One man. One voice. One mindblowing piece of musical invention.
Interview : Dan Prince
Darren welcome to DMCWORLD again young man. Exciting times for you right now! A honeymoon plus this stunning, ground breaking, game changing, life changing product you have brought to the music world. Let’s start with the basics, in one sentence can you please explain just what you have created to our not so technical readers!!
“I have also created a music production system which enables me to create any music I want, live, using only my voice…but I have a synth too…which you could say is cheating…but don’t, cos it isn’t. Some DJs just press press play, I don’t even have a play button, but if I want it to it can actually sound like a DJ set. So yeah, it would have been easier to write and make my music beforehand like everyone else does but it’s so much more fun to write and make it live. I couldn’t find a way to do it so I had to go deep and have it built from the ground up in C++.”
You once said that you suffer from severe music ADD, you get bored with anything you lay down on record within the hour and would rather be rustling up a live show on the hoof. Is this one of the reasons you have spent six long years researching, designing and developing your new Beardytron_5000mkII?
“Yes Dan…I couldn’t have put it better myself!”
Few musicians dream up ideas that push into unchartered territory, when they do they are not necessarily making better music. When did this idea begin to formulate and who did you approach to start early discussions?
“Well, I started to experiment with looping tech as soon as I could afford it, and before that I was using delay pedals to do some rudimentary looping. throughout my career I’ve always had a set-up for touring which is super stable and an experimental, next-level setup at home which isn’t stable and is a work in progress. This experiment has taken many forms. No-one has ever seen it until now. It’s consisted of hardware, software, all sorts, so I’ve been prototyping for 6 years. What i have now is the result of all that research and development. After running into too many problems trying to do it myself, CPU problems, unstable freeware, I decided I needed some high levelled skilled assistance, so I got Sebastien Lexer – at that point a research fellow at Goldsmiths – to build me a set-up using Max MSP. It was going okay, but we took 3 years to conclude that the CPU couldn’t handle what we were asking it to do and that I needed to go deeper. So I started working with Dave Gamble of DMGAudio who is basically the smartest person in the Europe. If you make music, you need his Equilibrium EQ. It’s a work of highly focused genius, the best EQ ever coded buy a significant margin.”
You admit that your old system was never suited to task but you got pretty good at using it live and working round it’s many flaws. What were these problems you ran into with the old system?
“My old live-system, fun as it was was made of parts not meant to do what I was trying to get them to do. Kaoss pads are not designed to be chained together and matrixed and used as sends and clocked off of a central clock, at least not with anything like the intensity with which i was using them. I’d need changes to happen so fast there’d be all sorts of problems with the kaoss pads trying to catch up with tempo changes. There was no undo, I couldn’t move loops around the system. There were a finite number of loops and loops could not be abandoned halfway through and left to run; every kaoss pad had to stay in record till the end of the loop, and you couldn’t multiply the length of the loop and cut in to the loop to create variations within a loop. All in all these and a whole host of other sync problems, and shortcomings in terms of usability would mean that the sounds I wanted to make were often outside the capabilities of the set-up, or just took too long to make in a live situation or were functionally not feasible within the schema of the system. Every single problem with my old looping system, or with any looping system for that matter has now been addressed. What I have is truly unique and it’ll be a while before I sell it as a commercial product.”
Surely this system can never be finished, surely it’s potential is limitless?
“Absolutely, but that is true of all things. You’ve hit on the core principle of the Japanese doctrine of Wabi Sabi; “Nothing lasts, nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished”
Do you think it possible for this ultimate live music production setup to one day make music on it’s own?
“Well, with the right programming sure. We actually joke about that in the film we made to promote it, that at some point it’ll start making music on it’s own. There are drum enhancement presets I use in the beardytron which are so detailed that if you put white noise through and resample a few times you have a drum beat without making any percussive noises…but I don’t ever do that…though maybe I should…it’d be a good illustration of how deep it goes.”
You unveiled your product to a standing ovation from the big wigs of Google at the TED conference in Long Beach, California. What were some of their questions to you after seeing it first hand?
“Well, everyone who attends TED is either a dot com billionaire or a TED fellow, selected to be given a free pass by the TED team, so naturally their questions were all fairly technologically oriented and were all very good questions. I learnt a lot about how not to pitch to investors. Firstly, don’t drink and pitch, second, don’t pitch…start a Kickstarter campaign and retain ownership and control.”
As you just mentioned, you have said that at some point you will commercialise all your hard work with it, so what have you in mind?
“Well, I’ll most probably start a Kickstarter campaign at some point and put out a stripped down app. I think the world is crying out for a really good looper. There aren’t any, still! it’s 2013 for fuck’s sake…”
I have been reading some of the posts from people around the world watching the feature on synthtopia. There are some comments from some people on there wondering this is simply an April Fools. How difficult has it been to convince people that what you have created is actually possible?
