Charles Martin: percussion, sound, interaction

Columbus Collaboration

2012-01-16

In November 2011, I visited Columbus, Ohio to work with my friend Noah Demland.

We had met at the Percussive Arts Society’s Convention (PASIC) in 2010 and over the next year, we both happened to be working on improvisation and composition in percussion and posting our results on Soundcloud. I think we were a bit inspirational to each other over this period: one of us posting something on Soundcloud motivated the other to go and record something.

Anyway, I was planning to be in America with Ensemble Evolution for PASIC 2011 so it was easy to plan on visiting Noah, but I had no idea what we would actually do.

When I arrived in Columbus, I found out that Noah actually has two personas. By night, he improvises and records strange, punk and post rock infused tunes with an old vibraphone and a new drumset. By day, he turns into Mr Demland, teaching at a high school called the “Arts and College Preparatory Academy” full of strange and wonderful young people.

Anyway, my role with this visit was to work with Mr Demland’s classes, teaching improvisation and talking about how I make music with percussion, computers and electronic instruments. In the evenings, Noah and I practiced for our concert “drums + gadgets”.

improvisation at ACPA

The high school teaching was completey exhausting. I have a lot of experience teaching, particularly one-on-one, but these students were uniquely enthusiastic about creativity. Whether they were interested in my projects or wanting to show me theirs, I hardly had a spare moment while I was in the class room.

There were (I think) four distinct classes each day with a few students overlapped between, for example, the “rock band” class and one of two “percussion” classes. I did three projects with each class over the three days I was there. The first was a seminar session where I talked about the process of creating an ambient composition on computer using field recordings, samples and Ableton Live and then using that as a basis for improvisation. The example was a piece I created with Ensemble Evolution in Piteå in October 2010 called “Sounds of Piteå”.

The second project was to explore the sounds of instruments that the classes used everyday and to use them in some ambient improvised music. The “guitar” class all had guitars and we found some interesting sounds going around the room and had fun making them together. The percussion class had some basic percussion instruments and could invent instruments out of other strange stuff around the room, and the “rock band” class had a mixture of everything. With all of these students I tried to emphasise the idea that you can make sounds with an instrument without playing it in the “intended” way.

The third project was to use these sounds to compose a piece for the whole class to play together. We divided the class into sections with similar sounding instruments while Mr Demland added some drumset over the top and I added some synth sounds from a Korg Monotron and iPad.

drums + gadgets

Noah and I had agreed to put on a concert while I was in Columbus that we called “drums + gadgets”. Our idea was to use the crazy instruments Noah had and the strange computer music gadgets I was bringing with me to play some music.

Noah’s friend Coco had recently opened a dance space called Feverhead in a warehouse, so as soon as I arrived in Columbus we took all the instruments over there and started improvising.

For the concert, we played some improvised pieces based on new ideas we had during the week and also each contributed one semi-composed piece. Noah had a piece called “Åtta för Anders” that he wrote in Stockholm over a summer residency in 2010 and I had been working my “Norra Vinter” suite.

On the day of the concert, we realised we wanted to use the ideas we were having in class, so Noah put together an ambient composition and we had three other friends play it with us.

Some of the recordings are up on Soundcloud here:

It was especially fun to rely on my iPad and iPhone instruments so much in this concert. I’d played around a lot with some little programs, but it wasn’t until drums + gadgets that I had a good chance to really let these “instruments” loose. The best surprise here was that my iPhone + iRig works well with a contact microphone. We used this setup to process the sound of Noah’s washing machine drum (literally from a washing machine). It was awesome.

So the concert happened, I think we played pretty well, had a lot of fun and the audience seemed to appreciate the music and the whole experience. One of the great things about working at Feverhead rather than a big concert venue or even a university is that you don’t feel like a customer or a hassle. Feverhead is awesome because cool people put stuff on there and make it happen and I got the feeling that everybody appreciated our efforts to put on a performance and use the venue.

what does this all mean?

This intense experience really pushed me as a performer and a teacher. It was great to use all the skills, music and technology I’ve been working on in Piteå in three crazy days, but I also had to draw deeply from my experience as a teacher. When I’m not teaching for a while, it’s easy for me to forget that I actually know how to do it. So much of what I teach is invented on the spot when I see what the students need so I rarely have lesson plans or outlines to prove to myself that I can do it.

