on to a different topic: this morning I was thinking about the EMS Synthi and how Brian Eno constructed some kind of weird system with it and a Rube Goldberg tape loop that drifted along and gave us Discreet Music.
Then I got to thinking about how much I enjoy constructing such systems, and playing them live, and how I try to make each one different from the last. The exception is that my "pedal board" has essentially congealed around the digitech whammy/mf107/mf102/guyatech tube delay/pigtronix echolution phi.
That got me to my next thought, which may not be so blazingly original but anyway: should you and I find ourselves playing on the same bill again sometime in the future (which naturally I hope comes to pass) we should contribute some sound element to the other's system. This can be a sound generator, a "preset", an effect box, a routing schema, etc. Kind of like lending you the MF-101 this past weekend, but in a more systematic way. The more unfamiliar (to the artist) the alien gear, the better.
This solution addresses a problem I have: I don't have enough gear to consistently come up with a different set-up each time I play. I think if lots of people did this, in a more or less collective fashion, it would increase the available pool of devices AND introduce randomness/unpredictability into the music. Andrew, for example, could easily participate if somebody brought in some vinyl he never heard or a cassette, or slapped a moogerfooger into his effects send from his mixer.