What was your first Mac?
I came to the Mac quite recently. My first Mac was a MacBook Pro mid 2009. I had been making music with PCs for many years, sampling and experimenting with music, but I discovered that if I took my PC on stage and one of the USB cables fell out, perhaps because someone tripped over it, the program would crash and I’d have to reboot the entire machine. With the MacBook Pro, just the device that was unplugged stopped working – and if I plugged it back in again it would start working again without having to restart the program, let alone reboot the system. That’s the only reason I bought the MacBook Pro – I’ve never been in favour of Macs or PCs. It was a very practical stage reliability reason why I moved to the Macintosh.
What Mac do you use currently?
My latest Mac is a 2013 Retina MacBook. It was time for an upgrade, my old Mac was struggling with the demands I was making of it, but I’d decided to keep going with the old Mac for another year. It forced my hand by dying.
What peripherals do you use with your Mac?
There’ll all generic MIDI over USB controllers. They just send ‘this button was pushed’, ‘this slider was moved’, ‘this fader was adjusted’. They’re generic signals interpreted on the Mac and, the other way around, many of them give me status information. They have lights that blink up or show me what’s going on in my setup. I use two different foot controllers, the Behringer FCB1010 and the Keith McMillen’s SoftStep. Keith McMillen do interesting stuff with pressure sensors at low cost. A foot controller is normally a button and you push it, but these have a sensor at each corner. So if you move your foot around, from the front to the back, it sends a continuously varying signal. In principal it allows you a lot more expressivity, but in reality its response is a bit random so it doesn’t feel very musical. With drums you need that, when you hit it harder you want a ‘louder’ signal coming out and that’s when you need a device that doesn’t just say this button was pushed. It needs to say this button was pushed with this velocity. All these USB devices use the MIDI protocol which is from the eighties, and they just show up as generic MIDI devices.
Which hardware do you regard as key?
My iPad. I’m moving more and more things to my iPad, and my foot controller – because I’m a guitarist and I need to be able to control things when both my hands are busy. My guitar is plugged into a sound interface which plugs into my Mac using FireWire.
I was in Argentina when my Mac died, and I had a gig planned. I debated cancelling it but instead I thought, lets see what I can do with iPad. My girlfriend has an iPad as well, so I daisy chained the two iPads – it was fantastic, it was really good fun. I played guitar into the iPads and had effects on loop, using synthesiser programs and drum programs and effects so I was able to build complete songs with these two iPads. Everything live.
Is there any hardware that you’ve regretted buying?
I bought, second hand, a super expensive, super professional sound interface, the best that you can get. It was an RME Fireface, and I couldn’t get it to work. I took it back a week later. During a gig it flipped out a couple of times and, with an audience watching, I actually had to reboot my Mac. I think it may have been ground loop issues, which is a problem when you start mixing sound interfaces and amplifiers. It’s funny, we all get the theory and it’s not that complicated, but somehow we still get it wrong and there’s lots of mysterious things happening. This is why it’s great to work with ADAT (Optical Interface).
I still think that the Fireface is fantastic, and the funny thing is that I still want to buy one – but a new one.
What’s your favourite software?
Max MSP is the brain of my operation, and it controls Ableton Live which is great, it’s the music engine. Max MSP is crazy, it’s graphical programming. It works like the old modular synthesisers, it’s actually based on that paradigm, the programming language is made up of little boxes and you draw wires between them. It’s exceptionally powerful, and the coolest thing is that it’s always ‘on’. You have audio running through it while you’re programming, so you can hear your changes as you make them. You can even design algorithms to change the actual program, so it can rewrite itself while you’re playing a gig. It’s easy to use the iPad as an interface to control the core functions of your music. For very quickly building nice interfaces I can’t think of anything better.
Can you share any tips for success?
Other than the usual stuff, be nice to people, make friends, and network? The most important thing, and I really struggle with this, is finding enough time to practise. It’s very tempting to spend all the time programming and very little time making the music. When you’re programming you’re building an instrument and, like all instruments, it needs practising. It’s an exaggeration to say that every time you change the code it’s like changing from playing guitar to playing piano – but it’s a little bit like that. If you want to be able to express yourself at the gig you need to be very familiar with it, it needs to be second nature to you.
I really need to force myself to not do any programming in the last week before a gig, I just need to learn to navigate the bugs or the things that I’d really like to change, to make sure I have enough time practising music instead of programming. My girlfriend tells me all the time that I need to play more and program less.
How did you first get into gigging?
