protman in the Chicago Reader - "Is the game controller the new guitar pick?" Sort of!

New Ways to Play
Better at video games than piano? It could be your ticket to a career in music.

By Miles Raymer

April 17, 2008

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Local electronic musician Protman, aka Joe Hahn, might not be making music at all if he hadn’t moved past traditional instruments. “Most computer musicians I know employ a piano-based MIDI controller, which also employs a few knobs, pads, sliders, et cetera,” he explains via e-mail. “I’ve probably gone through a couple thousand dollars’ worth of these trying to find something that encourages me to use it and make more music with it, but they always wind up collecting dust.”

What Hahn does instead is adapt controllers from video-game consoles—Nintendo NES, Xbox 360—so that they can interact with composition software. For him, it’s a matter of ergonomics. The problem with piano-style controllers, he says, is that “you can maybe control two or three parameters simultaneously depending on the interface, and they often require such exaggerated, sloppy motions to get anything interesting done with them. Game controllers are designed to maximize ergonomics and perform with great immediacy. Punch now! Kick now! Tweak now! Transpose now! Throw that snare drum into the delay chain now! Swap between your choice of random toy-instrument samples now!”

Hahn acknowledges that the commu­nity of game-modding musicians attracts lots of people who are just looking for kitschy kicks, and his own act is powerful nerd bait—he often works a Dance Dance Revolution mat with his feet and a video-game controller with his hands. But for Hahn the important thing about modding is the chance to transfer a highly refined skill set from the reactive task of gameplay to the creative work of making music. “I spent easily a thousand, if not several thousand times the amount of time improving my video-game skills than practicing the Casio piano my family bought me when I decided to take piano lessons,” he says....

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/sharpdarts/080417/