Posted on Mar 16, 2021

Mobley Interview

Special Feature

Austin, Texas-based musician Mobley, is a dynamic, multi-instrumentalist who utilizes an incredible arsenal of gear for his kinetic one-man show. Not satisfied with playing guitar, bass, keyboards, drums and percussion in his act, he has even gone so far as to create his own controllers and electronic instruments.

He’s probably best known for his “Human Drum Machine” (see video below), which is a fun, crowd-pleaser that gets his audience involved in contributing to his live show. It was created with an Arduino board put into a custom enclosure with some LED indicators, a sensitivity knob, and ports for USB and the contacts.

Out of necessity, Mobley developed the Daughtership, a custom-built MIDI controller – constructed around a Teensy and the keybed from an M-Audio keyboard – that communicates via MIDI-over-ethernet and OSC with his man gear rack (aka the Mothership). The Mothership contains two Apple Mac Mini’s (for redundancy) to control his keyboard sounds, drum sounds, vocal effects, guitar effects, looping, lights, video, and basically every other aspect of his show. The Mothership is quite complex, and includes software programs that Mobley coded to allow it to control and communicate with all of his gear and give back feedback about the status of various aspects of the show.

Mobley Live

Mobley Gear List

Italia Guitar
Gibson guitar / Epiphone bass
Fender (guitar and bass)
Line 6
iConnectivity iConnectAudio2+ (guitar and vocals in to two Mac Minis simultaneously)
iConnectivity PlayAudio12 (for redundant outputs across two Mac Mini’s for vocals, guitar, keys, bass, drums, samples / triggers / sequences / etc.)
iConnectivity iConnectMidi4+ (built into the “Daughtership” custom keyboard controller. Also used at the MIDI hub for other MIDI controllers on stage. It connects back to the main rig rack – “The Mothership” – via ethernet)
Sunhouse: Utilizing four SP pickups to trigger all drum sounds on a hybrid kit and to do some dynamic MIDI triggering of light and video cues.
Tama Cocktail kit
Chauvet lights
ENTTEC (lighting controller)
Hercules stands
Apple (on stage, Mobley has two Mac Mini’s and an iPad and is running MainStage 3 as well as some custom code written in AppleScript; he produces his music in Logic Pro X, and makes his videos using Final Cut Pro X)
Behringer XR18: Housed in the Mothership with all inputs permanently connected. Submixes are then sent to the house mixer, which is run by Mobley’s engineer/tour manager.
Ableton Live 10
Sennheiser (in-ear transmitter and receiver)
LG (projector)
Electro-Harmonix (pedals)
M-Audio (keyboard)
Evans and Remo drum heads
Microphones: Heil, AKGs, Audix and Shure
Akai (drum pad)
Custom MIDI Controller based on the Arduino chipset
Universal Audio (hardware and plug-ins)
SoundToys (plug-ins)
Izotope (plug-ins)
Native Instruments (plug-ins)
Arturia (plug-ins and hardware)
Softube (plug-ins)
SKB cases

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FutureMusic: Mobley can you please give FutureMusic some background on you? Where did you grow up? What was your musical education? What were your first musical influences?

Mobley: I had a pretty itinerant childhood, living in Spain, England, and on the US Atlantic and Pacific coasts, among other places. My music education is mostly self-taught, though I did take violin and trumpet lessons as a kid. As far as early musical influences, I was really into local, underground punk as a teenager.

FutureMusic: Tell us about the genesis of your live act? How did you come up with the idea to be a one-man-band? How did your rig evolve?

Mobley: The one-man show was really born out of necessity, more than anything else. Just before I started performing solo, I had been touring with a drummer as a duo. A couple of weeks before we were supposed to go out on the road again, he was injured and so I had to decide whether to pull out of the tour, play it acoustic, or come up with something new. I decided to come up with something new.

