Just a snapshot of what I’ve been up to all morning.

Basically, I’m running all the music for a conference this weekend, but couldn’t find any other musos. Rather than go the usual one-man-and-a-guitar thing, I’ve opted to add some of the stuff I use for producing electronica to the mix and see if I can do both at once. It’s been sounding OK – pretty bare bones, but it really gives what I’m playing on guitar more depth.

Where it’s really taken on a new life, however, is getting everything talking to each other via MIDI. Sure, you might be thinking that I’m 25 years late in discovering this stuff, but I’d never really ventured beyond the basics of using it before. Here’s what’s in my rather basic setup here:

• Boss GT-6. I’m using this for delays and some crunch/gain boost, mostly – but now I can use it to send MIDI messages to my computer too!
• Computer running Audiomulch – the system runs as a master MIDI clock. It’s running all my samples and and some of the loops and custom synths that I string together – mostly drones and arpeggios to give me a bit more freedom to move around the fretboard. It’s pretty intuitive once you work it out.
  I discovered that the GT-6 pumps out MIDI CC messages by default from the CTL pedal, expression pedal and expression switch. All you need to do is hook MIDI control up to various parameters in Audiomulch and get it to detect the messages you’re sending. No configuration required!
• Korg Electribe EMX-1. I’m actually loving this thing more and more as time goes on - it’s really quite a versatile sequencer/drum machine/monosynth once you get beyond the surface. It’s mostly operating as a slave to Audiomulch, but I’m also doing some performance live on it (it’s got a keyboard mode which is great for lead lines). The AUTO setting for the clock control is cool – when Audiomulch is running, it works as a slave, but runs its own clock at other times.

Now that I can play use this stuff without needing a mouse or hands, I’m definitely keen to experiment with a setup like this to try and get a live set together… we’ll see…

Dude, I want a toy room like that! One day, maybe…

This is kind of a tail-end to my original post about my 3AM remix of Gotye’s Hearts a Mess. I just found a couple of early demos of the track by accident and decided there were elements buried amongst them that I kind of liked, so I’m posting them here so they don’t get completely lost. I guess I’m kind of taking a page from Tim’s book here.

Warning: these are rough. Basically, when I’m demoing ideas for a remix I perform the whole thing live to my hard disk with a keyboard and mouse in realtime (I used Audiomulch, if you’re wondering). There are plenty of mistakes to be heard.

First I start playing around with ideas for chords and textures for a remix. All of the drum sounds are hastily sourced from my stock repository of samples I use to get things going. I apparently hadn’t quite worked out what vibe I wanted at this point.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The next day I think Carly and I were moving house. Somehow during the course of this I found time to mutate the mix into this. Don’t be deceived by the fact that the first minute sounds fairly similar to the way it is now: it’s pretty different.

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

From this point onwards it fairly rapidly became what it is now, but they’re the two early working demos that I turned out.

Again, thanks to everyone who gave feedback while I was playing around with these.