David Jameson, The Security Project / Beyond the Wall / Reelin’ in the Years / Gig Performer Co-Founder

David Jameson is one busy keyboard player, working across three bands with some demanding musical chops required. Then there’s the small issue of him being the co-founder of one of the most popular applications for computer-based gigging players, Gig Performer. We cover all of those bases plus some in this wide-ranging discussion. To listen /...

The post David Jameson, The Security Project / Beyond the Wall / Reelin’ in the Years / Gig Performer Co-Founder appeared first on The Keyboard Chronicles.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
and amateur practices so that they don't make any mistakes, a pro practices so that theycan't make any mistakes.
Hello and welcome to the Keyboard Chronicles, a podcast for keyboard players.
I'm your host, David Holloway, and I'm thrilled as always to be here with you.

(00:21):
I'm very excited to bring to you this episode, Mr.
David Jemisin.
Now David has had one hell of a career somewhat outside of music and he says himself thathe's an amateur, but I think he's stretching the definition of amateur to some extent
because aside from playing in a bunch of amazing bands,

(00:42):
David is also responsible for gig performer, one of the most well-known pieces of giggingsoftware for musicians.
You know, it's, it's, I'd argue in the big three there as far as main stage gig performer.
And then you've got other great apps like Camelot and then Forescore and OnSong and so on.
So we do talk a lot about David's career in music as it is, but also

(01:07):
the amazing work he's done with gig performer.
So there's lots to enjoy.
And if you're a main stage user like me, I've sort of been a little bit thrown not by gigperformer because it's actually incredibly clearly communicated how it works.
And there's some wonderful tutorial videos.
I've probably just been lazy and haven't taken the time to get into it.

(01:27):
And certainly after talking to David, I'm going to be revisiting that scenario.
So yeah, I do hope you enjoy this and I'll see you at the end of the show.

(01:49):
David, it's an absolute pleasure to have you here, sir.
How are you doing this fine Friday evening?
doing excellent just woke up from a very nice nap so roaring to go.
That's right, we're talking before the show.
Naps are good for your health and well-deserved.
And I'm not surprised you needed nap, Dave, because as we're going to hear over the cominghour or so, you're one busy, busy man.
But I thought we'd start off when maybe you were having naps in earlier years as a child.

(02:15):
What got you into music in the first place?
What was your sort of education in music?
Well, I was born at an early age.
Yeah, I know.
Write it down.
Feel free to use it.
So my father was a serious amateur violinist.
So he had quartets in the house every week.

(02:36):
Which, by the way, is probably why I don't listen to classical music much anymore, becauseI kind of burned out on it.
And, you know, like many kids that generation, we're talking back, I guess, in the 60s.
That's scary.
I started piano lessons when I was four.
Apparently I was very good and I actually was in a few years later, I was in like a prizewinner's concert for young kids.

(03:00):
And then I gave it up.
I had one of, apparently the best teacher at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.
I grew up in Ireland, but I hated practicing.
know, my friends were outside playing soccer and you know, stuff and I'm like stuck.
And so I kind of, much to my father's disappointment, I gave it up.
And then I took up the guitar for a little while and took a few lessons and that was kindof cool.

(03:23):
And then I kind of really didn't do that much anymore, but I was really into electronicsas a kid.
apparently when I was 12 years old, I registered for, I didn't know it was an adultcourse, but it was an adult course in electronics done in England over the mail.
How's that the old days?
I actually

(03:43):
built an oscilloscope when I was 12.
I got a bit of help from an electrician and I was fascinated by electronics and stuff andpractical electronics, magazine, you know, all that kind of thing.
There wasn't, there were not many opportunities in Ireland.
There was like one shop in Dublin that you could buy parts.

(04:04):
It's not like over in the U.S.
when they had Radio Shack and everything.
And you know, and that was fun.
I did that and then...
I discovered electronic keyboards and you know I'm still into music and I persuaded myfather who was keen to support anything I did in the music world I don't remember what my
first keyboard was yes I do it was a Farfisa organ

(04:29):
Nice.
Absolutely.
I was just fascinated by the sound and all the buttons and knobs and switches and so on.
And so I kind of got back in and was kind of just more self-taught at that point.
I wasn't taking lessons anymore.
you know, I was getting ready to start college.
I was playing a lot.

(04:49):
And then I got some other keyboards and you had to go to England for the most part to getkeyboards.
They weren't really anything in Ireland.
There wasn't that much.
And I joined a band, actually there's a few bands as a kid, but I joined this band calledTime Machine.
And I ended up, I was using nine keyboard, no, 11 keyboards on stage.

(05:12):
You know, I was in my Rick Wakeman phase.
What can I tell you?
So this was between school and college.
I actually left college for a couple of years, much to my mother's horror.
And yeah, I had the whole thing.
I had my first synthesizer.
I've never forgotten this.
was the EMS Putney, if you know what that was.
No.
So it was actually was the AKS model.

(05:34):
Pink Floyd used it.
It's the one with the grid.
So the patch panel.
And I had gone over to England and I was like looking at different synthesizers.
I didn't really understand much about them or how they worked.
And around the same time, the Minimoog had come out and I saw it.
And then I saw this EMS thing.
And it kind of, to me at the time, it looked more interesting.

(05:56):
I'm sorry I didn't get the mini-mog at the time, but I got this thing with the grid and itwas great.
Except it would go out of tune very quickly.
So I'd be like on stage and play one song and I've got a headphone and one ear tuning upthe octave, you know, those days.
And I ended up, you know, building this thing.
got, I had the first Yamaha CS-80 in the country.

(06:19):
Which I got in England.
Yeah.
One of our roadies quit when I brought that home.
They weighed a ton.
They really did.
And we were doing shows.
We were doing one every week.
It was mostly pop, but they did a couple of prog ones.
used to do, do you know the band Camel?
Yes, absolutely.
So there's a great song that they did called First Light and it starts off, it's a guitarintro and then this Moog comes in and the song is...

(06:49):
It was a really exciting song.
so, you know, and so I had, you know, the string machine.
I didn't have a Moog at the time.
I had the Roland version of a Mini Moog.
I forget what it was.
SH something or other.
don't remember anymore.
Long time ago.
But I could, you could do all those kinds of things.
You know, I had a ham and organ, I had a fender road and he schlepped all this stuff,know, you're young.

(07:11):
And did that for a while.
And then to be honest, I actually had a song in the Irish charts, a song that written,although I'm convinced to this day that that only got into the charts because my mother
bought 50 copies of it.
I'm totally convinced.
I've gotta know David, what was the name of the song?
The song was called Let Me Tell You.

(07:33):
Here, look, I still have it.
that.
Nice.
It's from Time Machine.
Yeah, okay.
That's like, and my nickname was David knobs, Jemisin, because I had so many, mean, I sawknob, yeah, because, you know, I just loved, you know, twiddling all the stuff.
Yeah.

(07:53):
You know, if you saw a picture of my studio down in my basement, you'd understand, I'vegot more knobs and it's like, and it's great, you know, there's a lot to be said for the
physical tweaking.
I got bored because I didn't like the social scene and I was a token Irishman who didn'tdrink.
yeah.

(08:14):
And so I went back to college.
I had discovered programming while living in France for a year between school and college.
My parents had me go to France for like an inter-between because just the age stuff.
They thought, and I discovered the Hewlett Packard 25.
Do remember the HP?

