Anachronistic Album of the Year 2011: The Mouse and the Mask

Posted on by

In October, I replaced my venerable Motorola Droid (the Original Gangsta model) with a new Droid Bionic. Since the switch, I have been constantly ridiculed by Brak—you remember Brak, from Space Ghost Coast to Coast and The Brak Show. This is going to take a minute to explain, and it will require discussion of Bluetooth, Android, cartoons, music, and the nature of open source software. If that’s too much for you, stop right here and just go buy The Mouse and the Mask by Danger Doom. It’s the best album of 2011.

For the last year I’ve been using Bluetooth headphones (model: Jaybird SB2) with my phone. That may seem excessive, but before you accuse me you should take a good look at the fact that I listen to music constantly. I’m telling you I got sick of the cable becoming temporarily disconnected, which pauses the music player, requiring me to pull the phone out and unpause it several times a day, usually while huffing up the stairs from a subway platform. These wireless headphones never come unplugged, and they have convenient transport controls (play, pause, skip forward/back, volume) on one of the earpieces. Anyway, shortly after I bought the Droid Bionic, the Google Music app started malfunctioning in a highly unexpected manner: approximately one out of ten times when I press a button the headphones (e.g. pause), my phone starts playing the 2005 Danger Doom record, The Mouse and the Mask. Most frequently, it’s the beginning of “El Chupa Nibre,” the first track on the album, which opens with Brak’s taunt “Why did you buy this album? I don’t know why you did, you’re stupid.”

Let me elaborate a little more on what this taunt has come to mean to me. I listen to a lot of weird music. I frequently listen to albums I don’t even like, because someone recommended I check out a new artist, or because I feel a need to fill-in an underexplored area of my musical interest. So I might be listening to something great (these days that might be Bright Eyes’ The People’s Key) or something I don’t like much at all (sorry, Sufjan Stevens’ The Age of Adz). And then, right there in the middle of a song I press a button on my headphones and one of three things happens:

  1. My phone obeys my command and does what I ask
  2. My phone switches the song to something from The Mouse and the Mask, usually “El Chupa Nibre” but almost as frequently it is “Vats of Urine”
  3. My phone decides to cooperate with my request, but also plays a something from The Mouse and the Mask, right on top of whatever I’m listening to

So more than once I’ve been confronted with a pretty valid criticism—why did I buy that album? I am stupid. I deleted the Sufjan Stevens record from my phone. And then sometimes two songs play simultaneously, and all of a sudden it’s Amateur iPod DJ Night hosted by DJ Such-N-Such, former roommate of a girl who knew a guy who used to roadie for Girl Talk. Great mash-up. You make me want to turn down my stereo. Pump down the jams.

I have two points to make. First, The Mouse and the Mask is the best record of 2011. Yes, I realize it did not come out in 2011. I first heard it in 2011. It’s better than everything that came out in 2011—I can say this with some confidence, because I have listened to it (or at least part of it) every day now for months on end. It’s better than the Adele record, better than the Kanye/Jay-Z record, better than Foster the Hoople. Really the only 2011 record that comes close is David Lowery’s The Palace Guards. Fantastic. If you could convince me that The Mouse and the Mask did not actually come out in 2011, I’d concede that David Lowery made last year’s best album.

My second point is that Android is not as free or open as it should be, and this is why I am hounded every day by harsh words from Brak (“Why did you buy this album?”) and Ignignokt (“Behold! The digital vats of urine!”). Android is now the dominant phone platform in the USA, which is quite nice given that just a little while ago it seemed that a completely closed, craptastic phone OS (like RIM’s Blackberry or Nokia’s Symbian) would plague our future indefinitely. Google shepherds the Android platform, which is advertised to be free and open source, but 2011 showed this to be only loosely true. You can read elsewhere about the Android 3 source code fiasco, I’m here to talk about The Mouse and the Mask and my phone’s incredibly strong desire to listen to it constantly. I admit that at first I was mystified—had my phone become self aware?—until I started learning Android programming in December. It turns out that when I press one of those buttons on my headphones, something called an “intent” is created in Android. An intent is a representation of my wishes, something like “hey phone, I want to skip to the next track.” At that point, the Android system compares that intent with applications that are capable of implementing my wishes. If there is only one such application that plays music, then Android will send the intent to that application. If there is more than one, it will ask me which application should receive the intent, and also whether I want that application to always handle those intents.

