We founded Electrotap in January 2004 after working together on a lot of projects in the preceding years.  Since then a lot has changed, both in the world and in our lives.  Jesse now has four amazing kids and I’m privileged to have two.  Jesse is a full tenure-track faculty member at LSU.  I am fully engaged working with Cycling ’74.  In the process we had let Electrotap wane.  We decided that for 2012 we would reinvigorate Electrotap and see what we could learn from the experience.  We learned a lot.

Some exciting progress was made brainstorming new products, updating TapTools for Max 6, launching the new Hemispheres, releasing our first iOS app, selling a minimal version of the Teabox, and overhauling the website.  We exhausted ourselves in the process, but it was the fun kind of exhaustion!

The World Has Changed

One of the things we learned was that despite any efforts in updating our existing product line, these products have essentially run their course.  The world has changed.

The Teabox

When the Teabox was released in 2004 it was not only superior in its performance, but it was also competitively priced ($400 as compared to the $650 I-Cube or $1200 Kroonde).  In 2012 a $400 Teabox is still superior in performance, but a $40 Arduino is just too large a price gap to overcome.  It cost us more than three times that to produce a Teabox ourselves!

We sold the last of our Teaboxes in November and decided not to invest in building more.

TapTools

TapTools similarly finds itself in a dramatically different world.  When it was birthed in the late 1990′s and early 2000′s, there were essentially no decent free VST plug-ins that you could use.  There were many fewer objects in Max.  It was much harder to build things in Max.  Now the world is awash in free Max objects, free or cheap VST plug-ins, and Max itself is dramatically more full-featured and easier to learn and use.

While TapTools still has value, it does not possess the value that it once did when many considered the package to be “essential” to using Max and MSP.

Drawing Conclusions

The effort we poured into Electrotap this past year was rewarding, as Jesse and I greatly enjoy collaborating together.  It also cast into relief the aforementioned observations.  Electrotap has had a lot of successes, from TapTools to Hipno to the Teabox, to the Hemisphere.  But the amount of effort required to keep turning the cranks is also daunting.

As an example, prior to Electrotap, I had always considered myself an artist and composer first; an engineer or software designer second.  Since the birth of my second child I have not written a single piece of music.  I’m still in awe of Jesse in that he has managed to continue writing.

I’ve seen a number of other artist/coders in the past let their business side wane and wither, but never give clear closure to it. We don’t want to go back down that road. We need to have closure and make a clean cut.

It’s time to write music again.

Moving Forward

We know this news will impact some harder than others.  We are incredibly grateful to all who have supported us over the years, both through purchases and through words of encouragement and feedback.

The Teabox is now open source and you can find all of the design files for your use as you see fit.  The same is true for all of our sensors and accessories.

Stephan Moore is now selling the Hemisphere directly through his new company Isobel Audio.  We hope you will consider buying a Hemisphere from him!  They really are amazing and it was a tremendous privilege working with Stephan for all these years.

TapTools is getting a rebirth of sorts via 74 Objects.  It is now open source.  There is still a recommended donation of $25 for using it.  There is no more required authorization (the bane of my existence for the last N years).  The source code is available which, among other things, opens the door for bringing a Windows version back.  For anyone who has ordered TapTools from Electrotap over the last month, we have either refunded (or not charged you for) your purchases.

The future of Hipno is still cloudy due to the retirement of Pluggo by Cycling ’74.  Hopefully it will come back in some form, possibly through the Plugtastic project in Jamoma.

HipnoTouch is now available for free on the AppStore.

Thanks!

We genuinely appreciate the patronage, support, and opportunities that have been given to us each personally and as Electrotap.  We count the experience of Electrotap as one of the great blessings in our lives, and hope we have been able to share the blessing back in a small way to everyone else in our community.

Now it’s time to experience different opportunities and blessings.  It’s time to write music again.

So what have we accomplished so far in 2012?

• Launch of the 4 new Hemisphere models with Stephan Moore of Isobel Audio
• Introduce the new HipnoTouch app for the iPhone/iPod, with versions forthcoming for the iPad and Android.
• Updated Tap.Tools for Max 6
• We now sell Max 6 on our site, bundled with Tap.Tools, to offer a fabulous price (up to $199 discount).
• Released the source for one of the original Hipno plug-ins (Multilution) with plans to bring back a number of the original Hipno plug-ins in the future
• Introduced the Naked Teabox
• Reduced the price of the classic Teabox by $100
• We have Electrotap T-Shirts now!
• We’ve made some dramatic improvements to our support system for handling inquiries.  We are now able to get metrics to evaluate how we are doing, and we have numbers showing that we have dramatically improved.
• We’ve overhauled our website.
• We have a new Electrotap channel on you tube and we’ve started producing video content about or products.
• We are now soliciting projects and interviews from artists to feature on our site.  To kick things off, we’ve interviewed Jeff Albert.
• We’ve renewed our commitment to Jamoma by providing both source code / man-hours and also making a financial donation
• We’ve sponsored two conferences: SLEO and NIME

So, as you can see, we’ve been busy!  During one stretch this past Spring we did 5 product announcements in 5 days.