(08:35):
You know, it was a programmable class later.
It was the first time I ever saw anything programmable.
I was fascinated, spent ages just learning how to do programming stuff.
And once I was there, software, that's where I was.
So I went back to college, got my multiple degrees in computer science and kind of went onfrom there.

(08:57):
What a shame.
What a shame.
They never paid off David and I'm being sarcastic, obviously.
And we definitely, just for the sake of our listeners and viewers, I know a lot of peoplewill be listening and viewing because of David's role with gig performing.
We're certainly going to cover that, but I'm really keen before we get to that, David,just to talk about three bands that you either are currently in or have recently been in,

(09:18):
because I think you go back to when you were young and piano, you said you were prettygood.
I think that's a pretty accurate description because the three.
bands you've chosen to play a regular role with are not easy to say the least.
I thought we'd start with Reelit in the years.
So Steely Dan is obviously, you know, one of the greatest bands of all time and keyboardplayers love Steely Dan as a general rule.

(09:41):
Tell us about your involvement in that and how you've had to approach that from a playingviewpoint.
Well, so that's kind of interesting because that wasn't when I fell back into bandsbecause I stopped for about 30 years.
I didn't I didn't I, I, you know, real job family, all the all the usual stuff.
And then I started playing again and then I fell into this thing.

(10:04):
A lot of luck.
I'd been advertising.
I found some local bands who were trying to do stuff.
And somebody I knew was trying to put together a band to do
Peter Gabriel's early music.
This came before real in, so I'm kind of going with his story.
do that first, Davie,
everything else will make more sense.

(10:25):
And so I'd been playing in a local band with this guy, I was a good guy, his name wasScott.
And he was trying to put together this thing to do the early Peter Gabriel.
And he knew Jerry, Jerry Morata, who was of course, Gabriel's drummer for 10 years.
And he had found a band in Rochester that was a Genesis tribute band.

(10:46):
And his plan at the time, he was going to bring in this singer and their keyboard player,and Jerry was going to be the drummer.
and he had Trey, Trey Gunn, a bass player and so on.
He used to play with King Crimson, an amazing, these amazing players.
And at the last minute, the keyboard player from that band couldn't do it.
So I got asked, would I be interested in kind of doing some early Peter Gabriel?

(11:10):
Now I didn't really know that music.
was a big Genesis fan, but I didn't know Gabriel's stuff well, but it's like, who can turnthat down?
So I learned a bunch of songs and I went for an edition.
which was up at Jerry's studio.
And I was kind of interesting because first of all, very intimidating, you know, becauseyou're like, I'm this amateur musician and you've got all these, you know, famous people.

(11:33):
But, you know, I had a, I'd learned the songs pretty well, the three or four that we didfor the audition.
And I also had a very interesting instrument called an Eigenharp that I was using.
I don't know you've ever come across that.
So it, it, unfortunately that company went out of business for various reasons, which
didn't surprise me, but it is a pity.
Great idea.
So it was basically a controller with five columns, 24 rows of buttons that were sensitiveto hair's breadth.

(12:02):
could like the way you touch your hair, you can feel it.
That's sensitive, but it was sensitive in out, right left and up down separately, eachkey.
I had been looking for a controller for years to play synthesizers, but
allow me to do vibrato the way I would do it on a guitar.
Because I was playing guitar and so on and I could never find anything and I tried themall.

(12:23):
This thing, you could do it.
So I was using this thing and there's a bunch of videos.
I did it with Security Project and with the Pink Floyd Band.
And it was kind of wild because it's got all these lights and you can do all these crazythings with it and it wild.
So anyway, I fell into this thing.
I ended up going on tour.
with the- even lived in a tour bus in Europe for a month I do not recommend that to anyoneover 20 by the way certainly not in your 50s but it was a blast and all the stuff they

(12:54):
tell you that happens in rock and roll happens in rock and roll it's for real so I-
understanding is David though you can't comment on a lot of that.
I can't, but let me tell you, there were some things and as they say, it's a good job Iwas married and faithful.

(13:16):
Anyhow, so it was great.
It was a great experience.
It was one of those things all us amateur players, I'd love to be do that with, you know,and it was a lot of fun.
They gave me, I got a good ribbing in the early days.
We weren't doing Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in the early days.
But we went into a restaurant on the first tour and outside the restaurant, Trey said tome, by the way, we've decided we're doing Lamb Lies Down on Broadway tomorrow.

(13:44):
Now I had never played it.
I don't know you know, you know the song.
It's got this whole thing in it, right?
You know, I ended up learning it.
It took me about a month to learn it, to do it really right.
Once you learn it, it's easy, but it took me a while.
I was petrified.
It turns out they were all in on this.
At the restaurant, they were all talking about it, and they did it totally to freak meout.

(14:06):
They succeeded in totally freaking me out.
I was just panicked.
Great experience.
We did a bunch of tours, and I got to go to Europe with them, and we even went to Japan,did a few shows there.
It was a blast.
I discovered then, so moving to Rieland, I discovered that Jerry had the Steely Dan band.

(14:27):
And they were playing up at a casino a few hours north of where I live.
I went up to hear them.
was like, Jerry was there with his brother Rick, who's also a famous drummer.
And it was like at that time it was a 13 piece band.
Yeah.
Four horns, two drummers, three singers, two keyboard, blah, Two guitarists, massive.

(14:48):
And after the show, I went up to Jerry and said, hey, you know, Jerry,
know, Pete Levin was playing keyboards at the time, Tony Levin's brother.
And I said to Jerry, hey, you know, if you ever need a sub, I'd love to have a go at someof this stuff.
So Jerry said to me, yeah, well, you know, go and learn.
Here's like 20 songs, go learn them and we'll see.

(15:09):
So I went, okay.
And I went off and I, I learned them and I do stuff.
It's both note for note and also sounds.
Now by this time, by the time Reelin happened, I was totally on gig performer.
So I could pull off these sounds to a T.
I have Donald Fagan's Rhodes and Whirly.

(15:32):
I've got the emulator for the Phase 9, the MXR Phase 9 phaser that he used and so on.
And anyway, got all that stuff.
So I learned a whole bunch of songs and that's the last I heard of it.
So then about eight months later, I get a call.
says, are you free to do a show in December at the Bearsville Theater?
This is in Woodstock.

(15:52):
I said, sure, I'll go back and relearn everything.
What about a rehearsal?
said, well, we'll set up a rehearsal, you know, one thing to go through.
I okay.
I started learning all the songs, and can get them off.
I'm doing all these things because I'm trying to get all the sounds.
So stuff that we're doing with two or three keyboard players, I'm automating stuff anddoing stuff with the performer and blah, blah.

(16:14):
When's the rehearsal?
I'm working on a date.
Closer, closer.
You can tell where this is going.
What's a rehearsal?
Anyway, to cut a long story short, no rehearsal.
I show up at the Bearsville Theater.
We ran through a couple of songs, packed house, did the show.
Somebody comes up to me afterwards and said, okay, Pete Levin left the band three daysago, you're it.

(16:39):
And that is how I ended up joining Real It in the years.
It's still going.
And it's still going.
We've a couple of shows coming up starting in June, I think.
And that band starts off again.
And that's how ended up.
So the Steely Dan, asked me about the music.
You know, I knew Steely Dan, the older stuff, not so much the new stuff.

(17:01):
So it was great to get outside my comfort zone and learn a style that I hadn't gotten usedto.
Once I learned the basic style of those chords,
Turns out for keyboards, that stuff's actually not that hard.
A little more disappointingly, for the most part, with a few exceptions, it's veryformulaic.

