Music Technology for Accessible Music Making – an ethos and recommendations, by Jim Nankivell (Plugin Project blog)

When running musical workshops in inpatient settings it can be difficult to know what equipment to bring. Some young people will have lots of musical experience, some will have never tried music making, and there isn't often lots of equipment onsite. As a Young Music Leader on Quench Arts' Plugin Project, I was keen to experiment with a range of equipment, supplementing a standard guitar, computer, mic, and audio interface with hardware music technology. As a performer, I play and write music on a range of hardware, and I was interested in using some of this equipment in a community music setting, hoping to develop a facilitating and teaching style that reflected my musical style and interest. This is by no means a new idea, but I wanted to write about my personal experiences and development, as well as highlight some equipment I used as a sort of mini-guide.

On the whole, the outcome was very positive! Not everyone was interested, which was expected, but I found I was able to engage young people with a wide range of musical and physical abilities. Seeing equipment with flashing lights and lots of buttons to push drew in some participants, whilst others were interested in a new method of music creation, or liked the immediacy of it. Overall it felt very accessible, which is so important in an inpatient CAMHS setting. As professional musicians it can be hard to put yourself in someone’s shoes who has never held a guitar before, let alone used a fretboard, so bringing along equipment without that preconceived expectation can help remove the first barrier that participants may be worried about. To me, this can be summarised in three key aspects:

● A new interface. A keyboard or fretboard are great ways of making music, but can be quite intimidating. Hardware technology uses a mixture of knobs, sliders, and buttons that anyone can turn, move, and push.

● Tactile feedback. These new interfaces require physical movement, so music making can be done with movements and gestures, which can be simpler than fretting a guitar, or using different fingers for different notes on a keyboard.

● Sensorial feedback. This tactile feedback has a recognisable audible change, which can vary from a drastic multi-layered change to a simple volume change.

With this in mind, I want to highlight three pieces of music technology I used on Quench Arts’ Plugin Project, and how they helped me to engage a range of young participants.

Chase Bliss Audio – MOOD

A looper pedal is a great way to start making music quickly. MOOD is a guitar pedal, and just one example of a looper. It has lots of interesting features, and sort of acts as its own instrument – as little as one sung note or strummed chord can be fed through it, and the pedal will affect, duplicate, and loop this audio through itself, generating huge soundscapes incredibly quickly. Even though it is quite complicated to technically explain how it processes sounds, MOOD has six knobs which all affect its output in a recognisable and distinguishable way; there is an interface participants can interact with. So we have a piece of equipment with tactility and sensorial feedback, as well as a new interface of knobs, footswitches, and lights.

It can be quite meditative to make these soundscapes, and several participants enjoyed making a type of music they hadn’t come across before. From a facilitating point of view, I think it is so important to be able to make music for music’s sake – experimentation comes naturally from layering loops like this, and this is such an important part of music making that can sometimes be forgotten about, particularly if you are focussed (perhaps from a funding point of view) on creating some quantifiable output. But on multiple occasions across this project, the participants and I would sit and listen for 5 or 10 minutes to one of their loops unfolding. Not only is this fun to make music without rules, structure, or output, but it is mindful and can encourage a deep listening or meditation, something that has lots of benefits in the mental health sector.

Lots of other loop pedals exist too, and even one that just allows you to record loops on top of each other is great. You can build up whole tracks or grooves, particularly in a group setting, by recording a range of hand percussion, singing, lyrics, single notes, or even any found sound. The hitting of a metal water bottle becomes exciting if it is part of a groove you are layering up in real time! The process of music making becomes fun – a physical looper pedal can reveal the musicality of physical everyday objects.

Teenage Engineering – PO12 Rhythm

The PO12 is a cheap battery powered drum machine. It has 16 tweakable sounds which can be played in real time, or programmed into a grid of 16 light up buttons. Being a small form factor, participants who might be more shy can take the machine and make beats in their own space, without having to have someone guide them through a complicated DAW. Once they know how to switch between programming sounds and playing drums live it becomes super quick to program in a beat, and then play live DJ effects over the top, all in a phone sized gadget. At Plugin, several participants created whole tracks stemming from a quick 5 minute beat, sometimes programmed at random.

Every sound is adjustable through a simple two knob system, where each knob changes the sound in a particular way. So not only can you create beats, but for someone who might be more production minded, they can dial in the exact sound they want in a way that doesn’t require them to know what FM is, or how long the decay on a hi-hat should be – just turn the knob until it sounds right!

AKAI MPK Mini 3 (or any MIDI keyboard with knobs, pads, or sliders)

If you are working with a computer, a MIDI keyboard is often a necessity. However, there are many options with a range of pads, knobs, and sliders and these can offer new interfaces and make a DAW more physical and tactile. Pads are an intuitive way to record in drums, and considerably easier than lugging around a whole acoustic drum kit! Finger drumming can be taught in a way to build up simple grooves, and pads that light up when you hit them can make it fun. Knobs can be mapped to effects, allowing parameters to be tweaked in real time with sensorial feedback. This is engaging for participants, but can also be used to mix on the fly by turning knobs and recording their data.

I had a lot of success using these pads and knobs in conjunction with Logic Pro’s Quick Sampler instrument. Several participants were quite anxious about singing, or felt too shy to commit to recording their own melodies. By recording in single words, a bit of speech, or vowel sounds, then chopping it up with Quick Sampler we were able to help participants get past these worries. Each pad on the MIDI controller could be mapped to a slice of the sample, and whole phrases chopped up into new melodies, or lyrics rearranged on the spot in realtime; knobs could be mapped to pitch, enabling a voice to be distorted beyond recognition, removing that anxiety and dislike many of us have when hearing your own voice. This was fun to explore, and meant a lot of tracks had vocals added, even if the participant didn’t originally want to sing or rap. We found this process working very well with groups, where each person could contribute a sound or phrase, creating a sense of collaboration too.