As people grow, it happens to everyone – tastes change, perspectives shift. Sometimes it’s out of nowhere, sometimes it’s an organic process years in the making, but whatever the case may be, the most you can do is try to honor those instincts do what the bumper stickers tell you to do: “follow your passion.”
Of course, these bumper stickers rarely come with asterisks or disclaimers warning people that following one passion can easily lead to the extinction of another, as it often can these days when people have to juggle increasingly precious amounts of time and money just to survive, but ut that’s a lot of words for a bumper sticker. And the truth is, the reality doesn’t have to be so grim. But it’s still a lot of work.
There are a lot of multi-disciplinary artists or multi-instrumentalist musicians that make it happen – hell, it’s a staple of the DIY mechanics we all know and love. But every once in a while you run across someone that threads various passions together in such a way that allows them to pursue simultaneous fascinations, like Adam Betts or Author and Punisher for instance, or perhaps even more close to home would be the Brians of Lightning Bolt. Brian Chippendale’s cacophonous vocal effects, complex parts, and distinct aesthetic become a beast all it’s own, and he does a similar thing in a different ratio with Black Puss. Brian Gibson makes music for video games, but also develops them, and it’s resulted in lauded rhythm-action games like Thumper and Thrasher.
And now, we have V1deoboy.
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V1deoboy brings together so many great things – video games, audio visual performance, chip-tune, punk rock… oh, and he’s obviously a killer videographer as evidenced above. But perhaps best of all is a custom integrated suit of hardware, and we are so, so, stoked to have him break it down below. It’s also kind of a bonus that V1deoboy is actually a longtime friend of ours that played in one of the best Eugene bands to ever do it, The Critical Shakes. But this ain’t about the then. In a way, it’s not even about the now – it’s about the future. Get ready for a truly fascinating deep dive on V1deoboy’s writing process, his bodysuit of hardware, how it works, how he pulls it off live, and a whole lot more below. Cyberpunks, you’re in for a treat.
FB: V1deoboy seems to be this massive passion project that spans multiple interests, from drumming and songwriting to hardware, video games, and more – when did the idea for V1deoboy first come to you? What were some of the influences or inspirations?
I first became interested in the idea of using triggers to make melodies and basslines from drum hits, somewhere around 2017 when my youtube algorithm gave me a gift. I discovered the French artist Andre Diamant or Duracell. There isn’t much of a trace from his work these days aside from a few grainy videos on youtube of his live performances. Despite the low quality of the videos, I became completely obsessed with how he was able to play covers of classic video game songs simply from hitting his drums. Almost all of his songs prioritized the melody over the drum parts. He didn’t use a high hat, and rarely locked into a groove. There were enough mistakes and impromptu moments in the performance, that he stood out against many other artists who do a similar thing.
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It was really clear that he was actually playing the tunes, not just playing along to a backing track. And they were experimental sounding or sort of avant garde. They were catchy tunes. I realized that it was possible to create chip-tune music just by playing drums the way I naturally do and that stuck in my brain for years. There is also a modern act called KHOMPA that does a very similar thing to Duracell. Although he managed to create very contemporary sounding electronic music while playing traditional drum grooves. I believe that his programming is much more sophisticated to achieve this, because like Duracell and V1DEOBOY, he fires every note from drum hits. But it is certainly not as clear what hits are making what sound when you hear it, unlike Duracell.
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Aside from the music, I was very inspired by “The Daniels”, the director duo behind Everything Everywhere All At Once. I watched a talk they gave about how creatively fertile contradictions are. They talked about how they wanted to make The Matrix but that the world kinda didn’t need another movie like The Matrix at the time. It needed more of a hug. So you can see how embracing that contradiction led to the brilliant climatic fight scenes where Michelle Yoh is using her martial arts prowess to love her opponents and help them as she fights them. V1DEOBOY is full of these kinds of contradictions. Electronic music is usually perfectly in time, and extremely consistent in how it sounds. Whereas a punk band can get away with being less rigid with tempo and will often sound different every time they play. I wanted to find the perfect middle ground between those two places.
FB: Is juggling / monitoring the various aspects while performing live a punishing experience? What kind of steps have you taken to make it easier on yourself?
It’s actually not too bad. It’s more of a physical challenge to play with all that gear strapped onto me (the harness is like a heating pad on my chest). But part of the reason I locked myself in a room for over a year working on V1DEOBOY was to address this exact problem. The biggest difference between Duracell and I, or any other drum/synth project, is that early on I became committed to the idea of never having to interact with my laptop during performance. I knew from experience that I would just be squinting and sweating all over a macbook’s trackpad trying to cue up the next song in the middle of a set. Even if you dont know a thing about drum triggers or DAWs, most people just see a laptop and go, “oh that’s how it works”.
