Maker Camp: “Not on Tour” With Imogen Heap & Zoë Keating

Craft & Design Music
Maker Camp: “Not on Tour” With Imogen Heap & Zoë Keating

We’ve got a real treat for Maker Camp’s field trip Friday today at 11am PST. We get to hang out with two of our favorite musicians as they step out of their studios to share their thoughts and insights on making music. Imogen Heap, a Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, and composer will show us how she crafts and sculpts sounds. Zoë Keating lays down her cello to talk to campers.makercamp_400

Why “not on tour?” Because they’re not on tour and so they have time to spend with us!

Imogen is known for her work as part of the musical duo Frou Frou and her solo albums, which she writes, produces, and mixes. She has produced three solo albums, the latest of which is the 2009 Ellipse, a North American chart success that earned Heap two Grammy nominations, winning Best Engineered Album, non-classical. She is a multi-instrument artist. She plays keyboards, array mbira, cello, clarinet, guitar, drums, keytar, nail violin, vocal percussion, synthesizer, sampler, organ, Hang, vocoder. She taught herself sequencing, music engineering, sampling and production (on Atari computers).

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Imogen Heap.

Zoë is a one-woman orchestra. She uses a cello and a foot-controlled laptop to record layer upon layer of cello, creating intricate, haunting and compelling music. Known for both her use of technology – which she uses to sample her cello onstage – and for her DIY ethic which has resulted in the sale of over 60,000 copies of her self-released albums and a devoted social media following.

She serves on the boards of the San Francisco chapter of the Recording Academy, the Magik Magik Orchestra and CASH Music, a nonprofit organization that builds open source digital tools for musicians and labels. Zoë has performed and recorded with a wide range of artists, including Imogen Heap, Amanda Palmer, Tears for Fears, DJ Shadow, John Vanderslice, Rasputina, Pomplamoose, and Paolo Nutini.

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Zoë Keating.

As a bonus, we’ve got two great projects lined up today, too—the “gloves project” and an LED color organ. The glove is a user submitted project for an Arduino-powered glove that makes sounds when you tap your fingers. The LED organ allows you to plug your music in and a circuit divides the sound into high, mid, and low frequencies and then flashes three different colors of LEDs according to those frequencies.

Tune in right here at 11am PST on Google+ and join in the fun and listen in.

Discuss this article with the rest of the community on our Discord server!
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Stett Holbrook is editor of the Bohemian, an alternative weekly in Santa Rosa, California. He is a former senior editor at Maker Media.

He is also the co-creator of Food Forward, a documentary TV series for PBS about the innovators and pioneers changing our food system.

View more articles by Stett Holbrook

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