Vids from the show

“Just Like Honey” (Jesus & Mary Chain cover)

“Heroin” (Velvet Underground cover)

These were the last two tracks I did. “Just Like Honey” was going to be the final song, but as you can see in the second video, an audience member asked me to do an encore.

For these, I had a random audience member named Joe (on the first song) and my guitarist Aaron Archer (on the second song) come up and play drums using a Wii remote. This was accomplished via an app called The Wiinstrument, which translates Wii data into MIDI signals — specifically, in this case, a sharp value difference in the Wii remote’s and Wii nunchuk’s built-in accelerometers…using them as drumsticks for playing air drums, in other words. The MIDI was sent into a software drum machine, which had a heavily reverbed drum kit loaded.

I’d been thinking about doing this for months, but I’d never actually tried it until last night. I set it up at home yesterday afternoon and attempted to have my girlfriend play the Wii drums while I played guitar. Unfortunately, she…well, let’s just say she couldn’t quite get the rhythm down. So this was, in fact, totally untested until I actually got Joe the audience member up on stage.

It was really fun and everybody seemed to find it fun. I picked “Just Like Honey” because it’s an easy, easy drumbeat to play. “Heroin” I picked because I knew Aaron could improvise on it (he’s an excellent drummer as well as guitarist), and because my guitar was already feeding back with the sound I’d picked for “Just Like Honey”…and because I can play the living shit out of “Heroin”, and I hadn’t played it live in a while.

So there you go. I plan to use the Wii as an instrument a lot more in the future — it’s fun and easy and it looks cool.