And we have arrived at problem 1: The Droid Bionic comes with a pre-installed, stripped-down version of Google Music, which cannot be removed from the phone. The technical term for software that you cannot remove from your phone is “crapware.” I’m serious, that is actually what technical people call it. Anyway, I attempted to upgrade it to a newer version, but that is not possible. I searched the Android Market and found that I could install the newer version, so I did, expecting to only have one Google Music app. Surprise! Now I have both the old crapware version and the new version, and that’s when the trouble started. So when I send a command to my phone from the Bluetooth headphones, Android has to figure out which app to send that command to. No problem—or so I think—I’ll just tell Android to send this command and all future commands to the new Google Music app, right? And now problem 2: the two Google Music apps have the same name. Android gets confused because they have the same name, and sometimes sends the command to the other Google Music app. At least that what I think is happening. Regardless, I might be listening to something pleasant like Grandaddy’s “Aisle Seat 37-D” (one of the most beautiful songs I have ever heard) and then I hear “Behold! The digital vats of urine!” I like to think that Jason Lytle would appreciate the humor.

I’m a reasonably intelligent person, one who happens to be a Linux system administrator. I can wrap my head around most programming languages. I could fix this problem. However, doing so would violate my contract with my cell phone provider, because I am not to uninstall crapware under any circumstances. For instance, long after Blockbuster goes bankrupt and disappears, I will have the unremovable Blockbuster app on my phone. I could remove it (by “rooting” my phone), but having actually rooted an Android phone, I can tell you that the process is far more difficult than it should be, with significant risk of turning your phone into a “brick.” This is not what openness looks like.

This brings me to my final point. There has been a lot of talk lately about why Google cannot force mobile providers to provide stock Android, but that is only partially true. Google has frequently used two tools to force the mobile providers to comply with their wishes: access to the Android Market, and access to Google Apps like Gmail and YouTube. I recently read an opinion piece [can't find the link at the moment] arguing that Google should use these terms to stipulate that mobile carriers must provide a stock Android build for any device that will have access to Android Market. Not that Google would force carriers to use stock Android–that would be even further from open source–but rather that each device would have to be able to boot stock Android in order to pass hardware certification. This would go a long way toward allowing customers to finally opt-out of crapware. Crapware like Blockbuster and the built-in Music app are only the tip of the frozen urine iceberg. Hidden on most phones is the most dangerous crapware of all, spyware. Do yourself a favor and read this short article on CarrierIQ, software that is tracking everything you do on your phone right now, even logging your keystrokes (and therefore your passwords). Yikes.

Until users can easily switch to stock Android, the OS will continue to be crippled by problems like this one. I will continue to be taunted by cartoon characters. Your mobile carrier will continue spying on you. And I will keep listening to The Mouse and the Mask day in, day out. I guess it could be worse.

Who Owns New York?

Posted on by

This evening as I walked through Washington Square, it was clear that something was up.  At the bottom of the arch, where Fifth Avenue reaches its dead end, two police vans and three police cars sat in a line, as a sort of metaphorical barricade of red and blue lights.  The cops were nervous and moving quickly, while the park stood eerily empty.  Most ominous was the sound of at least three helicopters overhead, one of which was circling low and tight over the perimeter.

I assumed immediately that the commotion was related to Occupy Wall Street, which was swept out of Zuccotti Park by the NYPD riot cops on Tuesday.  Occupy Wall Street had announced a city-wide protest for today, threatening to blockade the New York Stock Exchange and take over the streets of Lower Manhattan.  A block away on Sixth Avenue I came upon the protestors marching downtown.  Those marching were moving at a brisk clip, with jubilant confidence, in massive numbers that justify use of words like “parade” or capital-M “March.”  They weren’t dirty, they weren’t homogenous college students, they were people from all over the city who were protesting peacefully and ardently.

The countenances of those among me on the sidelines mostly fell into two camps.  There were the great many who stared blankly into the smartphones held in front of them, thumbs hovering over camera apps, bound to post their pictures onto Facebook within the next second or so.  Then there were those who looked perplexed, assuming that the tabloids and the pundits had sold them bad information about the recent neat and clean end of this protest.

When confronted with this scene, right at the heart of the fundamental debate about the future and viability of our great city and nation, I greeted the parade with the most non-New Yorker set of actions.  I smiled.  I clapped.  I cheered.

