upcoming promo director ed holdsworth had been contacted by dave clarke's management to produce visuals for the upcoming devil's advocate tour. the footage was in the bag, but ed wanted something more than just triggering clips in arkaos. he went looking, found me, and we not only had a lot of fun with the production work, but turned dave clarke into a fully audio-visual performer to boot.

they key was realising that dave clarke's performance was pretty much entirely sampler based, fired off two midi keyboards. if we could put some form of video sampler hardware next to the audio sampler, he would never know in terms of his performance, but the overall show would be a tight a/v whole.

using vdmx3 and its audio-analysis, we recorded mini-vj-mixes for each audio sample. we then commissioned a special polyphonic build of grid and set it up with dave clarke's midi mapping and our sync'd-to-the-sample visuals clips. split the midi, hooked up the screens, and voila.

there's a historical note here that the special version of grid commissioned for this was a beautiful piece of software i really miss. it was never released as it was built off an experimental codebase that got sidelined as vidvox's development went elsewhere, but the simple concept of layering up to three clips with fade each layer in and out, akin to an audio sampler, gave such smooth, beautiful output from such a simple concept.