Suddenly you’re just a guy with a drum set and a laptop and that always felt like it took away from the magic a bit. That idea of preserving the mystery led to the development of the Headset and Control Harness which allow me to monitor and control everything I need to in real time without physically interacting with my laptop. I can cue up new songs, see my sequences firing and even check how much time I have left in the set. Another ‘rule’ or commitment I found early on was that all the cables and tech need to be real and functional. And by the time I got everything working, there was no need to fake the cyberpunk vibe. It just was cyberpunk! Suddenly I had a unique stage persona that preserved that ‘authenticity-quality’ which, in my experience, is one of the most important ways to connect to an audience and what makes Punk music so appealing.
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FB: Are there any remnants of your experience making a band life simulator / oregon trail overhaul alive in V1deoboy?
I think after the Pandemic, when most people’s bands kind of fell apart, I was desperate to find a new creative outlet. I tried stand up comedy, I tried to launch a comedic animated youtube channel, and eventually tried to manifest my dream of an Oregon Trail game that was about a band on tour. I didn’t have much of a background in game development but I had done a few small things in Gamemaker Studio 2, which is the engine that a lot of indie games were made in. I found someone who code jammed an oregon trail like on youtube and pretty soon I had a humble prototype of the game. So far, not much of that experience has cross pollinated with V1DEOBOY. However, I did start to learn about sprite animation workflow which I think is likely to show up in V1DEOBOY’s future eventually.
FB: The visual aspect of V1deoboy is fascinating, like a very specific and grounded vision of cyberpunk meets Guitar Hero POV… on drums. How would you describe the aesthetic?
I like to think of it as a vision of the 90’s future. So much of it is just USB extensions and RCA connections. And it felt really good to continually make choices based off of utility that just happened to keep lending themselves to that Cyberpunk look. Like wearing something that clearly blocks your eyes but you can still see. The look of the sequencer should be credited to Tobi Hunke who developed the Melody Trigger Plugin at the heart of the V1DEOBOY system. Also known as The Ableton Drummer, Tobi actually helped me troubleshoot some bugs in the plugin and eventually sent me a custom version of the plugin that works perfectly. I freely admit that this is a place where I kind of stepped right over the genius of my heroes like Duracell, who had to figure out how to do the same thing with gear from 20 years ago. But I’ve tried to innovate in other ways and pick up where Duracell left off when it comes to the song writing.
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But that’s just how V1DEOBOY looks. I also wanted to push what a smaller live act could do with visuals during a performance. Again a lot of this came from wondering how much of the strings to show the audience. Wouldn’t it be cool if people could see what I was seeing inside the goggles y’know? So there are basically two states for the visuals that can be projected during a show. One is the video output from an audio to video synthesizer from Critter and Guitari called the Rhythm Scope. It basically generates visual patterns from any audio source. The other state is to project exactly what I’m seeing inside the headset. For the audience, they can now see the show from my POV as well as follow along with the sequencer. This kind of helps bring in the audience to how everything works as well as creates a very simple but effective reaction in them when they see themselves on the screen as I look out into the crowd. All of this can be controlled and monitored from the headset and harness.
FB: Can you take us through the evolution of some of the other gear involved, like the strap and the headset?
Getting this all correct took longer than the learning curve of writing songs in this format. I explored VR options that allowed for some basic AR functionality like the meta quest or Apple Vision Pro. Besides being very cost prohibitive, they had a lot of features that I’d never use and were missing some ones I wanted like being functional without wifi and maintaining a hard-line connection. Plus, it’s hard to be punk with Zuch-Tech strapped to your head. This led me to find some cheap ‘Video Goggles’ which kind of look like a VR headset but are just a simple screen inside a cheap headset with an hdmi in. This allowed me to get started with something inexpensive to prove the concept. I bought a really cheap camera that had a suction cup mount and attached that to the outside of the goggles. I used OBS (which is what most live streamers use to compose various video sources, like a webcam and their chat feed) to pass the camera’s feed back into the goggles as well as layering in a screen capture of ableton. With fairly minimal lag, I was able to see outside of the goggles while also seeing what I needed in Ableton.