(17:26):
I didn't realize it until I'm sitting down with 20 songs, but every song intro, firstverse, interlude, second verse, interlude, solo, using the same chords as the verse,
outro.
And they're all like that.
As a couple of exceptions, Asia, for example, that song itself, a little bit, it's stillgot some of that, but it's extended.

(17:49):
But they were all, you know, same kinds of chords.
So once you learned their style, they was like, you know, okay, yeah, I can do this.
Pretty much you do it.
Some of the solos were tricky having to learn because they had some phenomenal players.
And, you know, you'll learn the solos and I like to do note for note and blah, blah, Andthat's how that happens.
That's great.
And so I think that's a fascinating point about the formulaic nature of some of the songsand probably links into my next question, which is around Pink Floyd, which is far from

(18:17):
formulaic.
I would never make that claim, but I've always felt, and this is due to my co-host Paul,who's an apology for today because he's literally touring with a Pink Floyd tribute band
is that...
The sounds and the playing isn't necessarily as complex as what it may appear on thesurface.
Is that a fair thing to say about Pink Floyd as well or not?

(18:38):
So the Pink Floyd thing for me is another interesting thing because I'm actually not a bigPink Floyd fan.
What happened was around the same time that Security Project was getting off the ground, Igot this call to see if I was interested in joining a Pink Floyd band.
it's a band I had turned them down a year earlier because I am not Pink Floyd.

(19:01):
And when they called me back again, I said, sure.
because I didn't expect the security project thing to happen.
So I ended up in both of these baths at the same time, which was bizarre.
So I had to go off and learn a bunch of Pink Floyd songs.
So that was kind of an interesting one for me in funny ways.
So I'm not a blues person and I'm not an improv person.

(19:26):
So in other words, I love Tony Banks stuff.
You know, playing the solos for cinema show or 1st of 5th or Supper's Ready, they'regorgeous solos and I've learnt them, you know, but they're all worked out.
When it's improv, I'm just no good at it.
So Pink Floyd is what I used to tell people.
Yeah, Pink Floyd is basically a blues band with sound effects.

(19:52):
Yeah, I've gotten into trouble.
Yeah, but...
That'll be the tag at the start of the show, I'm already telling you that, David.
Well, please, I'm not sure.
you know, look, you're, I mean, you know, my hero is Keith Emerson.
You know, and I'm like listening to, you know, know, Chick Corea's return to forever orJoe Zalano weather report.

(20:15):
you know, they're, they're gorgeous players and Keith Emerson, of course, was phenomenalcomposer as well.
A lot of color and so on, you know, now, you know, the Pink Floyd stuff in terms of theeffects.
In some ways was very easy for me because I knew what they had used and I had used thesame instrument a long time ago, the EMS Putney.

(20:38):
So I was able to recreate all that stuff pretty easily.
mean, you know, interestingly enough, last year, and we're doing it again this summer, wewere asked to do a theatrical version of the wall.
Yeah, which we did, which meant I had to learn the rest of the wall.
kind of knew some of it.

(20:58):
And so there were songs, and because I wasn't Pink Floyd fan, I'd never really listened toit all.
So there were songs like empty spaces, which has, so there's this engine running, youknow.
I have a Euro rack down in my basement.
And so I was, I knew, okay, I can hear that.
And you know, it's old style 60s, 70s kind of stuff.

(21:20):
Yep.
They have a white noise thing going in.
There's a bit of like bass there and there's a filter thing chugging along and there'sbasically a sequence.
And I was able to pretty much duplicate that stuff.
And the arpeggiators are easy with gig performer, of course, and so on.
And so I'm like, as opposed to what they were doing in the studio where they're doing onepart and another, I could like push a key and have boom, boom, boom.

(21:43):
And the arpeggiators with the chords, the whole thing was just done with one key, whichleft me with my other hand free to play solos.
know, being able to do that stuff.
so, you know,
Like we do Shine on You Crazy Diamond, which I used to play the solo on the Eigenharp.
But if you listen to the main tune, you know, it's a very simple couple of oscillatorswith a filter that's low cutoff, you know, low down.

(22:07):
It's just this nice smooth sound.
you know, it wasn't really very hard to do.
Now, you know, at the time they did it, of course, incredibly creative because they wereusing the technology was new.
From a technical perspective, the keyboard playing is not hard.
I mean, one of the first things I built with and before gig performer, I was still usingMax MSP because gig performer came out of the performing with security project.

(22:34):
I realized I'd been using something else.
like, this isn't good enough.
I need a better system.
And that's what started the gig performer project.
But one of the things I built long time ago was an auto sustainer.
And there are latch things and some keyboards to do this, but basically the idea was
I could play a chord and it would just stay on until I start playing another chord andthen that one would go off and the new one would start.

(22:57):
And in Pink Floyd, you play a chord and like, know, organ chord stays on for three minutesor something.
You know, and then you do another one, another three minutes.
You know, there was a lot of that.
And so I could play the chord like in, in shiny, you crazy that I use.
And there's a great plugin, the Swarm stuff that audio modeling did, Sax Brothers, which Istill use by the way.

(23:21):
And so, you know, I've hit the chord and then I could do the sax and use the pitch wheeland do the sound and then every now and then hit another chord, you know, when it went
from G minor to C.
Whoa, really cool change there.
You know, so that wasn't, you know, that's how that works.
Yeah, no, that's amazing.
And thank you for confirming.
mean, it is an amazing, what would you call it?

(23:44):
Amazing discography that Pink Floyd have done.
And it's incredibly satisfying to watch and listen to.
But yeah, you've given me heart.
And I know Paul, my co-host, is an amazing player, but you've still given me heart.
So you mentioned there, let's talk a little bit about gig performance.
You mentioned your multiple degrees in computer science.
So you obviously had a passion there for coding and so on.

(24:06):
so...
Tell us actually how you kick that off, because it's one thing to go, I'd like to createmy own thing, but to actually take it from that to what it is now, just tell us a little
bit about the buildup of Geek Performer in the earlier days.
So if you remember, I started, had like this big rack of keyboards around me.
And then various sequencers and dolls and stuff were around.

(24:31):
Apple Mainstage came out and I got that early.
It's like they did some very clever things in Mainstage.
In particular, the notion of having a knob.
that on one side responded to your controller and on the other side control parameters.
And by the way, we use that in GeekFormer.

(24:52):
That at the time, thought that was brilliant.
Now it turns out MoTo's performer had something similar.
They didn't have plugins at the time, but they did have that indirection thing, but it wasreally nice.
And so I had been playing around with using that just at home.

(25:13):
But I ran into a lot of problems with it, which is really not a surprise.
One, was very, the design was a little bizarre.
At the time in my home studio, if you'd call that a long time ago.
So I had, among other things, I was using a Chord Oasis, which is by the way, gorgeousinstrument.
I'm so sorry I sold it.

(25:33):
I've had a Kronos since, but even though it's the same concept, it was just, it did nothave the feel.
It's sort of like going from a Steinway to a Yamaha.
And the Yamahas are great pianos, but they're not Steinways.
So anyway, so I had a Korg Oasis and I had a, at that time, a Moog Voyager.

(25:54):
And I had set up a bunch of sounds and some patches that I was doing myself.
And the Voyager at the time was quite new.
And so I had everything going, connected through a MIDI timepiece.
If you remember the MIDI timepiece, Motu did some great stuff.
So the MIDI timepiece, I had two of them.
And everything was going through main stage.
And I was doing a song and I was switching patches and the Voyager, the Moog sound wouldbe wrong every time.

