So, the guitar with the Korg KAOSS Pad KP3 built-in wasn’t enough for you, huh? Here’s an axe with two iPod touch units attached. The sounds that result, with Ableton Live, the Eno/Chilvers app Bloom, and bowed guitar, are quite lovely. That shows some of the power of these apps: playing along with the generative/interactive music app Bloom is a bit like having an intelligent composition to work with. If these devices were more open and allowed easy creation of your own musical toys, you could built generative machines to play along with you. And it also demonstrates how touch and smart devices can extend the performance possibilities of a traditional instrument, in a way a rig of effects pedals and stomboxes – no matter how sophisticated – never could. (Thanks, nostromo!)
My favorite part: because Bloom uses the accelerometer, shaking the guitar clears patterns in Bloom. That demonstrates how a gesture that’s gimmicky on its own could be really useful in a particular performance situation.
Creator Brian William Green has some notes on his creation. And he cautions that this is just a quick, informal jam; it’ll be interesting to see how this evolves as he practices.
This video is a quick demonstration of my guitar with 2 itouch ipods mounted onto the body of the guitar.
The ipod closest to the guitar pick ups is running Itouch Midi’s Matrix app which I’m using to send midi to Ableton Live on my Macbook via wifi.
And the itouch near the bottom is running Bloom designed by Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers, Bloom is a generative music application.
Note: in this video bloom is just being run through my mixer when i play live it is run through various patches to alter it a bit.
The reason i shake the guitar is to clear bloom and start a new pattern, each time i shake it, it clears the boards and lets you start again.
Note: this video is just me messing around with a quick live set i through together just for the video its nothing real special but it shows kinda what im doing for my live sets, one thing that im not using in the video that is in my live setup is various Pd(puredata) patches.
More Videos Soon.
Thanks
-Brian Green
Other guitarists using similar rigs? Let us know!