In several of my videos and entries I have already made reference to either the monome or the arduinome project, without saying much about what it is all about. So, with my participation in the upcoming Monome Community Remix Project (v2), I thought I’d share some thoughts on the monome and my experiences.
First of all, the creators of the monome are amazing. They have designed an amazing project, and helped build a strong community of musicians and designers, financially supporting themselves in the process. Not only that, but they have shared their hard work with the world, open-sourcing the design and the software, enabling others like myself to DIY and save about $250 off their (totally worth it) $500 hand-made instrument. While I lean toward the more hacktivismo open-source anti-capitalist side of things, I have appreciate the quality that they have been able to achieve, and if anyone deserves to profit off of a creation, its them.
But, I can only speak from others’ experiences as I have yet to hold a ‘real’ monome in my hands, instead working with an arduinome that I assembled last summer. I think I was one of the first few to have a completed arduinome up and running, although there aren’t a whole lot of them in existence yet. And why? Because building this thing is not easy! It probably took me over a hundred hours total, including the time I had to resolder half the breakoff board connections because I read an old diagram, and having to try and reglue the boards twice (never did get them to stick together right, anyway). But all in all, it was worth it.
Now I get to participate in a truly unique community. There are some seriously geeky musicians out there, and they have been writing amazing code, all of which I can use for free. Unfortunately, with the advent of Max for Live, this might not be true anymore. Nonetheless, I stand on the shoulders of giants when I load up mlr and soyuz and polygome.
In about of week the MCRPv2 will be over, so I really need to get on mangling those samples up. I’m probably going to try for a non-monomey sounding track, instead chopping up the clips to make some tech-house style music. I’ll post the results here, as well as another entry on the monome and my workflow.
