Mau5 TRAPPED
“Man, I wish I could do these shows where I bring like half a studio’s worth of gear to play in a club setting”. Music-technology aficionados, such as we are, know this struggle well. But Joel Zimmerman knows it better than anyone – how would he possibly pack up his gargantuan modular rack, his jaw-dropping collection of vintage and modern synths, and his half-a-million-dollar Neve console?
He can’t. Instead, eight years ago, he began work on his own custom-made OSC-control app, now publicly available as OSC/Pilot. Deadmau5’s live performances revolve around OSC/Pilot, which not only controls individual elements of his tracks and different parameters in Ableton Live but also his entire show. “There are more than 800 tags of OSC data that are piping from me to front-of-house and back”, says Joel. “All the way from Cube rotations to light movement to the visuals being driven. It’s nuts”.
Though much of the music industry has come to a grinding halt due to the pandemic, Deadmau5 is still very much in demand. Armed with OSC/Pilot, his trademark ‘mau5head’ helmet and an impeccable light show, Zimmerman has performed live at drive-in concerts in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal. During the lockdown, he’s also released the track Pomegranate with Pharrell and Chad Hugo of The Neptunes. All of this beats on as he puts out new material with Steve Duda as BSOD, and performs live sets as Testpilot.
Of course, his OSC-packed Cube shows have all been delayed thanks to COVID-19. But Deadmau5 remains modest about the effect it’s had on him and acknowledges first that his team has been hit too. “I’m thinking of the position of the business before I’m like, ‘Me, me, me’,” he says. “Because everybody’s trying
