A Man With A Launchpad

BY JENN WEBSTER

Music 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.

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 loops.”

Mao’s YouTube channel, NicTinyte, features mixes he’s created with his own instrumentation—he plays both piano and violin—as well as sampling and electronic producing.

When I take a listen, I find that as he covers a song he loves, Alan Walker’s PLAY, he both incorporates the original and deepens it, making it darker than before. The vocals be come the violin line, but the hiss of the bow on string gets picked up and drawn out into static, as if we’re listening to a very old phonograph record folded into a hypnotic matrix of dance and plasticky pop.

The nature of the Launchpad community, like the EDM community at large, is to continually collaborate. Songs are webs made up of multiple samples, including self-samples, single tracks or sounds extracted and looped. There’s no concept of a singer-songwriter, yet you get an ear for nuance.

“I’m part of a mega collaboration with seven other small YouTubers doing a Launchpad song for Skrillex’s ‘Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites’,” Mao says. He shows me what exists so far: his sections, with each sample connected to a button on his Launchpad, and some of his collaborators’ tracks.

When he plays these other tracks after his own, they’re identifiably part of the same song, but different. One tinkles like a music box, while another has a distinct early-80s midi game vibe. Mao’s is the densest, most dubby of the lot.

“Once everyone is finished sampling and making lights, they’ll be recording,” he explains. “They’ll synch it with music, start adding transitions and effects, color correcting, and then send it to the host to edit into one giant video.”

I’m delighted. The mixture of cotton candy and cerebral in the sounds, of creation and pilfering in the process, both fascinate me. It’s too bad COVID-19 closed down some of the EDM shows anticipated in Chattanooga this season.

In the future, Mao hopes to continue composing and producing as he builds his following. He definitely has time. Not only has the pandemic slowed things down, Mao, a student at Hixson High, is only 14.

I ask if he has any other comments for readers and he pats his Launchpad. “This is expensive,” he says, wrapping the device in a big towel. “So take care of it if you’ve got one.”

The venues are closed, but EDM is still active as livewire online. You can find Nick on YouTube and on Soundcloud at soundcloud.com/niktinyte.