For those who haven’t lived in New York, you might not really know what I mean.  New York City is a giant whirlwind, best understood as close kin of the tornado that carried Dorothy on her trip from Kansas to Oz.  You learn pretty quickly that everything is here, and everything wants your attention, from the guy selling knick knacks spread out on the sidewalk to the TV blathering at you in the back seat of a cab.  In order to stay sane, you reserve your attention and emotions for the few people and things you have time for.  You learn to tune out the external world, just as much as you learn to tune yourself out of it.  I have lived in New York for most of the last fourteen years, since I came here from Texas to study at Columbia College in 1997.  As I watched the protestors cheerily march past the cops and executives and the regular people, a song popped into my head.  It was the Columbia fight song: “Who Owns New York?”

So there I was, cheering the protestors on, and why?  Well, despite what you hear from the pundit class–love that term, BTW–this movement is a powerful representation of a consensus that is building in our nation.  In fact, I argue that this consensus is not just building, it is already here.  Even the apolitical, and that’s most of us, recognize and freely admit that our political system is critically wounded.  We all know that our laws are bought and sold by the powerful few, while the many voices of our democratic republic have been drowned out by the din of the money changers.  For every angry Tea Partier upset about the cost of Medicare, there is a 99 Percenter angry about the fact that GE made billions last year but paid little or no taxes at all.  For every Republican who believes that our country is being strangled by labor unions, there is a Democrat who resents that bailouts are reserved for investors only.  The one thing that the vast majority agrees on is actually very simple.  Our country is for all of us.  The only way to save the American Experiment is to take it off the auction block.  But what does that mean?  What can we agree on, really?

  • The tax code, the massive body of law that affects each and every American, must be made simple enough for the average citizen to understand, and simple enough for the government to enforce.
  • If we are to keep the roof over our heads, we must rigorously enforce the laws that apply to the financial industry.  It was only three years ago that a major rallying cry was “Main Street versus Wall Street.”  Now that cry is more like “Everyone versus Wall Street.”
  • Campaign finance must be reformed to forbid the purchase of our politicians by labor unions, corporations, and the absurdly wealthy.  This is the big one.  A law is not a law if someone or something can buy it.

Now, I believe in this consensus, in its power and its political currency, even while I admit that the consensus does not reach much further than what I have spelled out above.  But that is how consensus works, you have to find it, not choose it.  Looking back to the Civil Rights Act, we see another moment in our history that seemed improbable at best.  This moment too must be defined by our consensus if our nation is to survive.  We got past Jim Crow because we agreed as a nation that the status quo could not stand.  It is time for us to stand together again.

As I walked away from Sixth Avenue, other songs popped into my head, because songs are really the way I understand the world.  I thought of the cynical Rolling Stones line, “I went down to the demonstration to get my fair share of abuse.”  Maybe that’s how some people see Occupy Wall Street, but I also remembered that same song’s brilliant chorus, “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.”  But mostly my thoughts turned to the question “Who owns New York?”  For the sake of all of us, it had better be all of us.

Rocktober 25, 2011: Fugazi Primer

Posted on by

I assume a lot of you know the band Fugazi, but some of you might not.  For a lot of kids in the nineties, being into Fugazi was at least half about knowing about something outside the mainstream.  On the flipside of that, I know a lot of people who didn’t get into them precisely because it was something the cooler-than-thou kids listened to.  Well, let’s get back at the cool kids by investigating the bands that immediately preceded Fugazi: Teen Idles, Minor Threat, Skewbald/Grand Union, Deadline, Rites of Spring, Happy Go Licky, Embrace, and Egg Hunt.  The cool kids are probably bankers now anyway.

Here is the Spotify playlist: Fugazi Primer http://open.spotify.com/user/karlward/playlist/5pHOQGiekwFPIcAdKGuPse

If you listen to nothing else from this playlist, check out Minor Threat, Rites of Spring, and Embrace.

Teen Idles (Ian MacKaye) almost had Henry Rollins as their singer.  Rollins went on to join Black Flag, and write some mediocre poetry, and embarrass himself at Cake Shop (as Blythe pointed out in this video last Rocktober).  Anyway, it’s no Minor Threat, but you can hear the beginnings of the DC hardcore sound very clearly.  MacKaye isn’t the frontman yet.  The song “Deadhead” probably rang immature even then, but it certainly says a lot about the DC scene that birthed Fugazi, famous for all ages punk shows and rejection of drug culture.

