During live concerts, it is often difficult for any musician to recreate the sounds obtained in studio recordings thanks to technologically advanced instruments. This is especially true for bands like Muse, who base their style on unusual sounds, and who are currently on their world tour. For this reason, the English rock band contacted Michele Benincaso who, thanks to the technology developed by his company, MIND Music Labs, allowed them to make “all sounds possible.”
Matt Bellamy, Muse’s lead singer and guitarist, wanted to be able to perform on stage without any restriction while using the Arturia Prophet V synthesizer and Fishman’s TriplePlayMIDI guitar pickup & controller like he did in the studio, but these instruments are designed to work only through a pc. Knowing that MIND Music Labs could run existing plugins and instruments on hardware with their ELK MusicOS, the band’s guitar tech Chris Whitemyer approached the company founded by Benincaso at the 2019 NAMM Show, where they held the first meeting with Fishman and Arturia. Four weeks later, just before the Muse’s 2019 World Tour, Bellamy was able to receive his new guitar sporting an ELK microcomputer that made the miracle possible.
Mind Music Labs‘ CEO Benincaso commented “Getting three different companies to join forces on a special project like this does not happen very often, so this was truly special. To go from a first meeting at NAMM to a functioning system in just weeks was a mind-blowing achievement. It required the special expertise and focused efforts of all three companies to pull it off – I can still hardly believe we did.”
Benincaso, a luthier from Lucera, trained in Cremona and Stockholm before founding his Italian-Swedish company in 2014 with the aim to combine his two great passions: musical instruments and technology.
Ilona Catani Scarlett
Cover ph – Author: Moses
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