Pop idle.

I am not a musician, and I have come to the depressing conclusion that I will probably never be a musician. Much like my F1 racing driver and fighter jet pilot fantasies, this is another the musician dreams will probably stay just that, dreams.

However over the years’ technology, games, PC software ad plug in peripherals have given me an all too brief glimpse of a world where I was a club DJ, a rock guitarist or just maybe a writer and composer of complex and beautiful symphonies.

There are the obvious ones, the guitar and band heroes with their plastic guitars and drum kits, the borderline karaoke of sing start and lips and the one step too far of DJ hero- however these are not the ones that stick with me.

 

Rave EJay

 

 

Back when rave was still under a decade old, I made an impulse purchase from a Brighton book shop that was having a closing down sale- it was a game/tool that allowed you to take beats, samples and melodies, stack them horizontally along a scrolling time bar so you could create cut and paste tracks and create and save them in MP3 format.

The fact that you could knock together a simple track in 5 to 10 mins and then spend hours tweaking and adjusting it with new samples, increased or decreased tempo and even record and convert your own samples to use in the program as well.  It was this last feature that kept me coming back to this simple to use sequencer- I spent hours sampling movies, music and even SNES and megadrive sound effects to make increasingly complex and diverse musical tracks.

In the end I moved on to more complex and professional applications, but none matched the fun and accessibility of Ejay.

 

 

Electroplankton    2006 UK

 

Now this is an odd one. It’s not a music design app, it’s not a rhythm action game and it’s not a tech demo- the only way i can describe this weird fish related undersea music mash-up is that it is a collection of noise making, sound distorting beat repeating mini games that have no other function other than to delight you with their short, useless, musical muses.

This was only on the original DS ad took advantage of the mic, duel screens and touch pad to allow you to manipulate sounds you recorded, add beats and create loops and phrases with the help of the afore mentioned plankton .

The really odd thing about this cartridge was there was no way to save the results and no way to use the tools together to create anything but disposable snippets of what could have been. Why the designer ndieszero did not allow the mixing and matching and even eventual saving and storing of the results is unknown, but what we are left with is a spark o genius that could have been so much more.