![\"Hungry](\"http:\/\/www.45rpmsoftware.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Hungry-Ears-2_0.png\")
<\/p>\nWhat was your first Mac<\/b>?
\nI 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\u2019d 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.\u00a0 That\u2019s the only reason I bought the MacBook Pro – I\u2019ve never been in favour of Macs or PCs.\u00a0 It was a very practical stage reliability reason why I moved to the Macintosh.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
What Mac do you use currently?<\/b>
\nMy latest Mac is a 2013 Retina MacBook.\u00a0 It was time for an upgrade, my old Mac was struggling with the demands I was making of it, but I\u2019d decided to keep going with the old Mac for another year. It forced my hand by dying.<\/p>\n
What peripherals do you use with your Mac?<\/b> Which hardware do you regard as key?<\/b> Is there any hardware that you\u2019ve regretted buying?<\/b> I still think that the Fireface is fantastic, and the funny thing is that I still want to buy one – but a new one.<\/p>\n What\u2019s your favourite software?<\/b> Can you share any tips for success?<\/b> 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\u2019d 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.<\/p>\n How did you first get into gigging?<\/b> Do you see yourself making a career out of music?<\/b> What would be the perfect gig?<\/b> There\u2019s something very interesting about how very small instruments can have very big sounds.\u00a0 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<\/a> keyboard which is good for nothing and play a nice fat synthesiser bass sound on it. There\u2019s something really weird about tiny crappy devices which can generate these really huge electronic sounds. That\u2019s something that I think is fun.<\/p>\n iPads are like that.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got a load of simulated synthesisers on my iPad and they sound incredible.<\/p>\n Who are your influences?<\/b> Tell us something good.<\/b> What is your favourite gizmo or gadget?<\/b> Talk us through your work.<\/b>
\nThere\u2019ll all generic MIDI over USB controllers.\u00a0 They just send \u2018this button was pushed\u2019, \u2018this slider was moved\u2019, \u2018this fader was adjusted\u2019. They\u2019re generic signals interpreted on the Mac and, the other way around, many of them give me status information.\u00a0 They have lights that blink up or show me what\u2019s going on in my setup. I use two different foot controllers, the Behringer FCB1010<\/a> and the Keith McMillen\u2019s SoftStep<\/a>. Keith McMillen do interesting stuff with pressure sensors at low cost.\u00a0 A foot controller is normally a button and you push it, but these have a sensor at each corner.\u00a0 So if you move your foot around, from the front to the back, it sends a continuously varying signal.\u00a0 In principal it allows you a lot more expressivity, but in reality its response is a bit random so it doesn\u2019t feel very musical.\u00a0 With drums you need that, when you hit it harder you want a \u2018louder\u2019 signal coming out and that\u2019s when you need a device that doesn\u2019t just say this button was pushed.\u00a0 It needs to say this button was pushed with this velocity.\u00a0 All these USB devices use the MIDI<\/a> protocol which is from the eighties, and they just show up as generic MIDI devices.<\/p>\n
\nMy iPad.\u00a0 I\u2019m moving more and more things to my iPad, and my foot controller – because I\u2019m a guitarist and I need to be able to control things when both my hands are busy.\u00a0 My guitar is plugged into a sound interface which plugs into my Mac using FireWire.<\/p>\n![\"Toys\"](\"http:\/\/www.45rpmsoftware.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Toys.png\")
<\/a>I was in Argentina when my Mac died, and I had a gig planned.\u00a0 I debated cancelling it but instead I thought, lets see what I can do with iPad.\u00a0 My girlfriend has an iPad as well, so I daisy chained the two iPads – it was fantastic, it was really good fun.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
\nI bought, second hand, a super expensive, super professional sound interface, the best that you can get. It was an RME Fireface<\/a>, and I couldn\u2019t get it to work.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I think it may have been ground loop issues, which is a problem when you start mixing sound interfaces and amplifiers.\u00a0 It\u2019s funny, we all get the theory and it\u2019s not that complicated, but somehow we still get it wrong and there\u2019s lots of mysterious things happening.\u00a0 This is why it\u2019s great to work with ADAT (Optical Interface).<\/p>\n
