So, what exactly is a MiXem?

Good question! MiXem blinks, MiXem makes noise, but is it an instrument? Is it a game? Is there food in it? (I'm not joking, a kind old lady on the subway asked me this) The answer is, none of the above. MiXem does many things, but you certainly cannot eat it.


MiXem is a physical interface for sequencing music loops, and it's a lot of fun to play.


The original idea for MiXem was to create a performance tool for musicians, but somewhere along the way our team -- Heejin Joo, Jose Olivares, Dave Spector, Tymm Twillman, and myself, Matt Young -- came to the agreement that MiXem should be inviting, usable, and fun for both musicians AND people with absolutely no musical talent (like me) to enjoy. Thus, playing MiXem is as easy as touching the blinking LED touch pads to pick out your instruments and loops and letting Ableton Live worry about synching them up for you. Anybody can do it!


How we got from those early discussions to our first prototype is charted in this blog, so if you're interested in how we programmed our LED drivers, best practices we learned for soldering onto copper clad, or how to interface MIDI protocol with Ableton Live software, please read on. And we've posted some videos and pictures in case you're like my parents and just here to see MiXem blink and make noise. In either case, comments and suggestions are greatly appreciated. Thanks for your support and we hope you enjoy!


-Matt


Sunday, December 2, 2007

Design

This is Heejin's design for the acrylic switches. The idea here was to come up with something that we could send off to the Advanced Media Studio to be laser etched. We're pretty happy with the results so far. Check it:



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