(26:23):
I was convinced for about a month that there was a fault in the programming of theVoyager, the patch memory, it wasn't remembering everything.
What was happening was, if you know the Moog, what was happening when I switched to thispatch, oscillator three would go into low frequency mode.
So instead of being an oscillator that you could hear, it was just making bizarre noise.

(26:44):
So after about a month, I finally decided to what's going on here.
And I put a MIDI monitor on the whole thing and I discovered what was happening.
You'll love this.
So I would change a patch in, in main stage.
Main stage would send a program change out to the instrument and it would send a programchange to the Oasis.

(27:04):
The Oasis would switch to another program and then it would send out some CC messages.
In particular, it was sending out CC messages.
You know where this is going, right?
It would send out messages in CC 80 and CC 81, which would go back to main stage.
Main stage goes, I don't know what to do with these.
I'll just rebroadcast them to everyone.

(27:26):
What the fuck?
Turns out I don't remember which CC, but either 80 or 81, one of those when sent to aVoyager puts oscillator three in low frequency mode.
Why would you build something
that just rebroadcasts arbitrary stuff coming in on the assumption that other things willknow what to do with it.

(27:49):
Does it still do that, do you know David Tilly's Dave?
I'm sure they fit, I don't know.
I'm sure they fit.
Well, it would explain a lot of bizarre behaviors to me in my own main stage rig.
Maybe that's the cause.
It was bizarre.
Yeah, funnily enough I am, I won't bore you with, but I was involved in a virtual bandproject back in the 90s that was initially based on Max MSP.

(28:16):
Okay, so my next step, I had been using Max for a long time.
And so I decided, you know what, I'm going to build a plugin host in Max, which I will usefor touring.
So I built a thing and I have a, there's a blog article, three-part blog article somewherein the internet around just showing you how I did it.

(28:38):
Basically put together a lot of abstractions and so I could have basically,
up to six plugins and up to two effects plugins for every patch.
And then I had abstractions that could reload a different sets of plugins and differenteffects.
And then I was able to, each song then was a patcher that when you, selected it, it wouldbasically set things up, load in the appropriate plugins and blah, blah.

(29:05):
And it worked pretty well.
And I actually used it with
Security project the first tour or two still I was using a Kronos and three Roland a800controllers I was using four keyboards and I know actually worked pretty well The only
problem was it took about seven seconds to switch from one thing to another which wasn'tthat big a deal but it is a thing and and Yeah, and and by the way, this is involved in

(29:32):
the interesting onstage problem that I had once we'll come back to that
And it worked pretty well.
then Cycling 74 brought out the next version of Max and I had nothing but trouble with it.
I'm still using the latest version and I think it probably works pretty well, but versionsix was crashing on me.

(29:53):
was having a lot of trouble and it was all those real time issues.
They couldn't reproduce it, blah, blah, blah.
And so, you know, if it can't reproduce it, then they can do about it.
But I ended up with a system that I could not depend upon.
So I was around 2016 or so.
and a development partner in Canada that we had worked on a bunch of other projects and hewas a guitarist.

(30:14):
He, unfortunately, at the age of 52, he died a couple of years ago, which is very sad.
Anyway, he and I said, you know what?
Let's build our own to scratch an itch.
And that was the beginning of the gig performer project.
And we aimed it at both keyboard players and guitarists because he was a guitarist and Iwas a keyboard player.
And so the stuff in there really designed for both.

(30:34):
And of course, once you do that, works.
vocalists, bass players, other...
it works great with as well, because you're dealing with audio in as opposed to just midiin.
So it ended up being great for both, and today it's in use by guitarists as well.
This is probably a good juncture.
I would love for our listeners and viewers, you to give a broad overview of GigPerformer.

(30:55):
So a whole bunch of our audience will either use hardware keyboards without a laptop andplugins.
There'll be another whole swathe like myself that probably started out with main stage andhave been too lazy to look at other options.
Then we'll have a very dedicated audience of GigPerformer users and then others that willuse iPad based things like Fourscore on song.

(31:16):
and so on.
And obviously they are all very different, but I'd love you to just give an overview ofhow GigPerformer broadly works and how it's different from the others without you having
to get too deep, obviously.
Okay, so when we first decided to build it, we had two or three goals.
One was total reliability on stage.

(31:37):
If you're on stage, particularly in front of a paying audience, that's a remarkablystressful.
I had, by the way, until I started doing with security project, I had no idea howstressful it really was.
You know, I played with bands and you go and, you know, and there's a few people dancingand you're playing away.
But you get up in a theater or something and there's an audience sitting there and youhave to be on for two hours.

(32:03):
It's really hard, which was a huge wow for me.
So the less stress you have, the better.
So I didn't want to worry if I move a slider because I was going to go kaboom.
Our biggest and our first goal was utter reliability on stage.

(32:23):
And I will tell you, as of today, and I'm not superstitious, so I don't mind saying it, Ihave toured, I've carried a backup laptop with me ever.
I've never needed it.
I've never had a single problem that wasn't the user.
Actually, the user problem I had was before gig performance.
That doesn't even count.

(32:43):
But anyway, and so that was our first go.
Our second goal was, this is for musicians.
You should not have to have a PhD in Mix Engineering to be a musician.
So we didn't want to use channel strips.
Okay.
And that's the big paradigm shift where it's like, I don't care about buses and sands andinserts and oxes and like, what the fuck is that?

(33:09):
I want to connect.
I've got a plugin.
It's a piano.
I want to connect it to my phaser.
And then I want to connect it to my reverb and here's my organ and I want to connect thatinto my reverb.
So just like wire them in together and off you go and start playing.
So we basically decided to build this visual system that's basically graphical.

(33:30):
Okay.
And so we have this notion of a rack space where you basically, and a rack space,essentially, I don't want to get too technical, but basically that's a topology.
So a rack space represents a collection of interconnected plugins.
each rack space and can have lots of rack spaces can have a completely different set ofplugins connected in different ways.

(33:54):
Okay?
So, and you can switch from one rack space to another even in the middle of a beat withoutany glitches or stuff.
So can be playing and I've got a medley, a Genesis medley that I used to use on tour whereI went through about 30 these rack spaces.
I was doing like...
eight or 16 bars of different Genesis tunes that ended in Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,which the rest of the band then came up on stage and we performed it.

(34:21):
So that was the basic concept, this graphical view, no channel strips.
So it's like a guitarist, I got effects pedals on the floor, I plug this into this andthis into this and this into this and it works.
I don't have to like plug each one here, one here, one here.
Okay, let me see, have to put a send in here and turn this up and what's the bus, youknow.
You just see what's in front of you and that's where the audio goes.

(34:43):
So you've just already opened my eyes, David.
So for the sake of other main stage users out there, and I may be alone, I've downloadedgig performer a couple of times and just due to upcoming gigs and haven't made the switch
as yet, but I probably was getting thrown by the rack space thinking the rack space wasthe overall configuration of my keyboards, no matter what.

(35:05):
then, and that's where I've gotten confused because as you know, in main stage, basicallywhat you're saying is a rack space is equivalent to a patch in main stage, not.
not the overall configuration of mainstage.
It's kind of, yes, kind of, yeah.
But there's another whole piece to it which I'll come to.
By the way, the biggest problem has been very interesting because almost half of our userbase are Mac users, which we did not expect.