Initially the rig was a really heavy hybrid of a keyboard and six-unit rack cabinet. It looked really cool, but it was a colossal pain to lug around. I’d built it when I’d had a band, so it also wasn’t optimized for my solo show. It took about two years, but I eventually was able to build a 12-unit rolling rack that houses the brains of my show (it handles FOH and monitor mixing, vocal effects, guitar effects, drums, samplers and keyboard sounds, MIDI and audio sequences, synchronized videos, and my light show). To control that rig, I took the keybed out of an old M-Audio controller and built a custom keyboard loosely inspired by the Moog Model D. My custom controller uses OSC and MIDI-over-ethernet to communicate with the various elements in my main rack. Given how powerful and flexible the show is, it’s a remarkably lightweight and efficient solution.

FutureMusic: Did anyone in the music industry mentor you?

Mobley:
I wouldn’t say that I had any single mentor, but there have been countless people who’ve lent me their wisdom, time, and talents, and without whom I don’t think I’d still be in the business.

FutureMusic: What was the hardest part of your live setup to achieve?

Mobley: Initially, the whole thing! It’s kind of been a case of my vision being right at the edge of what was technically possible on my budget, and slowly becoming more and more realistic as technologies improved and prices dropped. More recently, the hardest thing to implement has been redundancy. My main rack contains two identical Mac Minis that are each capable of controlling every element of the show. Getting all of those different elements to play together nicely and run perfectly in sync has been quite a challenge. On that front, though, the iConnectivity PlayAudio12 has been a godsend. It really simplified redundancy on the audio side.

FutureMusic: What’s your practice routine?

Mobley: I don’t really have a practice routine. At this point, just doing the work involves so much repetition that I really get my practice in that way. To illustrate that, taking into account all of the various elements, it takes about 75 hours to add a single song to the set – and that’s after it’s already been written, recorded, and produced, all of which I handle by myself. Needless to say, by the time all that’s done, I’m pretty familiar with the song!

FutureMusic: What part of your live performance gets the best audience reaction?

Mobley: I wouldn’t say any single part gets the best reaction, but one part of the show that does get a particular reaction is what I call the “Human Drum Machine.” Using an Arduino, I built a USB MIDI controller that allows me to play four members of the audience. I hand them each a piece of copper tubing that’s wired into the controller. Then, when I touch each of them, a different MIDI note is sent to my custom controller, which relays it to the main rack, which plays back different samples and triggers various lighting cues.

FutureMusic: What are some things you’ve learned about yourself from the point you decided to start creating this unique live performance set-up up until today?

Mobley: I’ve learned that it’s really important to me to use technology to tear down the barriers between myself and the audience, and to curate every possible aspect of the experience for them.

FutureMusic: With Covid19 decimating live performance, what’s next for your act?

Mobley: Thankfully, as a solo writer/producer/performer, social distancing hasn’t interfered with my creative process too much. Like every responsible artist, my pivot has been to find ways to bring performances to people without endangering them or myself. Of course that’s involved live streaming, but I’ve also tried to pull off more creative solutions. Earlier this year, I did a “Curbside Tour” where I delivered one-song concerts from the streets outside of the houses of fans who’d entered and won a contest.

In February and March, I’ll be embarking on the Devil in a Daydream Virtual Tour. I’ve partnered with about a dozen venues around the country to produce a series of ticketed livestreams. For the performances, I’ll be shooting cinematic sets in unconventional locations (a hotel rooftop, an F1 racetrack, a gulf coast beach) and streaming them. The ultimate goal for me is always just to find new and better ways to connect with people.

FutureMusic: What positives musically have come from the pandemic?

Mobley: It’s hard to talk about silver linings in the face of so much carnage. What I can say is that I think that the pause in the rat race has been important. Having the opportunity to really focus on the people and things that are most important to me has been deeply meaningful.

FutureMusic: What’s next for Mobley?

Mobley: Promoting my new record “Young & Dying in the Occident Supreme” that is out now and embarking on my “Devil in a Daydream” Virtual Tour, which kicked off on February 25. Aside from that, I’ll just be trying to make interesting and meaningful music, both as an artist and as a producer for other artists.