FANTASY FOOT-PEDAL

Dick Pountain/Idealog 275/01 June 2017 15:44

I'm sitting at my desk typing the sentence "I've never really been a gadget person" with a waist-high pile of old gadget boxes glowering in my peripheral vision. Nevertheless I stand by my assertion: many of them are years old and relate to photographic rather than computer equipment. I don't see a therapist so can't answer why I keep them: initially rational (might be faulty and need returning), eventually quasi-rational (may become collectors' item so keep the box). By and large though I'm really not. I upgrade my mobile and laptop around once a decade. I have all the camera gear I'll ever need. I don't go in for smart watches, fitbits, digital recorders or the like. Except. I just bought two gadgets to do with music making. Sorry.

In my last column I explored the way modern digital tools affect various creative endeavours, and proposed that a human being always needs to be in the iterative enhancement loop to make aesthetic judgements about when to stop. Well, since then I've taken this argument a few steps further, assisted by my two new gadgets, namely a guitar looper pedal and an Akai MPKmini keyboard. To take the latter first, this keyboard connects to my Lenovo laptop which runs Ableton Live.

Anyone who creates EDM (electronic dance music) will have heard of Ableton, a production-and-performance system in which, as well composing tracks, you can also arrange and perform them like a DJ. I'm not producing EDM myself, but as I've described here before, my interest lies in experimental algorithmic music. Playing the MIDI files my system generates through the Microsoft GS Wavetable synthesiser bundled with Windows is good enough during composition, but its instrument voices aren't really good enough for public consumption, so my more successful efforts I post-compose in Ableton using its superior instruments, and also some AWE32 SoundFonts.

Ableton is a very clever program, developed partly at the University of Berlin using advanced "granular synthesis" theory: it's enormously flexible, mixing sampled audio seamlessly with MIDI, changing tempos while maintaining pitch, its "warp"engine syncs different clips automatically, and much, much more. However it's also one of those mega-programs like PhotoShop, or the 3D animation program Maya, for which a mere human lifespan is too short to find all its (literal) bells and whistles, let alone use them all. I originally chose it because its user interface does *not* imitate a rack full of brushed aluminium knobs and dials: I'm not a sound engineer so that stuff isn't home to me.

My algorithmic music is getting steadily more capable, now displaying far greater rhythmic and dynamic complexity. Shortish passages can sound alarmingly like some six-armed Indian deity playing the piano, but it still has difficulty with long-range structure: pieces longer than three or four minutes tend to betray their mechanical origin. Dividing the code into shorter movements, generated as separate MIDI files, is one way around this, but another is to intervene myself. So thank you FaceBook for showing me that Akai mini ad. For £60 this little beauty, with its 25 keys, 8 pads and 8 knobs is just perfect. I can play a MIDI file in Ableton and overdub parts of it using the keyboard, but better still, map the whole piece onto the Akai so that each key I press sounds a whole multi-instrument phrase in perfect time. When combined with the Akai's built-in arpeggiator this makes for terrifying displays of orchestral pseudo-virtuosity that I may one day inflict on the unsuspecting public if they don't behave themselves.

And what about my other gadget? That belongs in the curious domain between the analog and the digital, a tiny Donner looper pedal that records two separate tracks of guitar of 10 minutes duration via a foot button. The guitar rig I've built up over the years incorporates a 10W Marshall practice amp with a variety of effects, a vintage Zoom digital drum machine and a micro-mixer, all feeding into this new looper. I can now generate some unfeasibly complicated algorithmic/orchestral backing track in Ableton, output it to a WAV file on my tablet and plug that into the mixer, then play live guitar over it. Or I can snitch a few seconds of bass from my favourite Dave Holland album on Spotify, into the looper, and put some drums onto it played with my fingers on the Zoom's pads. The looper has built-in reverse and speed-up effects so I can pretend to be in one of Bill Frisell's great trios, if only for a few minutes. Virtual Reality isn't the only way of using digital technology to live in a make-believe world, and you don't bump into things so often in a sound world...