Eventually, those goggles burned out on me and I had to find an upgrade. I started researching Drone FPV goggles which are used to put a drone pilot “in the cockpit” of the drone they are flying. What I saw was a robust video goggle with analog and digital inputs + long battery life that was more affordable than any proper AR goggles. I’m so blind without my glasses that I even installed an old pair of lenses onto the goggles so I can clearly see the screen in there. I also updated the camera to give me a wider, more natural view, and added a secondary camera that has a manual zoom. That allows me to zoom in on the crowd and make their faces the visual behind me. Almost like a kiss-cam at a basketball game. It quickly became apparent I would need to add counterweights to the headset to make it more manageable to play in. It took a lot of iterating but now it stays on my head fairly comfortably. There is even a little fan inside of them that helps keep the lenses from fogging!
The harness was originally intended to be a sort of gauntlet/power glove that I could attach to my forearm. However, that just didn’t work with playing drums. Plus I was getting so many ideas that I’d need more real-estate than my forearm. So I had a custom, three-point harness made (I think usually made for Ski Patrol radios…) and had them use Velcro material. Now I could attach different gear to it and it would largely stay out of my way when performing. The main component is a Streamdeck that controls a Midi Automator on my laptop. This essentially serves as a Setlist. It’s really just a list of ableton project files that can be advanced via a midi trigger, which is sent from the Streamdeck. I’m also able to deploy sound clips from the Streamdeck, which further enhance the persona as I never speak with my own voice but only through pre-recorded sound clips with a robotic effect.
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There is a comedic element of satirizing live performers in there too. I just thought about what are the most common phrases you always hear at a small bar show. “Wow, thank you” “what a crowd” “Give it up for the other performers”. I also attached a 1st generation Mini Korg Kaosillator so that I could make simple but effective ambient synth sounds while the next song loads. This can kind of shift the audience expectations and is a nice palette cleanser. I even found the matching 1st gen Korg Kaos pad, which all the sound clips and Kaosillator sounds pass through. The Kaos pad is set to a pitch shift/loop setting, which allows me to add a sort of glitchy robot quality to all those sounds that keep things from being too repetitive. Lastly, the Rhythm Scope is also mounted to the harness as well as an RCA switcher that allows me to switch out the projected visuals from the Rhythm scopes patterns, to the live feed from inside my headset with a single press of a button. I learned fairly quickly that down-scaling everything to RCA was not only more in line with my aesthetic but is a much more reliable way to send video signals. HDMI is great but the connectors can get loose and wiggly. We all know the feeling of your computer monitor adjusting for a second when an HDMI is added or removed. There’s a little digital handshake that happens between an HDMI source and the monitor to decide what resolution to choose. This was very frustrating when it meant blindness for V1DEOBOY anytime I moved too much… which is constantly.
FB: So… how are you even doing that? How does it work?
Taking what I learned from Duracell, Khompa, and Tobi, I set up a process where the Snare hits play the next note of the melody and the kick hits play the next note of the bassline. Now that can only get you so far. Sure, each sequence has 64 notes in it, so you could program a complicated melody, bassline, and just play it perfectly and probably get somewhere. But, knowing myself and my more loose punk style, I knew that that wouldn’t work for me. Plus it sounded so rigid with no room for mistakes or improvising. Thankfully, Tobi’s plugin included 16 different sequences to program. Meaning that I could switch between different sets of notes and create a lot more dynamics and traditional song progressions. So I use the rack tom to advance to the next sequence on both the bass and the melody. This is precisely what I believe Duracell was doing.
One of the greatest constraints of the project is fitting a whole song into only 16 sequences. Especially because, for maximum flexibility, I often put each different chord change on its own sequence. So that at any given time, the bass/kick notes match the melody/snare notes. However, if you repeat a 4 chord progression twice, that means you’ve already used up half of your sequences. So there is definitely a real puzzle-box element to getting a song on its feet…almost like….a videogame…. One of the ways I solve that, innovating on Duracell’s setup, is the ability to go back to the last sequence by hitting the floor tom.
Now I can do simple two chord progression parts by moving forward and backwards between 2 sequences, creating more song time with only 2 of my 16 precious sequences. Another technique I’ve found is to use palindrome-like progressions. Like F# – D – B. This way I can go forward from F# to D to B and then back to D and then start again by going back to F#. This took some practice to get comfortable hitting a single Tom at the beginning of each chord like a crash cymbal. And another reason why it’s nice to be able to see what sequence I’m on in the goggles while I perform, so I can get the cue to either go forward or back.
There is also a sort of meta-gaming thing happening too. Where each sequence is like a checkpoint. If I goof up, I get another chance to play perfectly at the next checkpoint. And some sequences end up being very long where I do have to play ‘perfectly’. Almost like a lil Boss encounter.
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FB: Do you ever have weird moments with the headset where you see what you are projecting out of the corner of your eye and it inspires an out of body, “who is projecting who” moment?