(35:33):
The biggest problem we've seen are users who basically, and I've seen this and I've askedquestions online, that decided not to go as gig performer and like,
Well, why not?
And the reason why not was they tried to use gig performer as if it was a channel stripsystem.

(35:54):
And the reality is you've got to forget everything you knew.
It's completely different.
And once you understand how it works.
So for example, we have a notion of a MIDI in block.
A MIDI in block represents MIDI coming in from some device.
And basically you can set up a split.
You can say this only receives on this channel and it only receives stuff between C3 andC4, for example.

(36:20):
The default is the whole keyboard.
But, so here's the thing.
Supposing you want to do a split.
Okay.
And you want to have like on the left half, you want to have like a piano at normalregisters.
And on the upper half, you want to have an organ, for example.
So people get like, well, how do you do that?
Well, the answer is very simple.
You take two million blocks, you make one of them be the lower split, the other be theupper split.

(36:42):
You connect one to your piano and the other to your organ.
And off you go, right?
So people, until they see, oh yeah, just use multiple blocks.
One for this range, one for this range.
You know, once you see that, then kind of your eyes like you go, oh yeah.
And then it suddenly hits you how it works.

(37:03):
But there is that paradigm shift.
And if you're trying to make, want a keyboard and then I've got a plugin and may followedby, you know, an effect and another effect, another effect, you know, and the thing.
Ours, you could have like a, you know, you might have a piano and an organ and strings andthen the piano and the organ both go to a delay.

(37:25):
The other one goes to a flanger and then, also the, and one of those, you know, andthey're just arbitrarily connected and you can put
faders in between you want to control.
Yeah, but you don't think about this.
Yep, this is going to the flanger.
This is going to the flanger and the reverb, but this is going blah, And it just works.
So it's much easier to understand.

(37:47):
Once you get your head around and you don't try to make it be a channel strip model.
So that was the first key part.
The second key part.
was our front panel where you have the widgets.
And the idea behind the widgets was very simple.
You have a knob or a slider or a button, and you can attach a knob, let's just use a knobor a widget, to a plugin parameter.

(38:12):
And Mainstage does this as well.
This is pretty basic.
And then on the other side, you can connect map and controller MIDI message to yourwidgets.
And when you do that, then when you turn your knob or push a slider, that changes theparameter.
It's pretty straightforward.
But a big goal, and this is where the MIDI people get a bit bothered, our position is,forget about MIDI, okay?

(38:40):
You have a knob, I don't care what message it sends, learn it, and then you'll just useit.
You don't care about MIDI anymore, you're controlling a parameter through host automation.
So, there's a lot of people who want to just pass these parameters, MIDI messages,directly to plugins.
It's like, don't do that.
First of all, you're going to have a problem as soon as you decide to use a differentplugin, or you're to have a problem if you switch keyboards.

(39:05):
We have a whole system, by the way, again, came from my experience with backline, when Ihad to switch keyboards on the fly, say, wait, this isn't going to work because this sends
different messages.
And we have a whole system now.
We can switch your keyboard, tell GeekPerformer, this is what these controls send.
So eight knobs on the hammer have send these CC messages.

(39:25):
Eight knobs on something else send these CC messages.
you can sound check really quickly, just tell Geek Performer, this is what this is doing,this is this is doing, and then all your rack spaces will just work.
Wow.
Yeah.
So again, to address the back line or same way you just handed the keyboard controller.
So that whole widget thing basically is your interface to control the system from yourkeyboards.

(39:51):
That's amazing.
So that's the other main part to the wiring view, which is the rack spaces and the panelview, which is the controls.
And the goal and certainly the way I use it, my laptop's like either beside me or behindme.
And I never look at it during a show.
Now, obviously over the years, a lot of new stuff has been added in.

(40:13):
So for example, we don't have a concept of a widget controlling multiple parametersdirectly.
And the reason we don't is because a widget is meant to represent a physical control.
We can scale the values that a widget sends out and you can actually see that on thedisplay as a circle around the widget, which shows you what it's really sending.

(40:37):
But the widget itself is always following your physical keyboard.
If you want to control multiple parameters, you basically, you attach a widget to eachone.
and you link the widgets together.
And then when you turn one, the other one turns and then the scaling controls what theparameters actually do.
So if I want to do a crossfade, for example, I'll have one widget that's controlling thevolume that goes up as you turn the widget.

(41:05):
The other widget, when you turn it up, it goes down because the scaling curve is reversed.
They're linked together.
So as one goes up, the other goes down, for example.
So we do it that way.
You just have one widget attached to your controller.
You don't have to have them both.
The other ones will turn.
But we control multiple parameters, but we do it that way rather than having a singlewidget have control multiple parameters directly.

(41:30):
It's a different approach.
And I think I know your answer, David, based on what you're describing, but for someonelike me that uses both plugins and obviously physical keyboard, so I have a MoDX 7 Plus
and then I use an Arturia KeyLab, I'm assuming it's quite easy via widgets to selectsounds on my MoDX from Gig Performer, as far as changing between songs.

(41:52):
So there are multiple ways to do that, surprise.
So I mentioned earlier there's a MIDI in block and a MIDI in block basically receivesMIDI.
Well, there's also a MIDI out block for different ports and different channels.
And on a MIDI out block, of course, if you connect a MIDI in to a MIDI out, of course,it'll just go straight.
Now we've got transposers and we've got like generate chords from single notes and you canuse lots of third parties in between, but eventually,

(42:21):
There's a MIDI out block where you can send stuff out.
And I actually use that with our Pink Floyd band.
We feed my chords to a harmonizer, a vocal harmonizer piece of hardware.
The singers will sing and get chords when I'm playing a chord.
For example, but when you switch a rack space, and I didn't talk about variations, whichis a very important, those widgets for a single rack space, you can have multiple sets and

(42:47):
you switch variation and that changes widget values.
But widget values can do things like bypass one plugin and turn on another one.
They can do all sorts of things so we can have the same set of plugins, but havecompletely different things without changing even just in the same topology.
One of the things you can do, of course, you can connect a widget to say the PC parameterof a MIDI outblock.

(43:12):
Maybe turn a widget that changes the program number.
But there are actually better ways to do it now.
When we built our streaming...
file player, is an audio file player, mostly for backing tracks, but you can have like athousand songs in it.
And by the way, if that's not enough and you need another thousand, just add anotherstreaming file player.
And it doesn't use RAM.

(43:32):
It's mostly because it's direct from disk.
So you can have like tons, right?
We have a timeline there and you can put markers and then markers can have actions.
This is new in gig performer five.
And there are all sorts of actions and actions can be things like
send a program change to this external device and that external device, and then send a CCnumber to set something else.

(43:57):
So you can do all that kind of thing.
By the way, you can also send OSC messages.
We've got full OSC support.
And the reason we have that originally is because when we first started buildingGigPerformer, I still had all my patches for my songs in Macs.
And I needed Macs to be the driver, but control the plugins in GigPerformer.
which it did by sending OSC messages.

(44:20):
So we've got a really deep OSC thing, which now, by the way, you can use with LIMA orTouch OSC and you have control, you know, and as you're playing, your display just shows
you the widgets you care about in different songs.
Yeah, so, right.
There's also, by the way, just to add thing for stuff for which we don't have GUI becausewe didn't think of it.

