Button Music

Guitarish by mattlumpkin

Music is one of the great joys of my life.  I started playing guitar when I was 12 and I started playing computer a couple of years after that.  I got started with a terrible little multi-track recorder I found online but soon graduated the fantastically powerful Cool Edit Pro (for which I have still not found an equivalent in Mac OS).

I was in a terrible little band in high school and we had fun. But I didn't want to wait around for other people to show up to make music and growing up on a farm in rural Arkansas, there weren't that many people lining up to realize my visions of blending big-beat house with modern guitar rock.  In 1999 I learned to program drums in Fruity Loops and began to genuinely have fun collaging beats and drum sounds I sampled from my own CD collection with found sound from High School and the ubiquitous doom-sayers of the impending Y2K apocalypse.

There's still a big disconnect between the music I make when I play my computer and the music I make when I play my guitar. But if you listen to the track above, you can hear me playing guitar sounds with my computer, (that is, with my budget "monome," button grid interface running a sampling program called mlrV).

Integration is fun!