Gigging and my health

A week ago I did the stimulacrum gig. It went well and I felt like my efforts paid off. The response was very positive and thrilling for me. I wanted to shed some light on the behind-the-scenes stuff and also document some of the struggles I've been having with regard to gigging and my health.

The set was performed on a pair of Elektron synthesizers - a Monomachine and a Machinedrum UW, with custom firmware (X.01A and X.10), a MegaCMD with MCL 4.51, an Arturia Minilab 3, and a 3x3 MIDI merge device (U6 MIDI pro) to route everything. It was mixed with a Mackie Mix8 and recorded with a Zoom H4N Pro recorder from the tape output.

The routing was essentially:

1. MD in -> MCL out 1
2. MD out -> MCL in 1
3. MnM in -> U6 out 1
4. MnM out -> U6 in 1
5. MCL in 2 -> U6 out 2
6. MCL out 2 -> U6 in 2
7. MiniLab out -> U6 in 3

The MIDI merge routing was something like:

1. In 1 -> Out 2
2. In 2 -> Out 1
3. In 3 -> Out 1 & Out 2

And the Minilab was configured to either ch9 or ch10 depending on whether I was sending notes to the MnM or MD, respectively. The four sliders were mapped to the MCL perf controls, which are like macros that control a range of parameters across the synths, and differed depending on where I was in the set.

In terms of preparing & arranging the material... For the MD patterns, MCL was useful because I could copy and paste multiple patterns at once, though it was still quite tedious. On the MnM, I could copy and paste patterns individually or save multiple patterns via sysex to and from my PC with Elektroid via the U6 (since the U6 has USB MIDI ports too), but it required a lot of forethought to plan out exactly how I wanted to move my patterns around, and most of the time I was moving patterns around to try and figure out transitioning from one idea to the next. Also, since I was sending PGM out from MCL to the MnM, I needed the patterns on both synths to be lined up perfectly - A01 and A01 go together, A02 and A02 go together, etc.

It has to be said - arranging and preparing my material in this way has been quite a time-consuming process, but tedium is normally fine with me, and I think the result is worth it.

A few issues I encountered were that rapid tempo changes between patterns could make the MIDI clock fall out of sync between the two synths... So I relied on speeding up the tempo preemptively at a couple of moments during the set. The other issue was that it seemed like the MnM could get overwhelmed by the CC coming in from the perf controls from MCL, which could cause more desync. This happened in the last minute of the set, actually, which is why I decided to end it with a tempo slowdown to try and work with the chaos, but I thought that turned out to make for a great ending anyway. It could be that this is not MCL's fault, and is actually due to the MIDI merge becoming overwhelmed, so I'll have to do some testing.

Another curious part of the process was processing the samples to be used on the MD. Since it only has 2.5MB of space, and only accepts uncompressed lossless audio, removing silence from audio as much as possible was vital, and downsampling from 44.1 to ~22kHz could also be used to save space where the higher frequencies weren't as important for a particular sound. Another way to address this has been to speed up audio and then slow it down when using it as needed, which can allow for longer samples - though I didn't end up doing that too much. Some of the things I used as material were the opening to Mako Mermaids, various SFX from White Day (2001), some basic drum samples, and even a couple of experiments I did with AI voice generation with Bark a few months back (heard as reversed whispering at some point).

As for the music itself... It comes from jams ranging from 2021 until now. The start was 2024, then it shifted into 2022-2023, then the part with the spooky chord progression is 2024 again, and the final track is a revival of something I did in 2021. Some of my favourite things about the custom firmware is the way it lets me randomise trigs, use different loop lengths per track, and do microtiming.

I have given the parts track names too:

1. slifer the sky dragon
2. puzzle pieces
3. haunted house
4. wwuw wuuw wwwu
5. candy slices
6. churns unending
7. dancing in the rain

I enjoyed the gig a lot and I'm thrilled by the response it got, but it and the process that led up to it were marred a little by some health issues which I've had for the past year, and which reached a peak in the days leading up to it, leading me to go to the hospital in the early morning of the 23rd (the day before the gig). I've had issues with a tender pain/ache in my chest, paired with dizziness, breathlessness, muscle weakness, and mild nausea, and haven't been sure what to make of it. I've received ECGs, blood tests, and examinations with a stethoscope, at least a couple of times each, but they've all come back normal each time. The only thing I was told about me physically is that I'm low on potassium, in a nutritional sense, which prompted me to eat loads of bananas suddenly.

Something that was told to me throughout is that this may be a kind of psychosomatic, stress, or anxiety-induced issue. Initially, I acknowledged that it could be, or at the very least, something which doesn't help. But now, after coming back clear many times and researching what these kinds of psychosomatic symptoms can be like, I think it's very possible I have developed a kind of panic disorder, which is annoying because I feel like the past year has been an improvement, mentally, from the quite nasty years that came before.

I still want to rule anything else out that I can, and I've been referred to having a heart monitor (though goodness knows how long that'll take to come around), but I'm definitely suspicious. I have learned that these panic symptoms can happen very randomly and be very extreme for what they are. In several moments, I felt fear, like I was going to die; my body locks up as I find it harder and harder to breathe, and my sleep has taken a huge hit from this too. The heart aches, dizziness, and breathlessness come at random - however, it has a moderate chance of subsiding if I get distracted or pulled into something that I don't have to think much about. Talking to a friend, playing a video game, etc. At rest, it gets worse. It's like my brain is wired to fill up with thoughts at every available moment, and when nothing is going on, it nervously tries to seize the moment without my consent or awareness.

Going forward, I just hope that I can cope with it. I want to play more, but I haven't been able to shake the negative association that's formed with it yet.

Anyway, I will release the recording / master of the set very soon, and shortly after I plan to release the one I did back in 2022 as well (which was like an early run of a lot of the concepts I've talked about here).