Ha! I’m pretty focused on the songs when I’m all plugged in. Although creating a little infinite video loop by looking back at the screen is always a fun move. Plus the corner of my eye is still in the headset, so when I’m in there, I’m V1DEOBOY y’know? Makes it easy to get into character.
FB: After triggering the snare to sequence to so many melodies in the song, do you find yourself drumming differently or thinking about snare parts differently?
Yes and no. Definitely learned from Duracell that a very effective way to handle the bass parts is to just hold down 8th notes on the kick, which was definitely a little unnatural. But locking off my right limbs with just consistent 8th notes, does allow for some more odd choices with my left on the snare. That is at least what I took from Duracell. However, I was always curious what it would sound like to play more straight forward punk grooves with synth triggers. It’s sort of a constant balance of serving the song. Am I best serving the song by locking into a more traditional drum groove or by prioritizing the melody. Am I playing in the school of Duracell or KHOMPA? And I’m very proud of the fact that I struck a very effective middle ground between those two schools. Where you are getting catchy songs with verses and choruses and bridges but you can still see how every note is being fired.
Often I program the songs thinking one thing, and then realize what the part really is once I’m behind the kit. It’s very fun to try different fills and grooves on a set of notes until you find a perfect match. I think the key to V1DEOBOY’s sound is a mix of traditional drum grooves and more melody focused grooves. It’s always hard because so much of rhythm comes from the syncopation between the drums and bass/melody. But I have to sync every note with a drum hit. This can keep V1DEOBOY from sounding like contemporary EDM but also creates its own unique sound.
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FB: You’ve written songs we’ve loved for years, in fact we’ve probably shared more stages with you than anyone we weren’t technically in a band with – does a V1deoboy song come to you the same way a Critical Shakes song would have?
Writing V1DEOBOY songs is a very unique experience that takes a long time. In a two piece punk band like The Critical Shakes, songs flowed fairly easily. Especially when you have a very talented guitar player, Davey Beebe, as your partner. Most of those songs started on an acoustic guitar and then were beefed up in the garage. V1DEOBOY songs often start on a piano instead as that is the format they are programmed into ableton by. There is a really fun collaborative element to writing V1DEOBOY songs, I’m just collaborating with myself. There is the guy that writes a little progression or melody on the piano and programs the notes into ableton. And then there is the guy who plays the drums. Sometimes a small adjustment needs to be made in the drum parts or sometimes it’s a small adjustment of the notes in ableton. Most ‘finished songs’ end up sounding completely different than the original intention of the song, much like how it goes in a traditional band after every member puts their fingerprint on it.
The hardest part of the project is being alone and having a lack of feedback. So I often record rehearsals, listen back, and identify the parts to keep, throw out or adjust. Often I’ll even hear a happy accident and learn how to replicate it. A lot of the coolest moments in the set came that way. Which I think speaks to how slick the whole thing works. It’s rigid enough to play the same thing consistently but flexible enough to improvise, just like any instrument!
FB: As cheesy as it sounds, as someone who played in a punk band for years, do you have any thoughts on the journey from punk to cyberpunk? Would you say there’s a natural pipeline of resistance there from one to the other or that they’re parallel ideas?
This is a very interesting question. For me it was about that initial contradiction of imperfect punk drumming with the precision of electronic music that led me to the genre. I wanted to satisfy both the ‘Punk’ and the ‘Cyber’ part of the genre. The least punk thing about V1DEOBOY is how much stuff there is and the logistical challenge of being able to set it all up, in any condition, in about 15mins. While I spent a long time making sure that that was actually possible, the simplicity of setup is something I dearly miss about a more spartan punk band.
I think that if we examine the large umbrella term of Cyberpunk as a literary genre or motif, what we find is often a lot of stories about class warfare. It’s a genre that features scientific achievements like AI juxtaposed with societal collapse. A particular cogent theme to be playing with in 2025. It has been very satisfying to actually engage with the genre in reality. I mean I essentially created a very simple DIY AR system for a quarter of the price as an Apple Vision Pro. Cobbling together disparate pieces of low tech to create something that can keep up with the ruling class’s tech is as Cyberpunk as it gets. I’d like to think that Punk and Cyberpunk do eventually meet in the future somewhere, especially as more and more concepts from science fiction become reality. Cyberpunk is almost just a prediction of what Punk will eventually become on a long enough timeline in a capitalist society obsessed with technology. But there will always be a special place in my heart for the raw, visceral experience of seeing a genuine punk band perform. I don’t think that will ever change and I hope it doesn’t!
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