Minor Threat (Ian MacKaye again) is one of the DC bands.  MacKaye finally gets into the spotlight and just wrecks the joint.  I’m reminded of the review of Dylan from Don’t Look Back: “He’s not so much singing as he is sermonizing.”  I first heard Minor Threat when I was in eighth grade, on Rice University’s fantastic radio station.  They played “Filler” straight into “I Don’t Wanna Hear It,” which is three minutes of the best punk ever made.  For weeks afterward I called that show to request Minor Threat.  Eventually the DJ said something like “dude, I’m not going to play it again, just buy the CD already.”  I’m both from Texas and old enough to remember skin heads and straight edge types, and Minor Threat is usually associated with both.  MacKaye wrote two songs which probably haunted him, “Guilty of Being White” and “Straight Edge.”  Neither song is great, but like Auden with his famously misused poem “Spain,” I think MacKaye realized afterward that he had to be much more careful with what he said when he got up on the soapbox.

Skewbald/Grand Union (Ian MacKaye) was a short project by Ian with Jeff Nelson from Minor Threat.  You can hear the complexity of the music increasing, which prefigures what Fugazi would do a few years later.  To my ears you can also hear the influence of later Black Flag working its way into this as well.

Deadline (Brendan Canty), like Teen Idles, doesn’t quite make it.  You can hear that the future drummer of Fugazi hasn’t really found his sound yet.  I find Deadline most interesting because of its anonymity, you wouldn’t know this guy is going to become one of the best drummers around.

Rites of Spring (Brendan Canty, Guy Picciotto) has been getting name checked by all sorts of awful bands lately.  That whole “emo” scene seems to think it has something in common with one of the best DC bands, I just don’t see it.  Anyway, these guys put on wild shows.  Their songs are so self-absorbed and naive that it actually comes across as genuine.  Example: “I’m going down, going down, deeper than inside, the world is my fuse.”  Guy Picciotto’s songwriting and singing dominate.  Brendan Canty is already a much better drummer, but still not distinctive.

Happy Go Licky has the exact same members as Rites of Spring, who apparently decided to go weird for a little bit.  You hear echoes of this weirdness throughout Fugazi, like in the beginning of “Do You Like Me” from Fugazi’s Red Medicine.  In particular, the drumming is starting to get good, with slower tempos that give Canty more space to maneuver.

Embrace (Ian MacKaye) is probably the band that sounds most like Fugazi, although Rites of Spring could also make that claim.  MacKaye takes the hardcore sermonizing bit and fits it into something that sounds more a lot more like rock rather than hardcore or punk.  “Money” is a truly great song.  Around this time, Embrace and Rites of Spring were labeled “emo-core,” which eventually got shortened to emo.  Check out this YouTube video where Ian trashes the term “emo”.

By the time that Egg Hunt (Ian MacKaye) came out, I’d say you can hear MacKaye getting bored of the kind of music coming out of the DC scene, including the stuff he was doing.  Even still, that bass riff is great, and awesome bass riffs are a huge part of the Fugazi sound (I mean, come on, “Waiting Room“).  Anyway, Fugazi was supposed to be DC music with a heavy reggae influence, taking hardcore into different directions, and that’s what they did.

I invite any and all of you to share your favorite Fugazi/DC deep cuts, stories, pictures of you with Ian MacKaye at your bat mitzvah, and so on.

[This essay first appeared on the Rocktober 2011 mailing list, run by Chris Rummel and Graham Moore.]

Rocktober 6, 2011: Your Local Scene Considered

Posted on by

“Texas is known for strange bands. We’re weird. Everything from ZZ Top being a strange blues band, the Butthole Surfers, 13th Floor Elevators. Dead Horse being a weird mixture of styles.”
-Michael Haaga, formerly of Dead Horse

This is a playlist of the best Houston had/has to offer: Houston, TX .  It has everything from blues rock to thrash, from funk to pop punk, from ska to garage.  I’m proud of these bands, I feel like their music is a part of me.

I’m sure you remember a local band or two, and I invite you to share a band or story and then add a few tracks here: Your Local Scene Considered .

I grew up in Houston, Texas, during the height of the Houston music scene.  This was before the web existed, so I heard about things from friends, shows, xeroxed flyers in record stores, dubbed tapes, etc.  For me, Houston was dominated by the thrash band Dead Horse, but just as huge was the ska/funk/DIY band Sprawl.  Both bands were fiercely proud of Houston, which can be inferred from their names: one a throwback to the old West, while the other refers to Houston’s notorious problem of suburban sprawl.  Both bands were known for weird humor–Sprawl has some of the best titles ever, including the song “Matt Gets Arrested While Hitch-Hiking In The Same Louisiana County In Which A Member Of The Ku Klux Klan Was Elected To The State Legislature” and the album “America is Dying of Wetnurse.”  Sprawl was extremely hard to pin to a single genre, and Dead Horse increasingly mixed country and classic rock into a weird metal hybrid that could only exist in Texas.  Both regularly sold out Houston’s largest rock clubs, and the absolute mosh pit pandemonium at these shows contributed to the police attention that shut many of them down.