(44:44):
There's a fully fledged programming language in gig performer, right?
We call it GP script, which is a terrible name because it's actually a compiler, but it'sagain, it's designed to be very easy to use.
We didn't use like a C style thing.
It's more like a Pascal type thing, but very clean.
So you can do things, for example, when a rack space changes, it can trigger something andyou can make stuff happen.

(45:09):
And making stuff happen can be...
send an OSC message to front of house or set a widget to this or start playing a sound orturn on the streaming file, whatever the hell you want.
So there's a whole, you know, completely different set of things you can do with that formore advanced.
That's amazing.

(45:29):
And thank you for even taking us down to that level.
Cause I know we could spend 10, 12, 14 hours talking on this.
And I'm yet again, super tempted.
I need to get a break between gigs and actually bite the bullet nine 10 on doing that.
David and obviously operating a piece of evolving a piece of software of this complexitytakes a lot of effort without going into specific numbers.

(45:51):
Obviously I understand that, but I mean, are you a sizeable team now and how do you
sort of know in 10 years that you're going to be able to keep up the pace on this becauseit's an amazing effort.
So the team, the developer part has changed.
When we first started, it was Nabosia, my development partner and me.

(46:11):
Now, I don't want to get into a whole thing about software developers.
Well, no, no, no, no.
But the range of abilities of different software developers, can be orders of magnitudedifference.
And I hate the term coding, by the way.
To me, code...
To me, coding is like, you know, you want to do a website, you know, can, you can get someoffshore company.

(46:34):
They'll throw five gigabytes of backend shit into your computer and then write 20 lines ofcode.
And yeah, there's your website, you know, so to me, if you're developing and inventing tome, that's not coding coding is when you just glue stuff together that somebody else
wrote.
So, um,
The key thing is the approach that we take to software development.

(46:57):
And my partner and I, Nibosha at the time, who's also a phenomenally great softwaredeveloper, we worked on completely different parts.
So his expertise was the GUI stuff and the juice, the audio engine and stuff like that.
My expertise was the networking and the programming language.

(47:19):
because we built our own programming lines, we didn't take one.
my research work when I was a computer scientist was programming language design, built alot of languages.
So a lot of the stuff we were just doing our own thing and everything fit together.
And then every few days we'd argue over something, both understanding that it was neverpersonal, it was just we're pushing each other to make the best decisions and that's how

(47:43):
we got stuff.
And that worked very well.
Any time we outsourced a couple of things, the results were horrible.
The first audio player that we have, we outsourced it.
Biggest mistake we ever made.
Poor Naboja spent two months fixing bugs in it after.

(48:04):
I mean, if you look at the code, it's like you just pull your hair out.
This was years ago.
So we've been cautious since then.
I now about a year ago, so after my partner died, had a whole business because I had todeal with who owns this company and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I now own it 100%.

(48:27):
And once that happened, it took about a year to sort that out, I was able to start lookingfor new people.
And I found I have a couple of amazing people that are working pretty much full time,which is speeding things up tremendously.
So we normally don't talk about future stuff.
We've always made that the thing.
My position is I put my consumer hat on.

(48:49):
I don't want to do stuff that I hate having done to me as a consumer.
So I want you to buy a gig performer based on what it can do for you today, not on what itmight be able to do for you tomorrow.
So we never make any promises.
I mean, we generally don't talk about what we will do because if we don't do it,

(49:09):
We don't want people to say, I bought it because you said you were going to do blah, blah.
So we never promise.
But something that we expect to have, again, I'm going to say, even though it's up andrunning and working in our current beta, not saying anything, there'll be a future big
thing.
But we now have a concept that's similar to the keyboard view that you see in mainstage.

(49:32):
Now, the thing is our view is much more complicated because we have to represent an
arbitrary graph as opposed to a linear, you got a keyboard with a thing and thing andanother one in a channel.
can have one, I can have one midi in block going to five different plugins, or I can havefive different midi in blocks going to a single plugin and anywhere in between.

(49:55):
So visualizing that is a much more complicated thing, but one of our team members, Eldadis phenomenal, came up with a great way to do it and it has that up and running and it
works very nicely for people who want that.
So.
You know, and we've brought on we've somebody else now who just joined who were veryexcited about who's doing another separate area.

(50:16):
And what that means for me, and because these guys both are high end people, you don'thave to tell them what to do.
And and they'll they'll they'll write the code in the right kind of approach that's easyto maintain.
That's now freeing me up because I was like working like seven days a week, 14 hourscrazy.

(50:37):
I want to get back to GP script needs an overhaul because when I developed GP script, Iwas thinking 20 lines of code to do like, I need a mini transposer.
want to add a second note to what I'm playing.
People have written GP scripting with 10,000 lines in them.
Wow.
And it was just, and it works, which is remarkable, but was never designed for that.

(50:58):
And so I want to rebuild a piece of that to have a much bigger systems.
You know, I guess it's
proof that it worked.
People started doing things that we never expected.
A lot of stuff coming, which is very cool.
We just actually released a new little update just a few days ago, actually, 5.0.40, whichmostly it fixes a couple of things that people discovered and it adds a couple of little

(51:23):
features and that's out now as well.
So it's going pretty well.
using it.
I keep discovering we've got these high profile users using it all around the world.
We didn't even know about them because they just buy it.
We're not fans of giving away and yeah, sure.
Have it for free.
You know, that's like, yeah.

(51:44):
Hey, band.
Great.
Awesome.
Listen, come to my house and do a free show with you.
mean, it's right.
We'll do a video for you.
So, so we don't discount really.
We don't do any of that stuff.
So people buy it.
And then we discover, whoa, we've got all these like famous people using the thing, whichis awesome.
And
They didn't get paid to say nice things about it.

(52:05):
They put their money where their mouth was.
I love that.
Exactly.
And we're in the same boat.
So I want to emphasize to everyone listening or watching, we've got no, there's beennothing set up between David and I just wanted to interview David because he's a
fascinating guy.
And I've seen the work that's gone into gig performer.
And I can honestly say David just been involved in a whole bunch of different Facebookgroups and forums, music players.

(52:28):
I've never heard a bad report about gig performer.
I just honestly haven't.
I've never seen a
single gripe, know, detailed gripe about this doesn't work or that doesn't work.
Whereas I'd be the first to admit as a main stage user, there's no shortage of those.
And sure, the, I'm guessing the user base for main stages is larger, but yeah, I thinkit's a testament to the work you've done.

(52:50):
Yeah, as I said, my goal was I'm getting up on stage.
I got to deal with, especially in the Pink Floyd stuff, the Steely Dan's easy, the PinkFloyd and security project was hard too.
I had four keyboards doing crazy stuff.
I need to focus on performing, not on worrying about will everything work.
And that really was our primary goal.

(53:11):
And I think we've been pretty successful.
And so let's talk about when things haven't worked well.
David, I know you mentioned in your weekend worry profile, but I think it's worth anothergo through because it's amazing.
Tell us about when you had a bit of a
Okay, so in the early days when I was touring with Security Project, I had an L-shape,which I wish I still had because I much prefer that shape.

(53:33):
Now I just have like two to four in a single pile.
But I used to have an L-shape thing.
And that's nice because you could do stuff with your right hand high up on one while doingI always loved L-shape.
Trey basically kept pushing me, you got to shrink down, you got to shrink down.
Because we'd go from a theater where you're like,
I need binoculars to see the other band members to a club where it's like, there's, youknow, I mean, I did one show with Pink Floyd where they'd like to put me on the floor

(54:00):
because there's no room.
so anyway, those days I had an L-shaped thing.
So I had, you know, a couple of keyboards here and a couple of keyboards here, orcontrollers.
One of the songs we did, and memory muscle, I learned everything.
I knew exactly all the splits you just played.
Um, you know, I was not a fan of program changes during the song.
I liked to have everything out there.

