Dick Pountain /Idealog 368/ 05 Mar 2025 04:38
I’m literally a one-man-band, by which I mean that I make music using an assembly of electro-acoustic gadgets that permit me to do without the collaboration of other human musicians. (I hasten to add that those gadgets do not include drums or cymbals strapped to my legs, like the blokes who used to entertain cinema and theatre queues).
I love music, from a wide range of genres, and I’m picky about quality reproduction for other peoples’ music I enjoy. I’m far from being a hi-fi nut (and indeed quite sceptical of the excesses they indulge in) but I do run a nice-sounding system based around a Fosi Class D amplifier connected to vintage British speakers, which sucks in music via wire from a vinyl turntable or CD player, and via Bluetooth from my Chromebook, Samsung tablet and smartphone. (I can also listen to those via Bluetooth headphones and earbuds). It would be handy to incorporate the sound from my Panasonic smart TV via Bluetooth too, rather than SPDIF, but the brute refused to pair with my amp so I bought a tiny cheap Bluetooth sender/receiver from Amazon and plugged that into the set’s headphone socket. It worked fine but the cursed TV then hogged the Bluetooth and had to be unpaired before any other source could use it, so I’ve learned to live with its (actually quite acceptable) Dolby sounds, and so now had a Bluetooth dongle to spare.
I tried plugging this into my various electric guitars via an adapter, to play them wirelessly: it works but is totally unusable due to latency. Meanwhile in another corner of my music room stands the very analog, one-man-band conglomeration through which I play those guitars: two acoustic, two electric, one bass switched into a small Marshall amplifier that’s encrusted with five effects pedals and a small Zoom drum machine. This is all connected via standard ¼” jack cables, and It’s only taken barely 15 years to arrive at a satisfactory topology, the brainstem of which is a 3-channel passive audio mixer, barely bigger than a Yorkie Bar, which the late-lamented Maplin emporia used to flog for £20 (I bought two). One channel is taken up by the drum machine, a second one by the multi-effects box which the other instruments go through, so one channel remained empty and it was simply irresistible to plug in the Bluetooth dongle. Paired with my Samsung tablet, a whole new world opened up...
Among the pedals is an Akai Headrush echo/looper I bought 20 years ago after seeing KT Tunstall play one on the telly – this lets me store and replay short clips of music and overdub them with more layers. By logging on to Spotify on the Samsung I can play any tune and store a chunk of it into the Headrush to play over and add to – great fun with slices of Bill Frisell or Julian Lage, or Ron Carter bass riffs. I also have Volcanic Mobile’s MIDI Sequencer for creating backing clips using its piano or brass sounds, and also my own Algorhythmics programmatic system (which I’ve described here before). I can compose parts using BandLab, a popular free Android DAW, with sampled instruments other than guitars. In fact any software that can make a noise on my tablet, phone or Chromebook can now be routed into my guitar amp and chunks saved and looped to play over – which even includes my various voice synths and text-to-speech readers, or mic recordings.
However what I really wanted was to create original soundscapes for use as backdrops to improvise over, an ability that I discovered quite by chance in Pegboard (https://semitune.com/pegboard/). Its publishers Semitune describe this app as “an advanced mobile polyphonic wavetable synthesizer with a virtual analog filter, 12 standard modules and 6 effects modules.” It’s driven by two separate wavetable oscillators that you can customise via a graphic interface in which you drag envelope shapes and make them evolve over time in complex ways for really rich sounds. Play them back via an onscreen keyboard, either piano-style or an array of accordion-style touch buttons whose layout you can alter to represent a chosen scale or mode. Pegboard isn’t a sequencer so you can’t save whole tunes, just the sounds themselves, but that’s perfect for my purpose, to play short phrases into my looper (it can also work as a MIDI controller, a feature I’ve yet to master).Pegboard is free to play with but you must upgrade to Pro for £18.99 to save sounds, which I very quickly did. Think of my guitar as a pen and Pegboard sounds as washes I draw over to make sound pictures for my one-man band’s audience of one…
[You can see Dick Pountain’s one-man-band rig at https://www.facebook.com/share/v/15xD1dS1UD/ ]
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