\nMax MSP<\/a> is the brain of my operation, and it controls Ableton Live<\/a> which is great, it\u2019s the music engine. Max MSP is crazy, it\u2019s graphical programming.\u00a0 It works like the old modular synthesisers, it\u2019s actually based on that paradigm, the programming language is made up of little boxes and you draw wires between them.\u00a0 It\u2019s exceptionally powerful, and the coolest thing is that it\u2019s always \u2018on\u2019. You have audio running through it while you\u2019re programming, so you can hear your changes as you make them.\u00a0 You can even design algorithms to change the actual program, so it can rewrite itself while you\u2019re playing a gig.\u00a0 It\u2019s easy to use the iPad as an interface to control the core functions of your music.\u00a0 For very quickly building nice interfaces I can\u2019t think of anything better.<\/p>\n
\nOther than the usual stuff, be nice to people, make friends, and network?\u00a0 The most important thing, and I really struggle with this, is finding enough time to practise. It\u2019s very tempting to spend all the time programming and very little time making the music. When you\u2019re programming you\u2019re building an instrument and, like all instruments, it needs practising. It\u2019s an exaggeration to say that every time you change the code it\u2019s like changing from playing guitar to playing piano – but it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\nI 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.\u00a0 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 \u201clet\u2019s try something new\u201d, let\u2019s try all this experimental stuff that I do at home but in front of an audience, and I never looked back.<\/p>\n
\nNo way!\u00a0 Well, I have.\u00a0 Before I joined Thomson Reuters, I was a composer and it\u2019s boring!\u00a0 In five years I\u2019d like to be doing the same with my music as I\u2019m doing now – I\u2019d rather do new stuff all the time for a small audience than do the same thing and make it very big. Having a \u2018day job\u2019 gives a lot of artistic freedom, there\u2019s no pressure of trying to find a way in the music industry or please the masses.\u00a0 I do what I want to do and what I really like, and if people like it that\u2019s great.<\/p>\n
\nThere\u2019s one thing that I\u2019d really love and it\u2019s not a gig.\u00a0 I\u2019d love to be in a huge stadium, like Wembley, maybe before the actual band is on.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
\nAt the moment I really like Jon Hopkins<\/a>.\u00a0 I like jazz, and I like pop music a lot as well – people who play with technology and still sound very poppy. Garbage<\/a> is great band, and I really like Peter Gabriel<\/a>. Muse<\/a> 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<\/a>, Dire Straits<\/a>, Eric Clapton<\/a> and that stuff.<\/p>\n
\nThe stuff we can now do on a small budget is absolutely incredible.\u00a0 We live in amazing times. Amazing things are within reach. If you have just the slightest interest in something creative, and if you\u2019re not afraid of computing, you can make fantastic things happen.<\/p>\n
\nMy iPad. I never wanted to answer this question by saying \u2018iPad\u2019, but it\u2019s true. One of the ![\"BA](\"http:\/\/www.45rpmsoftware.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/BA-Mike-Amelia-Bday.png\")
<\/a>most powerful things I found about this is that you can program user interfaces.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I have all these really cool things and, if you\u2019re lucky, there\u2019s a couple of LEDs – you can make them go green, or red or blink, which is fine – but with my software I\u2019m controlling over one hundred things.\u00a0 They don\u2019t all fit on one panel.\u00a0 This means that you might assign more than one function to a button, but you never know what mode you\u2019re in so you don\u2019t know what your button will do.\u00a0 It might be that it all works at home, but now you\u2019re at a gig and that plug just fell out, and somebody over there is screaming at you and you\u2019re about to hit that button – but you don\u2019t know what it\u2019s going to do.\u00a0 Will it up your effects? Will it shut everything down? Visual feedback is really important so, while it\u2019s great to have the physicality of buttons and faders there\u2019s no way for them to tell you what they\u2019re going to do.\u00a0 The iPad is a glass plate so it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\nListen Here<\/a>\u00a0and watch Here<\/a>
\nI think it\u2019s 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.\u00a0 This is why I use so much hardware, so that when you go to a gig of mine it\u2019s still me – I\u2019m not just crouched over my toys.\u00a0 The idea is to be as free as possible from the computer and to use my body and my guitar playing to express things.\u00a0 It\u2019s important because I don\u2019t spend a lot of time recording my music and making it sound as good as possible. I\u2019d rather spend that time making a gig which feels more like it\u2019s a musician performing a musical instrument.<\/p>\n