myspace can be a good way to draw some attention to your music. it's how i got my first minz release. and being incredibly smart, it took me only 2 years to figure out that it can also be a good way to follow other artists and labels. just add labels and artists to your friends and make sure you receive updates about them. i've only selected to be updated about added tracks and blog posts, but that gives me a healthy daily dose of news. the problem is... myspace looks and sounds crap. enter soundcloud.

if you want to know whose shoulders we're standing on in electronic dance music, you should watch the 2001 channel four documentary 'pump up the volume'. although the 3-part documentary is about the history of house music in the uk, almost half of it is dedicated to what happened in chicago and detroit before 1987.

of all the software updates that got announced at namm, two stand out for me. and the title tells you just which two.

the more i learn about the upcoming max for live, the happier i get. it seems you can indeed load any max/msp patch. and even jitter. probably with a bit of adaptation, but a conversion tool shouldn't take long. the promised integration i raved about yesterday, might extend even further than i thought. through the use of custom max objects, it will allow people to use open source stuff like processing or ruby inside max for live. some of these objects have already been created for max and no doubt people will be inspired to adapt them for max for live or create new objects where there are none.

i never had much interest in the annual namm music trade show, but yesterday i was glued to cdm's twitter feed for a minute-by-minute update. i blame native instruments, who had me bursting with curiosity about their 3 new products. luckily, i didn't have to add any of those to my wishlist. i can see the fun of maschine, but mpc style programming just doesn't fit the way i make music right now. what got me excited though, was all of ableton's news.

a softsynth i use a lot is the korg polysix, an emulation of the 1981 6-voice polyphonic syntesizer by the same name. it's a pretty basic synth, and the range of sounds that can be coaxed from it is limited. but what it does, it does rather well. i made a free preset bank for it, and i couldn't resist to also write a little personal review.