Despite evidence to the contrary music is in my genes. My mum is a classically trained singer, my sister plays violin to orchestra standard and my step-dad (while not a genetic connection) is a conductor, and not of buses. Like most kids I did the instrument thing at school but gave up the trombone when I was about 16, probably because it was a trombone and, well, it’s a trombone and I was 16. But I do have a pretty good music ear even if I’ve never done anything with it other than listen to stuff. And drum along on my knees.

So it’s with a strange sense of pride that I’ll be performing my first piece of live music since school days sometime in the next few months. I don’t think it’s quite what my mum had in mind when she paid for all those lessons but it will involve me on a stage making music, of a kind. Yes, this involves the Thingamagoop.

When I blogged my first experiments with the Thinga on Friday the reaction was generally postive, I think, and the last line, in which I mooted doing this live with an army of them, sparked a notion in the mind of Josh, the geezer behind local listings site Live Brum who threw me an email:

In return for an absolute commitment to perform live somewhere in Birmingham within 6 months I propose that Live Brum sponsors you to the tune of a couple of Thingamakits to go with your current monstrosity so you can form an orchestra.

And I said yes and Josh blogged it and so it was written and would happen no matter what. An order was place and some £20 notes were thrust into my hand on Monday when we met up. They were particularly dirty £20 notes which I quite liked. Made the whole exercise somewhat more authentic.

Bleep Labs have a bit of a backlog so I won’t be getting my mitts on the new beasties for a few weeks, and when I do I have to assemble them using a soldering iron, something I’ve never done before but I gather it’s not that hard really, but I’ve figured out how it’s going to work. When sister and family emigrated, bro-in-law Jeff unloaded a few bits of electrical equipment he couldn’t sell onto me, specifically a live mixing desk that runs off 120v and the absurdly heavy power transformer that makes it work in this country. I’ve never had any use for it but figured it’d be handy to hang on to (and had no chance of selling it anyway). Now I have a use. I can plug my three Thingas into a channel each and mix them live. Result.

But there’s something missing. Sure, I can mix these little fuckers together and create an almighty racket but it’s not necessarily going to me music, especially if I’m going to be doing it live. I need a bit of control. Then I listened back to Thingamagoop Test Track 3 from Friday, which sounds like this:

[audio:thingamagoop_test_3.mp3]

and realised it’s not about melody. It’s about rhythm. This is essentially percussion I’m playing with here. What it needs to tie it together and keep me on some kind of track is a beat. I looked around at cheap drum machines before realizing I have a drum machine on my Mac. Garageband comes with drum loops and while they’re not the most original they’ll do the job. So the Mac becomes the fourth channel.

Then I started thinking about the performance itself. The nice thing about the Thingas is they react to light. Any light. So I can play them with any light source. Bike lights, desk lamps, maybe even the levels indicators on the mixing desk. Anything is possible. I could even cover myself in small LEDs is play them by moving them over my body. Actually, a couple of people jokingly offered to do interpretive dance to my performance. Maybe I could cover them in lights or mirrors and play off their movements? The possibilities are endless.

Oh, and it’ll probably happen at a future Robot vs Dinosaur if they’ll have me. I can’t think of a better venue.

The one thing I’m keen not to do, however, is call this an orchestra. Brian Duffy has already cornered that territory with his Modified Toy Orchestra and ZX Spectrum Orchestra and while I don’t think he has exclusivity on the term I do feel to call what I’m doing orchestral would involve a certain level of circuit bending, which I’m not doing at all. All I’m doing is taking instruments (admittedly rather odd looking instruments) and playing them in the manner in which their creator intended. While I hope Lord Duffy would enjoy the results I feel sure he wouldn’t find the process that interesting so I’d like to distance myself from his endeavours, at least for now.

What I’m doing is more like a one man band, playing three synths and a drum machine. And I need a name for my band, the only part of all this that has gotten me stumped. A chat with Danny produced the name “Bleep Jay Pete” but it didn’t really grow on me. Any ideas people?

And if I can produce anything as genius as this, a performance using many circuit-bent Pikachu toys, then I’ll be a happy man. (Thanks to Nikki for the link.)

Oh, and before I go, this notion was sponsored by Live Brum, purveyors of fine events-related data to the Birmingham conurbation.