Sprawl broke up in 1994, and in 1996 Dead Horse did too.  Michael Haaga from Dead Horse was asked why and he replied “Fuck.  Can you just print ‘Fuck’?”  The whole scene collapsed around that time, and local musicians and fans were crushed that Houston’s brightest lights could never make the jump to national recognition.  Sprawl splintered into many bands, including Free Radicals.  Michael Haaga released a fantastic solo record in 2005 with a backing band entirely composed of Houston’s musical celebrities.

For the unspotified, these are the songs on the Houston playlist:

  1. Dead Horse – “Hank”
  2. Sprawl – “Sea Weed”
  3. Free Radicals – “Ocho”
  4. Los Skarnales – “All Dressed Up”
  5. Sugar Shack – “Form a Straight Line”
  6. Michael Haaga – “Four Letter Words”
  7. Dead Horse – “Rock Lobster”
  8. de Schmog – “You Stew”
  9. 30 Foot Fall – “Better Off Dead”
  10. Free Radicals – “King Conundrum”
  11. Michael Haaga – “Supernaive”
  12. Carolyn Wonderland and the Imperial Monkeys – “Blue Lights”
  13. Bring Back The Guns – “No More Good Songs”
  14. Sprawl – “Mold”
  15. Pain Teens – “Amerikan In Me”
  16. Dead Horse – “Like Asrielle”
  17. 30 Foot Fall – “Opposite Day”
  18. Bright Men of Learning – “Blow Them Away”
  19. Free Radicals – “One Meow to End It”

[This essay first appeared on the Rocktober 2011 mailing list, run by Chris Rummel and Graham Moore.]

Multilooper, Part 2: Design

Posted on by

This is part two in a three part series describing Multillooper, my multi-track live looping system. If you haven’t checked out part one, you might want to read that first.

Avoid Computers At All Costs

Ghost Ghost has always been a gear-heavy band, and in particular I have always been interested in bringing sampling and live audio manipulation into the mix. We had tried various hardware samplers and loopers in practices for a couple years, but never found one that was very playable. We had resisted the temptation to bring computers onstage, because they are not purpose-built (therefore complex) and consumer-oriented (therefore fragile). I’ll give you an example of what I mean about fragility. In 2010 we recorded our second EP (Of Innocence and Experience) in our practice space using Pro Tools running on a MacBook Pro. During the recording of the song “Kate,” the MacBook crashed toward the end of each take. After about 15 takes, we became desperate to find the cause of the crash, which we eventually confirmed was the hard drive locking up due to the sheer amount of vibration generated by the drums and bass. You can imagine this situation being much worse on a stage with a sound system and subwoofers augmenting our own volume.

So what changed that made us comfortable with using computers onstage? In short, our desire to push the envelope overcame our trepidation, but there were also technical reasons that made that decision easier to stomach. In late 2010, I gave in to my curiosity and I bought a copy of Ableton Live. Quinn Raymond (Cue the DJ) and Asif Maroof (DJ Amni) had been urging me to try Ableton for a few years. After a month or so, I had learned the ropes with Ableton and began working on a live looper (described in part one of this series). I found that the Ableton Looper instrument stored its samples in memory, not on disk. This is huge, because as I mentioned, I have no confidence in conventional hard drive reliability onstage. So once Ableton Live is running, there is very little need for hard drive access. We have actually never had Mac OS X crash onstage, though Ableton has crashed a few times during practices (from a memory leak bug that Ableton appears to have fixed). Also, solid state drives have just come within price reach, so I could see a path to even better reliability coming soon with a switch to a MacBook Air, for instance.

Laptop Folk

As soon as I had my head around Ableton Live, I came to see it as a modern folk instrument. Tim Bartlett and I had a long conversation (during my birthday party, actually) about what folk music actually is, ending with agreement that the laptop has become the folk instrument of choice and that folk music includes The Grey Album and video mashups just as much as it includes Bob Dylan and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.

Design Goals

In early 2010, Ghost Ghost also released No Clothes on Ragged Island, which was the band’s first serious exploration of analog synthesizers and other electronics. Kevin and I became adamant that electronic music would become further infused into our sound, and we thought for a long time about what that would sound and look like. A major deficiency of most electronic music shows is that they are no fun to watch, just guys pushing buttons on devices you can’t even see. One of our goals with the Multilooper was to create sound loops in real-time, in a way that the crowd could see and understand.