(54:22):
which is why I use multiple controllers, because then everything's there and it's justthere all the time and you just play.
So I had one song we were doing, it either I Have the Touch or No Self Control, was one ofthe things, both of which have this loop in it.
And basically, I would start off the thing and I would go bind and it would start theloop.

(54:44):
We do this show, it was up in Buffalo at the Tralf, which is a well-known venue.
Do it.
Nothing happens.
Do it again.
Nothing happens.
I'm panicking.
This was still early days.
You know, I think this was the first or second tour.
I still wasn't used to all this thing.

(55:04):
It's like, Jesus.
So I'm like telling, you know, do something else, do something else.
But anyway, Trey comes over to me.
He was so kind.
He sat down beside me and said, relax, think this through, blah, blah, blah.
So I'm trying again.
Nothing happens.
I rebooted my computer.
nothing happens and I'm like going, I'm like talking about pressure, you know, there's allthese people to the stage.

(55:28):
I'm sure somebody's going to throw a tomato at me in a minute, you know?
And then it suddenly hit me.
Wait, normally I have my keyboards.
Now remember I'm facing out there.
So the audience is here.
So there's the audience.
I normally have keyboards here and keyboards here.
Because of the layout of the stage and the trough and where the door was for coming on,which was in the middle, my keyboards were rotated.

(55:56):
So actually it was my rant.
I was kind of used to doing this, but in fact I needed to do this wrong keyboard.
You know, I was just so used to it.
And then I suddenly realized, shit, my keyboards are different, wrong keyboard.
And that's all it was.
But I mean, I felt terrible.
Yeah, that's funny.
I like it.

(56:17):
know, yeah, you know, there's been other screw ups.
The Lamb Lines down on Broadway, that intro in the early days, there were a couple oftimes I screwed it up royally.
And so, know, ended up, Trey thought this was hysterical.
So I'm playing the thing, and I went wrong.
So I just went, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whoo, that's the thing.
And everybody cracked up.

(56:38):
And then Trey came up to me afterwards.
goes, that was awesome, man.
And he meant it.
And I'm like, I was dying.
So yeah, you know, Part I've learned it well enough that it becomes automatic.
And I kind of have a vaguely sad example of that.
We were on tour in Poland and part of Europe and my mother died.

(57:02):
I got a call just before the show that she died.
The funeral was going to be the next day, but I had to do the show.
We were there.
So I'm doing the show and I'm, of course, I'm thinking about everything and
My son has to drive down to meet my wife and then the two of are going to get on theplane.
And I'm busy playing.
And you know, it's so automatic.
I got through the whole show fine and then flew home.

(57:24):
And it reminded me, this is great description.
The difference between an amateur, I'm an amateur.
Yes, I've gotten paid and blah, blah.
But I am, this has not been my career.
The difference between an amateur and a pro, you've probably heard this before, but Ithink it's so accurate.
and amateur practices so that they don't make any mistakes, a pro practices so that theycan't make any mistakes.

(57:51):
And you know what?
It's dead right.
You do it, it becomes just so automatic.
And that's why I made that mistake because of muscle memory, I just did what I always did.
My keyboards were in the wrong place.
But for the most part, you're playing, you're automatically, you're doing what you need todo, blah, blah, blah, and everything just works.
I hadn't actually heard that one day.

(58:11):
That's a great piece of advice.
Yeah, it's absolutely dead right now.
Thank you.
Now due to time we're down to our last two questions.
We always ask our guests to tag another keyboard player.
So is there a player out there that you've always admired David that you'd love to hearmore about their story?
So that's a funny one.
My hero is Keith Emerson.

(58:33):
Which by the way, the first time I heard ELP, when I was a teenager, I was in England, Ibought an album, I was like, what the hell is this?
And I didn't listen to them for another 10 years.
I didn't understand what they were doing.
He turned, became my hero in terms of just composition and playing.
To Korea, Joe Zawinul.
Yeah.
Rick Wakeman used to, I found he kind of after his first couple of albums, which I thoughtwere terrific, it became too like the same for me.

(59:01):
I found, know, Keith Emerson right until the day he died was still doing new stuff and bemore, you know, but I will be very honest with you.
I have never followed the people.
Yeah.
My position was, okay, you're a musician, you're great, I love your music, I wanna playmore of it or listen to it, but what you do in your personal life, that's your personal

(59:25):
life.
That's right.
I was on the cruise to the edge once, remember?
don't think you know about that.
I went to one of those, just to, it was great, but I'm sitting down at lunch with a bunchof people and they're all talking, and one guy starts talking to me and he's telling me
all about Yes.
Yes was playing the thing.
And he said to yeah, um...
John Anderson owns the LLC and this guy owns that and blah blah.

(59:47):
I'm like, what?
It's like Close to the Edge is one of the greatest albums ever.
I don't care who owns the LLC.
So I can't answer that beyond, admire the music, know, in the rock world.
There's a couple of classical pieces that I think are just tremendous.
But in the rock world, would be Keith Emerson, it be Joe Zalinal, Chick Corea was Returnto Forever.

(01:00:12):
There some guitarists that I think were phenomenal.
Al Di Meola, for example, comes to mind.
You know, just gorgeous players.
What's his name from Focus?
God.
Not Typhoon Lear is the, Ackerman.
Absolutely gorgeous player.
You know, and you listen to some of those guys and it's like, just beautiful.

(01:00:35):
Yes.
Great picks.
Appreciate it.
Now, one question we usually ask, but we don't need to, and I'm going to quickly read themout, David, because I wouldn't expect you to remember them.
But from your weekend warrior profile, you chose five desert island disks.
And I'll read them out quickly.
Genesis, selling England by the pound, halts the planets.
Close to the edge, you've just mentioned from, yes, heavy weather from Weather Report andthe iconic brain salad surgery from Emerson Lake and Palmer.

(01:01:00):
Great picks.
That's the quickest desert island disks ever.
Now I'll go to the last question, which is our quick fire 10, David, which is quick, shortand sharp answers to 10.
What are hopefully not too hard questions.
First album you ever heard.
With all respect, I'm old.
I mean, you know, I mean, I'd like had 45s and listening to like pop songs as a kid, youknow, you know, I'm, my father used to tease me.

(01:01:26):
She loves me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
When I was a kid, but
That's as good as anything.
No, that's good.
Before you do play a gig, David, what is an important ritual to you?
What do you need to do to feel settled before a gig?
Fair enough.
don't have any superstitious rituals.
I never understood that stuff.
I do, however, get to a show early and set everything up so that if there is a problemwith anything, I have plenty of time to sort it out.

(01:01:55):
I don't like this last minute.
I tell our customers, by the way, if you're touring, do not update your computer, evenwith a gig performer, anything within two weeks of a tour.
If you have a problem, you've...
plenty of non-stressed time to deal with it.
early, make sure everything just works.
Computer boots up, cables are connected.

(01:02:16):
My front of house is like 10 seconds.
I feed them eight channels of pink noise.
Set your trims to zero and you're done with me.
There you go.
lovely.
Yeah, it's a great idea to pick noise.
If you, think you've already flagged the answer to this, but I'll ask it anyway.
If you hadn't been a musician, what do you think your career choice would have been?
Well, being a musician isn't my career choice.

