67-hour-long Bicep playlist on Spotify, where Angie Stone rubs shoulders with Aphex Twin and Odyssey, and the Ohio Players coexist with 90s house, punishing Basic Channel techno, drum’n’bass and the new wave of jazz. It doesn’t feel a million miles removed from the kind of eclectic musical connections Coldcut made on their celebrated 70 Minutes of Madness mix album and Solid Steel radio show in the mid-90s.