Unorganized Ghost In The Machine

So, anyway, on my essay Perfect Pitch, old comment-friend Dave from the wrong coast asked:

Whoa that was amazing. Know what I really really want for Christmas???
Use Me, by Bill Withers
Not the dude, the SONG. Nice little stretch for the boyos methinks
I’m betting on the 10 year old and I’m putting $50 on the table.
By Christmas. 2013.

Professor D
Fretboard Kinesthesiologist 

Well, as usual, be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it.

The little feller’s mysterious abilities range further than President Math, and Perfect Pitch, and being the Greatest Ten Year Old Drummer in the world. He likes computer programming, and electronic music.  His older brother put a copy of FL Studio on his work computer, in order to edit the rough tracks they use on YouTube videos. Our latest purchase for the boys’ videos, made possible by the generous support of my readers, was an input/output digitizer. It allows them to record up to sixteen separate signals at the same time, turns each of those feeds into digital signals (microphones are analog) that can be directly inserted into a computer for mixing. They used to have to do it one or two tracks at a time. It wasn’t cheap, but it was well worth the money we spent.

FL Studio was free. The little feller figured out that you could compose electronic music on it. He started sneaking into his big brother’s room early in the morning, putting on headphones, and monkeying around with it. He looks quite comical in there, the big hemispheres of the headphones on his little head, and the big screen full of virtual sliders and knobs and so forth on the screen in front of him. He looks like a mad scientist on his day off.

It’s a sequencer, and drum machine, and noisemaker par excellence. And that little boy can play it like a Stradivarius, getting all sorts of noise out of it. He’s composed dozens of fairly long pieces of electronic music, all by himself, with piquant names like Zither, OS, Don’t You Dare, Petrified, Iowa, Bismarck, Prism, Maps Of Salem, #45, That’s Correct, Acid Reflex.  According to him, they’re “Acid House, Brostep, Complextro, and sometimes Trance.” I’m old, so they’re all Kraftwerk to me. They are all between three and seven minutes long, and coherent and interesting.

So Dave bet on the ten year old. Dave bet wisely.

[Remember, it’s not too late to download an mp3 of Unorganized Hancock’s Generic Christmas Song at Bandcamp; only 99 cents, or any amount you’d like to give. And Merry Christmas!