Let’s Celebrate

To celebrate, we are going to offer an additional discount on new registrations of Tap.Tools for the next month. Use the discount code R3BOOT on checkout and get $30 off the order.

What’s Next?

First, you should buy the discounted Max now. There is no guarantee that we will keep it at this price.

Second, stay tuned. Whether by Twitter or Facebook, we have a bunch of things in the pipe for the next few months and years.

We’re excited to have another new app for iOS in preparation for the AppStore.

We also have a new product that has been much requested over the last several years and which we’ll be rolling out in the next couple of months. It’s a surprise though, so don’t tell anyone ;-).

What to do you do?

I like to make music, with trombones and computers being my main tools. I do some mixing and mastering work on CDs, mostly in the free jazz/improvised music space. I also teach music technology classes at Loyola University New Orleans, and organize the Open Ears Music Series in New Orleans. I am the transportation manager for my family, making sure that everyone gets to piano/ballet/soccer/softball, etc. I also do our family IT stuff. I coach U12 Girls soccer, and excel at embarrassing my children.

I know you are involved with different musicians and groups. How do they differ? Do they fulfill a need or exist as an outlet in any way? Are there any differing musical or mental processes – like when working with Pretty Lights to Hamid Drake? 

I guess I would say that everything I do fulfills a need or is an outlet of some sort. Even the very commercial trombone playing I do fulfills a need for time on the instrument, and is a social outlet. Lately I have been subbing in Lena Prima’s band in the French Quarter. She is Louis Prima’s daughter, and does some of his music, as well as other stuff. That gig isn’t really an artistic outlet for me, but it is a lot of fun, and that counts for something too.

The Pretty Lights stuff was just a few studio sessions. I am really curious about how that material will end up sounding in its final form, because he just recorded lots of bits and pieces of the musicians playing (based on his directions), and is gong to reassemble it in his style. The sessions were cool, but I think the real magic in that music will happen when he samples and reassembles what we recorded.

My work with Hamid Drake has been mostly in his group Bindu Reggaeology, which is basically a reggae band made up of some of the world’s best improvisers. I wish we could work more often with that band.

My own groups do exist as outlets. Usually outlets for personal expression in unedited form. So much of my early career was spent striving to fill a specific predefined role in a group (i.e. when playing with the Tommy Dorsey Orch, striving to really play “that style” well), that I use my groups as the place where I get to make music the way I want to hear it, as opposed to the way I think someone else expects it to be.

Has curating Open Ears Music affected your own music? How?

Mostly by exposing me to lots of good music. Every week I hear at least one live performance, and most of them are very good. That gets my creative juices flowing. It is inspiring.

Watching how so much different music is received by the audiences has also been enlightening, although I might be hard pressed to describe exactly what I have learned from that. I guess on the most basic level, I have learned that people react to really good music regardless of style.

Just today I listened to some unreleased live recordings of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, and I was struck by how good they sounded. New Orleans has the best orchestra in its price range by a long way. A couple of weeks ago, I was on a Crosby, Stills & Nash kick. I like cool harmony singing. I have been checking out the new CD from Mike Reed’s People Places & Things, and the Henry Threadgill box set of Black Saint/Soul Note recordings. Some recent “work” listening has included Jon Appleton & Don Cherry’s “Human Music” and George Lewis’s “Voyager.” Everything that I listen to makes some sort of impression on me. I wish I had more time to wander about the internet with no apparent goal, just looking for new stuff to hear, but it seems like these days, most of what I decide to listen to is music that I already know something about, or that I listen to for some research related reason.

I also listen to lots of RadioLab podcasts in the car.

How has your music changed for 5 years ago? 10 years ago?

10 years ago, I was just adding a personal artistic aspect to my life as a jobbing, craftsman, professional musician. I had just released a CD with a band called the Albert-Ankrum Project. It was pretty inside the mainstream contemporary jazz.  My jazz output has moved farther left over the years, and my current quartet is musically descendant from Ornette Coleman and others in the jazz influenced free improvisation spaces. I was into freer improvisation styles 10+ years ago, I just wasn’t brave enough to do it with my primary performing group.

I have also added the computer as one of my music making tools in the last 5+ years. 10 years ago I would not have believed that I would do gigs with a computer and no trombone, or that I would design the instruments I’d play on those gigs, or that I would be into composing electronic music for fixed media. Those are all things that have found their way into my musical life fairly recently, and I have found that they are a great aesthetic compliment to my other pursuits. I think my acoustic work and electronic work each inform the other in significant ways.

What is one cool thing you’ve recently added to your ‘bag of tricks’ (gear, technique, one of those things Jeff does)? 

I feel that my bag of tricks has been a bit stagnant lately. I’m on the search for that next cool thing.

What’s one cool thing that you wish you could add  that would make your music-making one notch higher?

I would love to be able to put together an “integrated Jeff” rig that would allow me to do acoustic trombone, processed trombone, and laptop-as-instrument all from one set up. I am going to start working on that when ever I finish my dissertation.

You describe your music in “spaces”, and label a few trombone, acoustic, and electronic. And they “inform” each other. I want to get a commonality out of all of them. What makes them all ‘Jeff Albert’?

Hopefully they are all interesting, honest, and at least a little bit funny at times.