LOCAL MUSIC
A Man With A Launchpad BY JENN WEBSTER
M
usic echoes. Patterned lights dance. Faces gather around, bent over a grid of squares. A little girl listens from a plastic lounge chair, eyes half-closed, intent on the sound. A retired cop looks on with equal fascination. What could bring so many people of different ages and tastes together? It was EDM, electronic dance music, in this case a trance-style mix of a pop song by producer Nick Mao. Mao is part of a community of digital producers who use Launchpad hardware, paired with Ableton software, to create EDM mixes spiked with pattern lights. It’s an odd modality, one that blends composition, playing an instrument, sampling, mixing, programming, and live performance—Mao “plays” his Launchpad with a series of keystrokes, bringing a preprogrammed song to life. Most such artists work in the EDM genre, focusing on trance or dubstep, but virtually any music genre could be explored using the technology. 16 •
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The result can be an in-person concert with a single DJ seeming to produce both song and light out of a simple device with a few strokes of his fingers. With less spontaneity, Launchpad enthusiasts share recordings of their music online…in fact, the community is huge. Mao tells me that the technology can also power live venues. “Ableton is good for live performance. Say you want to do a performance for someone at their house. You can open a session and create each sound and track. Then, if I’m connected to a computer and have Ableton opened, each button [on the Launchpad] is a track. You could also have a piano hooked up to a launch pad and computer. You could play on the piano, press a button to loop it, and
keep adding loo Mao’s YouTu te, features mix his own instru both piano an sampling and e When I take as he covers a Walker’s PLAY, the original an it darker than b come the violin the bow on strin drawn out into tening to a very cord folded into dance and plas The nature o munity, like the large, is to co Songs are web ple samples, in single tracks or looped. There’s
