DJ Deadmau5 Is a Gear Head

[Upbeat Techno]

I like notes that don't land on,

you know,

quantized to a sixteenth grid

for a barg.

[Upbeat Techno]

One particular piece of hardware that we took a liking to

that I use in my live-sets is a thing called the monome.

[Monome plays Synthetic Tune]

It comes in a box

with no manual, no software...

[Offscreen] Right.

No nothing.

Just that and USB cable.

And then there's a forum you go to,

and then they're like,

'You have to download the FTDI driver from this site...'

Right.

'And run that, and this is your serial application.'

And everyone's just like why you gotta...

They're telling me, have you got it all?

And I'm like right.

And what am I going to do?

And now I want to go to sleep.

Yeah, and I'm too tired.

There was a bit of a buzz around it,

but the problem we found with the monome was that

you have to run max

and there's P in the background.

And then you have to run your live applications

and it can only send over mininote.

And then the problem with Ableton Live is that

it didn't accept Always C which is the

communication protocol that this thing uses.

So it was just like a pile of hackness.

So you've basically taken the max MSP out of the equation

and then came out a kind of

step sequence or base application and connect it to

this device without any third party applications

where we could use that kind of MIDI information

or Always C information to trigger loops

and drive hits and all that kind of stuff, so...

[Looping Techno]

Your final mixes are...

To the point where like,

mastering people don't really need to even mess with it.

[Grinding Music]

Everyone's got like, a kind of methodology

for making a bus for,

say, just your drums on that channel.

'Cause you want only certain things to

compress certain things.

So it's like all of the bass.

Only one kit or drumset.

To dock that bass. Nothing else.

I want this highhat going, you know.

It's a lot of bus time.

So you develop these kinds of systems

like bus routines where you go through.

Coming up with that is like, you know,

culmination of ten years worth of just screwing around

with certain bits of hardware and software

and techniques and stuff like that.

[Winding Up Techno]