(01:02:37):
a computer scientist by training.
I had an absolutely great time living in the research world and doing all sorts of crazystuff, including, by the way, running a computer music research group for about six years
at IBM.
I haven't even flagged and I know you're not the sort of person to flag these things, butyou've got a PhD, don't you?

(01:02:57):
In computer science.
Yeah, in computer science, yeah.
Ironically, the use of sound and sonification for debugging code.
So can listen to bugs.
Yeah.
There you go.
Yeah, that a long time ago.
Yeah, favourite tour you've ever done.
I'm guessing it was that wonderful tour of Europe, but feel free to contradict me.

(01:03:18):
My favorite, my...
The tour in Europe certainly goes down as a thing to...
to, I guess, I mean, that's really the only big tour.
All the others were tours in the US, like, within a couple of weeks.
Yeah.
You know, this thing was a month long living on a tour bus.
The worst days and the best days all mixed together.

(01:03:39):
Exactly.
I got to a point where I took a half a sleeping pill every night before getting into thislittle berth on the tour bus.
while the guy was driving over the Swiss Alps, mountains, and the snow at 70 miles anhour.
Yeah, I'm hearing you.
Yeah.
Favorite gig you've ever done if that's possible.
My favorite gigs have all the...

(01:03:59):
Okay, so I guess there's two answers to that.
One is when I first fell into doing gigs at theaters.
I loved, I'm here, the drummer's way there, blah, and you're in this zone if you're on,and I use in-ear monitoring with molded in-ears, so I'm only hearing living room levels of
myself.
You're in this isolation chamber kind of thing, doing your own thing and everything elsejust happening.

(01:04:24):
I've always loved that.
Yeah.
My favorite local, there's a place called Darrell's House.
Yes.
Do know Daryl's house in Portland, York?
I've played there about five to six times a year with all three bands that I've been in.
That's my favorite venue as a club because it's so musician friendly.

(01:04:46):
I just played there actually, we just played there a couple of weeks ago, Full House, wedid the entire wall.
And we're going back again in August already.
They already booked us again, but I just love that place.
Yeah, no, great pick.
Favourite city you've ever played, David?
Probably Tokyo when we went to Japan.

(01:05:08):
We did Tokyo and Saka I think it was.
And that was just what a different culture.
We turned it into, my wife came with me.
She never comes things on tour, obviously.
She's not stupid, but she came and then we turned it into a two week vacation.

(01:05:28):
That was fascinating.
That was a great experience.
Yeah, name a song that you used to love but you've played it to death and maybe don't likeit so much anymore.
There are songs that I used to play that I never liked.
Does that count?
So when I was playing, when I got back into playing in the early 2000s, I was in a localkind of weekend warrior band in the town where I lived.

(01:05:51):
We did a bunch of gigs and they did a lot of just pop songs and covers and very repetitivestuff.
So there'd be like a Creedence Clearwater, there'd be Rolling Stones.
I had an ad once that said, looking for band, if you want to play Rolling Stones, don'tcall me.
I really wrote that.
I don't like monotonous stuff.

(01:06:14):
There has to be color and nuance and change.
Really just kind of just straight covers like that I got bored with.
Yeah, no reasonable.
Favorite music documentary or movie?
I have not seen that many.
I think the one about Queen was very good.

(01:06:36):
But was it what was I forget what it was called.
You mean the movie Bohemian Rhapsody?
Was it called?
Yeah, was it document?
Biopic.
There's also, yeah, no, you're right.
There's also a great documentary.
So yeah, I know the way.
Yeah, there's a movie as well.
Yes, you're right.
Yeah, I mixed them up.
I thought that was fabulous.
The Bob Dylan one we just saw recently was actually very interesting.

(01:07:00):
don't listen to words much.
it's like Manford Man, who's a band that I really admire.
didn't know the song I listening to.
My wife said, that's the Bob Dylan song.
said, is it?
Yeah.
So but they were very interesting.
As I said, I don't really follow the musicians.
I you what was great.

(01:07:21):
There was a documentary about session musicians and the impact they have and all thestuff.
L.A.
Session musicians.
I don't remember the name.
I the one you mean, I've watched it about three times.
Yeah, I know it's great.
Yeah.
Yeah, it was.
Name one thing you'd like to see invented that would make your life as a keyboard playereasier.
I'd argue you've already done it, but anything you want to suggest there.

(01:07:43):
Honestly, if I knew the answer to that, I'd probably be off building it.
That's right.
I know you've already done it with gig performer, but...
mean, there is that, you know, I would, I wish somebody would come out with a really niceweighted controller with multiple with a built in audio interface that's class compliant,

(01:08:06):
by the way, so you don't have to install drivers that would have like eight outs.
Yeah.
Cause I use up to eight, four stereo pairs, sometimes three and a sub and a click track.
and I wish there was a controller that, had that.
And it would have to be like RME type driver quality because I use an RME interface now.

(01:08:28):
That damn thing is just flaws.
Yeah, no, I like it.
I'd love to see that and I looked at NAMM and I saw a couple things and said, you've got agreat audio interface, you've got a nice keyboard controller, why don't you put them
together?
I would like that, that would slim me down a bit.
No, great suggestion.
And last but not least, your favourite non-musical activity or hobby, what keeps you saneoutside of this insane business?

(01:08:53):
I have lot of hobbies that I'm involved in.
I'm a ham radio operator, I read, I snow ski, used to water ski.
Yeah, I have lot of different interests.
Reading is probably relevant.
I still keep up with lot of technical stuff so that you don't get left behind.

(01:09:14):
and you certainly haven't been left behind with what you're doing with Geek Performer, letalone what you're doing with playing.
I can't thank you enough, David, it's been an absolute pleasure.
Like all of our guests, we've barely scratched the surface, but we love the fact thatyou've spent this hour with us.
Happy to, back at you, I appreciate you taking the time.

(01:09:39):
And there we have it.
I hope you enjoyed that chat with David.
I know I'm very enthusiastic often have another go at gig performer.
I know main stage can be incredibly reliable and the probably the reason it's somewhatunreliable for me is user error, not main stages issue, but I'm, am keen to check this
out.
And as I said in the show, we're in no way sponsored by gig performer.

(01:10:02):
We say it like it is, but I just feel a bit enthusiastic.
Go check it out.
Thank you as always for listening and a big shout out to our gold and silver sponsors.
So the wonderful Tammy Ketch from Tammy's Musical Studio.
Thank you Tammy, as always.
The wonderful Ed from Elk Electronic, particularly if you're Australia based and need somegreat synth repair or other advice, Ed is the guy.

(01:10:24):
If you Google Elk electronic ending in K as well, you'll find Ed's work.
And he also produces his own
amazing little modules, both synth modules, and I know he's just done a CV controller forlighting, I think it is called the Color KOLOR.
Do check that out.
So that thank you to Ed.

(01:10:45):
A big thanks to Mike at Midnight Mastering as always too.
Wonderful mastering services and mixing services.
Do check out Midnight Mastering.
And last but very not least is Dave Bryce and the team at the musicplayer.com forums.
Still going from strength to strength, lots of great discussions.
I know I've been involved in a couple of chats there this week on things as varied as theViscount Legend 1, which I'm still drilling to order one once we get some Australian stock

(01:11:13):
through to a whole bunch of stuff about AI and much, much more.
So do check that out.
Again, thank you for listening.
We'll be back in a couple of weeks and until then keep on playing.