I really felt that the different environment in Columbus brought out a different kind of creativity that I have in Piteå. Piteå has an isolated, focussed, university feeling that is great for practicing certain things but not so great for cross-artform collaborations and performance making at the pace we achieved in Columbus. I guess a challenge over the next few months is to bring my different creative interests together and have more awareness about how and where I can use them.

Also this hotdog was amazing:

Electronic Percussion is not just V-Drums

2011-12-13

Dave Gerhart posted an article recently called “A Question Concerning Electronic Percussion” by Norman Weinberg over on drumchattr.

I read this article in semi-disbelief and it wasn’t until I got to the end that I realised it must have been written quite some time ago (actually in 1990).

It is interesting to read such an old article to see how the world of electronic musical instruments has changed but I got stuck on one of Weinberg’s predictions:

“For better or worse, the knowledge and skills required to manufacture a good sampler, mallet controller, electronic kit, or drum machine are more complex… This means that electronic percussion instruments will most likely come from the larger corporations rather than the small home-factory.”

This has turned out to be absolutely not true, but I think it’s something the percussion (especially PAS) community isn’t necessarily aware of. While instruments like Roland’s V-Drums have stayed more or less stagnant in terms of design (but not in price or adoption!), creative performers have been making new electronic percussion instruments or innovative hybrids of existing ones.

The last 10 years has seen an explosion of interest in DIY fabrication of electronics and in particular electronic musical instruments. The threshold of “knowledge and skills required” to create electronic percussion instruments has become vastly lower thanks to the efforts of groups who believe in making “making” more accessible.

With an Arduino, a “drum kit kit” circuit board and a handful of piezo transducers a beginner could go create something similar to Roland’s old octapad or Alesis’s “Performance Pad”. With the right teacher, this could happen in one afternoon!

Of course, it would take much more investment to create beautiful, expressive and robust instruments suitable for touring – but it does happen, and it happens more creatively from boutique instrument makers than it does in larger corporations.

The player-inventor

I think there’s a place in the world for creative instrument makers who manufacture instruments for performers. But the most creative new instruments I’ve seen have been invented by the players themselves.

The electronics side of the “maker” movement is often about putting a few existing components together in a creative way. The artist in this video above has done a little bit of work making a transparent drum with a stretchy skin and a lot of work on the software end, but, most impressively, he has put together the camera, drum and software in a totally creative way to make a compelling performance.

This same creativity can be directed towards making hybrid percussion instruments… part acoustic, part electronic. There are great tools available now from big instrument makers (Roland and Korg mainly) to invent our own instruments (or multi setups!) from ready-to-buy components. The computer-based tools are more accessible than ever and the barriers for creating custom software and hardware are ever lower so that even if a player can’t make it themselves, they can find a bedroom-engineer who can make it for them.

Percussionists didn’t fall behind with electronic instruments as Weinberg feared in 1990. Percussionists are trained for this stuff. We’re the “makers” of the orchestra. We’re the crazy sound kids that composers want to hang out with. We don’t need to rely on the large instrument manufacturers to invent our new instruments for us, we (with some friends at a local hackerspace!) can make them ourselves.

New Norra Vinter demo recording

2011-10-27

Christina and I recorded a quick demo of Norra Vinter in Canberra just before I left for Sweden.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a pretty good work-in-progress snapshot!

Norra Vinter – October 2011 Demo by Charles Martin

(Sorry, the embedded version uses flash, if you’re on a non-flash browser, try my soundcloud page)

Christina and Charles Ragtime Project

2011-10-27

Christina’s favourite kind of percussion music is ragtime xylophone, so we’ve decided to start a duo project recording and performing the music of George Hamilton Green, Red Norvo and many others.

Our first demo is up on soundcloud now! It’s a bit rough because we had to record on the same day as we recorded some of my compositions and we were both tired. But it was important to get something up before I left for Sweden! So here it is:

Christina and Charles Ragtime Project by Charles Martin

A computer music system for vibraphone

2011-10-27

I recently finished my first prototype for a dedicated computer music system for vibraphone, just in time to use it at Electrofringe at the end of September and to take with me to Sweden!

The idea is to have a battery powered computer system that can attach to a vibraphone, includes a microphone for processing the vibraphone sound and can output straight to the mixing desk at a gig.

