Oct 15, 2009, 14:56 GMT
Berlin - Picture a club in the Netherlands with a mass of perspiring young people surging towards the stage in eager anticipation. Suddenly the light goes off and Tim Groeneboom walks into view with a guitar dangling from a strap around his neck.
Only those who look a little closer can discern that this is no ordinary instrument. For one thing it is made of plastic and the neck is covered with brightly-coloured buttons.
But then Tim Groeneboom, whose stagename is WiiJ Timski, is no ordinary performer either. He teases the most extraordinary sounds from this toy-like guitar, from heavy rock to electronic.
Like many other musicians he has discovered that game consoles and accessories such as this guitar are not only good for playing the games they were designed to go with. They can be used to produce musical notes and original music as well.
Tim, 24, started exploring the musical potential of the Wii in 2007 shortly after the games machine appeared on the market. 'I thought the way musicians stand on the stage with their laptops was really boring,' said the Dutchman. He believes a concert should be a physical experience as well and aims to achieve this with the help of a compact console. 'That was when I started to think about ways of translating the tactile sensitivity of the Wii into music.'
The result of these musings was self-written software which Tim sells via his own website www.wiijtimski.com. This enables him to make the Nintendo controller respond to physical movements. 'I can put the drum rhythm onto a button and depending on how I hold the Wii remote the sounds that come out are different.' In this way he can combine up to five different sounds.
The Dutch musician claims the music industry is not particularly innovative which is why the latest generation of consoles holds such promise for those who like to experiment. The Wii was only the beginning and Tim is convinced that Project Natal, Microsoft's controller-free gaming experience for the Xbox, will also open up a whole raft of new possibilities.
At the same time, there is no need to be as inventive as Tim Groeneboom in order to get a console to sing. Nintendo has brought out special software which enables the palm-sized DS with its tiny twin screens to emulate the legendary Korg MS-10 analogue synthesizer. 'At first I thought it was just something to play around with but it gradually became an entertaining musical experience in its own right,' said Roland Moews, a musician and mathematician from Berlin.
The DS cannot hope to match the sound quality of the original 'but it is fine for simple loops and drums,' said the expert. Unlike Moews, Andreas Otto from Hamburg is a professional musician. He has come up with an instrument for theatre productions which also draws on console technology.
Dubbed the Fello, it is a cello which can be played using a Wii remote and allows the user to produce or distort different notes using arm movements. 'Practicing just to find out the most interesting moves is just like playing a video game whereby your skill increases as you get used to it,' he said.
Making music with the help of technical aids which were not originally designed for the purpose has already achieved mass-market appeal - a glance at the contents list of the App Store for Apple's iPhone illustrates this. Among the downloads available are digital flutes, drums, pianos and guitars.
Even Paul van Dyk, the internationally successful trance music producer and disc jockey from Berlin, offers his own programme in the App Store. The PvD-DJ-App has a beat counter which shows the important Beats Per Minute (BPM) of a music track being played and helps DJs to mix in the next track. It also incorporates a pocket flashlight to help disc jockeys find their way around dimly-lit stages.
Not that Van Dyk is really interested in using technical gadgets to make music: 'I think this sort of thing is more of a toy. Consoles do not give you genuine freedom of composition but take you down a pre-programmed path.' Tim Groeneboom does not share this view and he is planning to get to grips with the Wii Motion Plus, a development which is designed to make the game controller more sensitive than before. 'For experimenting with notes it offers some real promise,' said the Dutchman.
His current project is even more ambitious: Wiij Timski is currently putting together a band whose musical arsenal consists of nothing but Nintendo consoles.
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