I perceived from the beginning that using off-the-shelf hardware and software would be the fastest way to bring Multilooper to life. However, I have been working with computers long enough to know that custom hardware and software is the best way to streamline the user interface and eliminate complexity. It was decided that version 1 of the Multilooper would be prototyped and built off-the-shelf in the interest of time. Using off-the-shelf components like Ableton, Max For Live, and generic MIDI hardware allowed me to focus more on the functionality than the intricacies of the hardware (e.g. an Arduino board).

Kevin had built his wall of keyboards (Nord Electro, Moog Little Phatty, and Alesis Micron) augmented with his own loop hardware (Electro-Harmonix 2880) and drum machine (Adrenalinn). Because these devices all understand MIDI, we wanted to sync tempo, meter, and start/stop between the Multilooper and Kevin’s rig.

Also, Mark Christensen is, um, fond of delay, so we wanted to get his delay boxes and loopers in sync as well.

Tim Bartlett, our video maestro, was already using a laptop with VDMX to control the live video projection, so another goal was to provide his video rig with data about the sound component of our show. At a minimum, tempo and meter were requirements, which were easy to transfer via MIDI. I’ve always wanted to get more performance data to Tim, possibly even including motion data about Charlie Kemmerer’s onstage painting as well, but so far that has not happened. We are busy people in a busy band.

A side goal was to implement live video looping that is time synchronized to the audio loops. This could be done by sending performance data to VDMX, or within Max For Live itself using Jitter, the built-in video/graphics system for Max. Again, this hasn’t happened yet.

The design goals as a list:

  1. Create sound loops in real time, in a way the crowd can understand
  2. Use off-the-shelf hardware and software wherever possible
  3. Send sound performance data to other audio rigs
  4. Send sound performance data to video rig

Version 1; Pure Data; SXSW Interactive

Ableton Live did not make it into the practice room until January 2011. It was around this time that we were invited to perform at South By Southwest Interactive, the computer/game/DIY part of the very large SXSW festival franchise. After a few months of experimentation, I rolled my work up into the Multilooper, putting the whole thing together over a weekend using Ableton Live, Max For Live, and a host of other pieces that are described in part one of this series. I was surprised at how quickly the first version came together, especially since I had not programmed in Max for several years at that time. Ghost Ghost practiced for a week or two using Multilooper and we found it surprisingly stable. As an aside, this was also the first time we practiced using Skype to connect with Mark Christensen in Vermont, and we actually had Mark perform onstage with us at SXSW via Skype as well.

Despite the fact that time was short before our performance at SXSW, I coded the Multilooper in both Pure Data and Max For Live to compare the two platforms. I decided to do this primarily because Pure Data accepts the MIDI Program Change messages that come out of my foot controller, while Ableton Live filters these messages. In other words, I had a programming need that Max For Live could not address, so I thought I might as well code the whole thing in Pure Data. Unfortunately, I had some reliability problems with Pure Data, and I generally prefer getting as much functionality as I can into hardware rather than software, so I decided to use a MIDI Solutions Event Processor to convert the MIDI data into Note On messages before the MIDI data ever got to the laptop. I still had to rely on Max For Live for the rest of the functionality I needed.

Complexity and Setup Time

As you can see from part one of this series, the system I developed relies on many software elements (e.g. Ableton Live, the software mixer provided by the M-Audio Fast Track Ultra 8R, Mac OS X itself). If one setting in one of these software elements goes awry, the whole system can stop working and take a significant amount of time to diagnose and correct. This time risk is a very real concern, especially because the average changeover time between bands in NYC clubs is 15 minutes, which is not even enough time to physically move one band’s gear off the stage while moving another band’s gear on.

In addition, there are many cables to connect and devices to turn on. A single cable not connected (e.g. the MIDI cable that connects the foot controller to the Event Processor) can likewise derail the entire system. Again, time risk. At best, the fastest I have been able to set all this up consistently is 20 minutes.  That’s too slow by half. These are the problems that keep me up at night. But in return for all this complexity, I was able to bring multitrack live looping into our stage show using off-the-shelf hardware and very little custom software.

The Future

Obviously, the system is too complicated and needs to be refactored to a self-contained, purpose-built system. In my ideal world, a Multilooper would fit into a stompbox, and that stompbox would be networked with a master control device. Part three of this series is a spec of this ideal system.