I played in bands since I was sixteen, and then later I was travelling a lot for work which made it very hard to be in a band. I think that bands are only interesting if you can practise every week and gig once a month, at least. I was travelling so much there was no way that I could be in a band and I complained a lot about it but, during a lull in my life, I worked out what I needed to do. I thought “let’s try something new”, let’s try all this experimental stuff that I do at home but in front of an audience, and I never looked back.
Do you see yourself making a career out of music?
No way! Well, I have. Before I joined Thomson Reuters, I was a composer and it’s boring! In five years I’d like to be doing the same with my music as I’m doing now – I’d rather do new stuff all the time for a small audience than do the same thing and make it very big. Having a ‘day job’ gives a lot of artistic freedom, there’s no pressure of trying to find a way in the music industry or please the masses. I do what I want to do and what I really like, and if people like it that’s great.
What would be the perfect gig?
There’s one thing that I’d really love and it’s not a gig. I’d love to be in a huge stadium, like Wembley, maybe before the actual band is on. I love the idea of having a small guitar and just plucking one string and feeling the entire stadium vibrate. Just having your humble instrument and having the power to make this enormous building rumble.
There’s something very interesting about how very small instruments can have very big sounds. So if you look at a keyboard, you need really expensive, really high quality components for the high end, but you can get a cheapy Casio keyboard which is good for nothing and play a nice fat synthesiser bass sound on it. There’s something really weird about tiny crappy devices which can generate these really huge electronic sounds. That’s something that I think is fun.
iPads are like that. I’ve got a load of simulated synthesisers on my iPad and they sound incredible.
Who are your influences?
At the moment I really like Jon Hopkins. I like jazz, and I like pop music a lot as well – people who play with technology and still sound very poppy. Garbage is great band, and I really like Peter Gabriel. Muse is fantastic for doing weird techie shit and still appealing to a big audience. When I was younger, being a guitarist, it was Pink Floyd, Dire Straits, Eric Clapton and that stuff.
Tell us something good.
The stuff we can now do on a small budget is absolutely incredible. We live in amazing times. Amazing things are within reach. If you have just the slightest interest in something creative, and if you’re not afraid of computing, you can make fantastic things happen.
What is your favourite gizmo or gadget?
My iPad. I never wanted to answer this question by saying ‘iPad’, but it’s true. One of the 
most powerful things I found about this is that you can program user interfaces. With low cost hardware, like controllers with faders and buttons, they save money by only having very simple displays which allows very little visual feedback. I have all these really cool things and, if you’re lucky, there’s a couple of LEDs – you can make them go green, or red or blink, which is fine – but with my software I’m controlling over one hundred things. They don’t all fit on one panel. This means that you might assign more than one function to a button, but you never know what mode you’re in so you don’t know what your button will do. It might be that it all works at home, but now you’re at a gig and that plug just fell out, and somebody over there is screaming at you and you’re about to hit that button – but you don’t know what it’s going to do. Will it up your effects? Will it shut everything down? Visual feedback is really important so, while it’s great to have the physicality of buttons and faders there’s no way for them to tell you what they’re going to do. The iPad is a glass plate so it’s not as comfortable, but all the faders and buttons have constantly updating labels showing me their status – that stuff is just unbeatable. I flip through a few screens and I get so much more control and so much more feedback.
Talk us through your work.
Listen Here and watch Here
I think it’s nice, when you do something creative, to give yourself limitations. I set some rules for myself – everything I play in a gig is played for the moment. Nothing is pre-recorded, with the exception of simple drum samples (no prerecorded drum-loops permitted!). Everything you hear is played on the spot. It has to be as much of a musical experience as possible, where you see a person expressing themselves rather than a person standing behind a computer clicking away. This is why I use so much hardware, so that when you go to a gig of mine it’s still me – I’m not just crouched over my toys. The idea is to be as free as possible from the computer and to use my body and my guitar playing to express things. It’s important because I don’t spend a lot of time recording my music and making it sound as good as possible. I’d rather spend that time making a gig which feels more like it’s a musician performing a musical instrument.
There are two extremes, you see, you can go and see the Rolling Stones which have amazing energy and amazing presence and you love being there, but the sounds are sounds that we’ve known forever – you’re not going to go ‘Whoah, I’ve not heard that sound before’. If you go to a technology gig, it’s normally the visuals that need to keep you entertained because the guys are just hidden behind a computer. But the sounds can blow you away – open entire new worlds to you. Just have a listen to Jon Hopkins. I’m interested in where these two worlds meet, how can you get all these incredible technology possibilities but still make it feel like it is a human performing? That’s my quest!