CDM World Tour: catch up with Mike and Liz in Chicago, and Peter and Jaymis in Perth and Brisbane (Australia)!

Dorkbot Chicago

Any CDM-ers in the Chicagoland area are most warmly invited to this months Dorkbot at Deadtech, 3321 W. Fullerton Ave., on Wednesday at 8pm for food, drink, and brain-swelling information regarding micro-sampling and alternative musical controllers like QWERTY keyboards, game joysticks, and bicycles.

This week’s presenters will be Liz McLean-Knight and Michael Una, contributors to CDM.

See you there!

ByteMe, Perth; CDM Me, Brisbane

Australia is CDM’s second home, land of crazy creative contributors and designers, and birthplace of the CDM logo and graphic identity. And now I get to go there.

First up is an epic visualist festival in Perth, 11/30 – 12/9. (Jaymis and I arrive 12/2.)

ByteMe Festival

Okay, odds are, you aren’t anywhere near Perth, as it’s supposedly the most isolated city on the face of the Earth. But on the off chance that you are in/near Perth, you’ll definitely want to come out for this one. Visualists like Artificial Eyes and Jean Poole, not to mention festival organizers VJZoo, join a convergence of visual artists from game development to experimental film and motion graphics and special effects. I’m on a panel Wednesday night, but mostly Jaymis and I will be hanging around covering the festival and chatting with cool people. And we get to see whether our first in-person meetup creates a geek matter-antimatter temporal singularity.

12/10 – 12/14 we return to Brisbane, and odds are far likelier that you live there. There’s talk of doing some kind of music event in Brisbane. If you’re interested in helping us organize even a casual meet-up, Brisbanites, let me know. -PK

Ableton has booked a huge lineup for the NAMM show here in Anaheim, California. I’ll be talking today, Thursday, at Noon about how to abuse Live’s warp features and control Live with a Max/MSP/Jitter video input from a webcam. (Say hello if you make it; I hope to have tutorials on both these topics soon.) But I’m just as interested in the rest of the lineup . . .

Shawn Pelton and laptop beatboxer virtuoso Kid Beyond will hold clinics. My colleagues Jim Aikin and Craig Anderton will hold power tips sessions on Friday and Saturday. Ableton will provide tutorials on getting started, DJing, and performing. At the M-Audio booth, DJ Sasha, Junkie XL, and Junior Sanchez will join Ableton co-founder/CEO Gerhard Behles and M-Audio’s Robert Hanson to talk about the future of DJing. (I have to admit, I’m more interested in the future of music performance, not just DJing, but still interested to hear what they have to say.) Hey, we should do these kinds of things more often, outside of NAMM. See the full PDF schedule.

If you’re here in Anaheim, be sure to stop by, and if not, with Ableton’s help hope to put as much of this online as possible.

And in the meantime, enjoy these juicy 3D renderings of Ableton’s booth. I’m sure it can’t possibly look this good in person, especially once we clog it up with me and bunches of other NAMM-goers, so don your VR helmet and make believe! (More images after the break. Don’t think they work with 3D glasses, unfortunately.)

I’m about to go on the radio to talk to the Inside Mac Radio show. If you’re in the San Jose area, tune in 1220 AM between 2:30 and 3:00 PM today (Saturday). If not, downloadable MP3 and Podcast will be available shortly. But then, if you read this blog, you probably already know what I’m going to say.

And if you found this because you’re listening, send a quick comment (registration required, sorry) or write an email and say hello!

Now off on my whirlwind travels, including a day in Boston at Macworld Expo. For a glimpse of bloggers complaining about how boring the show is, see TUAW. But say hi if you’re at my session! More on the iUke and other things if I can post . . . then boatloads of content stacked up for next week. Cheers! -Peter, editor-in-chief

Reader Chad points out that, among video coverage of the likes of Al Franken and Luke/Owen Wilson, you can watch random video clips of our 'How to Trick Out Your iPod' panel (hi QT / lo QT)
Edited in, how shall we say, an unusual way — mostly random bits of me
talking and curiously completely omits Chris Breen (and most of Francis
Preve) — but I'm told they were having camera trouble.

And you get to watch Fran express mock wonder when I bring up the concept of 'RADIO.'