My friend and I won the star6 audience choice youtube contest (chiming in a bit late on this thread)… but I have done a good half dozen live performances with star6. I’ve been able to get people dancing to it… It’s the only app I’ve found on the iPhone that actually acts like an instrument. A very cool, different, and extremely expressive instrument.

I generally play guitars of some sort or another, but I love using star6 because it’s easy to learn and extremely deep once you get into it. The pitch control, for example, can be used to actually do basslines… kind of like playing a tilt operated trombone or something.

Lot’s of fun, like e’ryday.

As for iPhone apps, I’m in the process of trying this app now. The only other music app I have is Bebot. Both, I think, lend themselves to being put through a mixer and performed as an instrument in their own respects.

With all my respect to the performers, but, to say the least… the actual music was just lots of distortion and some leather jacket guy acting “avant garde”. If I make that noise with a Korg M1 which is right now “totally uncool”, would you cover my gig?. I know it’s a subjective thing but for me this is falling into a hype thing. If it’s made by an Iphone suddenly it’s interesting, although there’s no melody or recognizable rhythm.

It’s like the “leaf trombone” thing. Don’t get me wrong, please. Total respect for the app developer, as I’m a coder and a geek myself, but it seems that nobody wants to point that musically most of these apps are just sound toys. And yes, you could make a masterpiece out of a toy, but it takes a lot of effort to really know your instrument and create something interesting. There are videos out there of people playing amazing instrumentals with their supermarket Yamaha PSR’s who don’t get this coverage.

So, I’m not bashing against Iphone or chipmusic. I’m complaining againts people that seems to dedicate more time to choose a trendy t-shirt to go onstage and look supercool instead of programming their samples.

Give me some Edison monome video intead of a guy headbanging to a squarewave.

By the way, the banjo guy rocked. And the accordion girl was hot with the tiara.

Take for example take a look at how a huge stadium will watch and cheer on a celebrity DJ. What’s Tiesto doing up there beyond mixing a record or two? Well, he’s reading the crowd and if he’s good then he is shaping the context of the evening, but his actual “live” performance contains no “actual” performance of music.

Then on the other side of the spectrum, consider the tape performances by the electro-acoustic set. They saw so need for the live performance but rather the live presentation of hearing sound on a larger level.

But I think most audiences in western civilization come in some way from string-based music. So your average audience’s experience is to see performers performing. So in regards to performing with one’s iPhone I can say that people usually find it pretty interesting. With Star6, one has such a huge range of sound that the audience is usually more surprised than anything else. ATM it’s definitely a “gee-wiz” attitude, but as more sophisticated apps keep arriving on the market, and as users become more familiar with what is happening from a music/technical standpoint it will become more commonplace and also more accepted.

As for Star6, I was personally very surprised to see just how diverse the music was at our evening in Berlin. Of course we chose different types of musicians to perform, but we had very little idea about what they would actually do. The diversity between Kiki Moorse and Ben Butler and Mousepad is pretty staggering!

Can a entire musical genre die a horrid death from just one video?

Yes. Yes it can.

3. With electronic musical instruments, the audience can not be sure how much (if any) of the musical ideas generated are executed in real-time (like a banjo performance) rather than playback/manipulation of previously recorded/generated. I’m not arguing that one process is “better” than another. Rather I’m suggesting that even though the paradigm is continuing to shift, when audiences attend a live performance, they expect to hear “live” music.