“Ha! I was interviewed by this girl the other day who thought the whole thing was an elaborate joke. Which is good as it shows that what we’re doing is beyond the reckoning of many. But I guess it could also prove that for some, technology is simply not worth making a fuss about…I guess if you’re not a musician you wouldn’t understand what’s special about the system. I was just trying to make the video we made entertaining, but I think I might have made it too entertaining.”
What was the biggest problem you hit with the combinations of software and hardware?
“Well, we use Apple products wherever possible, so to be honest it all works very smoothly. Apple stuff does what it says on the tin. That said, NI’s Guitar Rig is used on the front end and it caused us grief as it didn’t like being told what to do too fast, so we had to build in a choke for program change data. It’s more problems with the inter-compatibilty of different software components we had to juggle, the computers behave themselves quite well. And we use RME for the soundcard, which has the best-written firmware in the world. I should mention Sugarbytes at this point. We use Turnado for the majority of the effects and we are stretching the program so far that we had to get sugarbytes to make a whole bunch of changes just to get it to integrate. That said, all those changes which took place over the course of a hectic year were released as Turnado 1.5 complete with a set of Beardyman presets.“
You mentioned Dave Gamble, the owner of DMGAudio earlier. Why was he so important to the Beardytron_5000mkII getting completed?
“There would be no Beardytron without him. He’s the most intelligent person I’ve ever met. I feel utterly stupid in his presence. He writes maths papers in his spare time. To meet him is to be in the presence of something very special. He’s the kind of clever that ought to be working for the government or some evil corporate bank, but luckily for the rest of us he’s chosen to use his powers for good rather than evil, that being, making music sound better, rather than writing algorithms for missiles or whatever. Without Dave the project would have not gotten finished. Max MSP was not suited for task. You pay for all that adaptability with a colossal CPU overhead. But that is to be expected with a modular real-time audio environment.”
How much do you admire what Imogen Heap does with her live performance?
“She is a beautiful example of the kind of thing I’m doing. Artists making their own luck by making their own instruments and trying to achieve their specific musical/technological dream. We are out there doing this stuff as are others, Tim Exile, Onyx Ashanti, as well as many others, but I believe that in the near future you will see this being the norm. In fact I guarantee you it will happen. Makers fairs, arduino communities, crowd-funding mechanisms, open source forums, hacker spaces, modular music environments. It’s happening.. a kind of musical singularity will be reached whereupon all means of making music will become so readily available that instrument design will be indistinguishable from music production. Ableton has been the start of that, max for live more so, soon you’ll see even more of it. Controllersim is already an outdated term as it’s so widespread due to the wealth of physical controllers out now.”
How did the beardytron beta_tour go in June, what were people’s reactions?
“People loved it, I’ve recently taken to beatboxing at the end as an encore and it always goes down well as many have been waiting for it the whole time…kind of like it’s my big hit that they all know or something. But yeah, the gigs were fully sick. Tried out lots of new techniques and basically proved that what I have is far better than my old gear, which is what I set out to do. To allay the fears of those who fear change. It’d taken me a while to get the amount of practice I needed and I finally felt it was time to do a tour and do a grand presentation. So yeah…really pleased with it…it was sick…video will be coming really soon!”
How much have you invested in this personally?
“About £30,000 so far yeah. I’ve not been counting really, it’s a project that needs to be done, and it seems it’s me that’s got to do it, but at some point I’ll make a commercial version and claw back some of the costs, though I must stress, commercialisation of the system is something I’m only keen to do as I feel it would be daft not to. The primary motivator of having this thing in existence is so I can use it myself.”
And finally, you are the only person in the world who knows how it works, I hear Herbie Hancock called you in for a private lesson – what happened, what did he think?
“He loved it. There’s footage of that too, I must get it out. I’ve been recording an album you see…it’s turned into 4 E.P’s as the stuff I’ve been making just doesn’t fit together as one piece it’s so diverse, but it works as 4 seperate releases…there’s singer songwriter guitar based stuff, there’s balearic stuff, there’s some fairly angular and obtuse electronic music…it’s not gonna work as one release, I tried that last time and it confused people…still…the stuff I recorded with Herbie Hancock will be being edited and used for releases too. I’m excited. I feel the stuff I’m making at the moment with the Beardytron is awesome…it’s living out the promise of it’s intended purpose….”
Check out the main man here…http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OlHSNpYg0A
And his One Album Per Hour…Edinburgh Festival Fringe – Thurs 15th – Weds 21st Aug Brownstock Festival – Morris Farm, Essex, Sun 1st September
