shoot the rodeo

pads your song with the room

20 HP

On a bar line the song cuts out and its clock stops dead, every sequencer frozen mid-phrase, and whole bars of whatever's going on in the room play instead, from a mic that never stops recording. Then the song carries on from the exact step it left, so it really gets longer.

The SHOOT THE RODEO panel: black, with a bull in gold dots squared up to charge, front-on, its horns across the panel under the name and its front legs braced in the dust, and down its face a strip of film, two rows of small square lights of bare circuit board, with a counter of red segments at its foot. The MIC's small hole under the name, RUNTIME, CUT and RELEVANCE down the film, SPLICE and REUSE either side; CLOCK, the plot's two sides and two CVs down the left, RODEO, the CVs and the outs down the right. shoot the rodeo at the top, daylight noise at the bottom.

Turn a knob: drag it, roll the wheel over it or use the arrow keys; a double click puts it back. CUT is a button: press it to cut away at the next bar line and again to cut back; hold it across a bar line and the cutaway holds. The patches step on by themselves until you touch anything.

The edit, the counter, the film and the room as it's cut are SHOOT THE RODEO's own. The song is made in the page as you listen.

the room the MIC hears

Your room is your own microphone, from when you press it; what it hears stays in your browser.

example patches

The cutting, the footage's chopping and pitching, the counter and the film here are SHOOT THE RODEO's engine as it's designed, running in your browser. The song, its drums and the pad after the module are a stand-in for the rest of a rack.

Padding it

When a cheap film runs out of story, it films whatever's happening down the road. Patch the master clock into CLOCK and the song into PLOT L and R, and clock the song's sequencers from PLOT CLOCK. A cutaway starts on a bar line and lasts whole bars, and the song waits for it on the step it was on.

The footage

It records the room all the time and keeps the last minute: the TV, the street, people talking, the song itself coming back off the monitors. A cutaway shows the room's last few bars, skipping back past a silence to the last thing that happened.

Tying it in

The edit

What comes out

Down the spine, the film runs with the song, amber, a perforation a step, and turns white in a cutaway. The counter at its foot adds up the padding in minutes, seconds and frames, and goes back to zero when the clock has stopped for two seconds.