The current setup has:

4 electret microphones that blutack under the damper pedal in the vibraphone.
A battery powered preamp and power supply for the microphones that mixes them down to a mono signal.
An IK Multimedia iRig dongle to make it easier to connect the microphones and the output to an iPhone
an iPhone (or iPad) running RjDJ
my own custom RjDJ scene (programmed in Pd).
A cheap stereo DI box to minimise the work that a sound technician has to do before I can plug into the desk.

The microphones on the bottom of the damper bar:

An “in progress” photo:

Of course, each part of this could be much higher quality: the elecret microphones could be condenser clip on mics, the preamp could a less noisy design with higher gain possibilities, the iRig and iPhone could be a Beagle board computer system running Satellite CCRMA.

I’ve seen a pickup design where the mics are suspended from an elastic band attached with binder clips to the vibes frame, but I haven’t had a chance to experiment with that yet! It might reduce the amount of noise caused by the moving pedal.

But my first goal with this kind of system was for it to exist and work – which it does – and there is every possibility of upgrading it as I find out the best ways to use it.

There’s some more documentation in the Flickr set!

Actually I should put a video up soon about it! I should do that this week…

Norra Vinter at Electrofringe

2011-09-28

Heading up to Newcastle tomorrow for Electrofringe and This Is Not Art! The best part is that I’m putting on the first performance of my new project “Norra Vinter” along with my lovely and supportive fiancée, Christina. Norra Vinter is a suite for percussion and iOS reflecting the sights and sounds of life in Northern Sweden, since I’ve used RjDJ to develop the iOS component of the performance, I’ve reworked some of it as an interactive sound experience for the audience to download and take away! So here’s the link (click this using mobile safari on an iOS device!):

Norra Vinter for RjDJ

(Here’s the link to the scene page that works in any browser)

Update!

The Electrofringe showcase was great and Adam Thomas took a great photo of Christina and I playing:

Developing for RjDJ on Mac OS X Lion

2011-09-11

So I got back to developing some RjDJ with my new MacBook Pro which (naturally) runs lion. But! The development tools don’t work anymore.

To run the rjzserver from the command line, you need to install wxpython from their website

http://www.wxpython.org/download.php

Then install mako templates:

sudo easy_install mako

Now you need to run this line instructs Python to run in 32 bit mode.

defaults write com.apple.versioner.python Prefer-32-Bit -bool yes

And then you can run rjzserver:

python rjzserver.py

Last Man to Die and Arduino Fio

2011-09-01

Last week the Last Mans and I put on a little run of our show as part of National Science Week.

Most exciting for me was the chance to refine the wearable interface I put together for Hanna.

I upgraded from a regular arduino, xbee shield and 6 AA batteries to an Arduino Fio and a LiPo battery. The Arduino Fio is super cool to use, it has a built-in xBee socket, and a charging circuit for the lithium polymer battery. The old rig used to be strapped on to Hanna’s back but we could stick the new setup to her arm with velcro so it was much easier to take on and off.

Now what else can I do with the Fio?

lessons in improvisation and jazz vibraphone/marimba

2011-08-18

In August and September 2011 I’m offering lessons in improvisation and jazz interpretation on vibraphone and marimba. Lessons will be in my home studio where the student and I will have enough space for collaborative music making and exploration.

In these lessons I want to help students explore their own musicality and give them tools to encourage them in improvisation, performance in jazz styles, song writing and composition. Students in high school and university are welcome as are adult learners. Students should probably understand the basics of keyboard percussion and need to bring a set of four marimba or vibraphone mallets. These lessons will be offered on an ad hoc basis with no commitment to any number of lessons.

A typical lesson might have some of these activities:

free form improvisation in a particular scale or key
creating and recording a simple piece by putting together riffs or chord progressions
looking at a jazz standard and working on accompanying and soloing from a written chart

Of course, I’m happy to help students with any aspect of their playing.

instruments: Musser M55 Vibraphone, MalletKat (4 octave), microphones and recording equipment
location: Charles' home studio in Ainslie, A.C.T.
price: $50 per 1 hour lesson, no commitment to any number of lessons
contact: 0419 176 858 or cpm at charlesmartin dot com dot au or message me on facebook or twitter