We came to dance. sandinternet. The piper calls out a different rhyme. An electro-pop pioneer, singer-guitarist Midge Ure called early-'80s club-goers to the dance floor with Visage's "Fade to Grey and Ultravox's "Vienna," "Reap the Wild Wind," and "Dancing With Tears in My Eyes." He later morphed into a philanthropic powerhouse who raised millions for famine relief, co-producing Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas?" single and mega-concerts Live Aid and Live8. After scoring solo hits "No Regrets," "If I Was," "Dear God," and "Breathe," Ure reformed Ultravox in 2009 for the release of 2012's "Brilliant" album. If you can't wait for Ure's return to the U.S. Live in Chicago" album or the eBook of his '90s autobiography "If I Was," on MidgeUre exclusively.com. If you've never heard of Midge, Ure in for a thrill. Download.com caught up with Ure about mobile touring and recording, taking pictures on his phone, the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of social media -- and most importantly, whether he downloaded Visage's recent reunion album. kingsdevelopers. Do you ever use mobile software to create music? I have experimented with that but it's too fiddly. I've always wanted to be in a situation where I could have mobile recording. rutrackeralways. But the idea of being able to do something on an iPad or on your phone is great, and an iphone app like GarageBand for the iPad is fun, but it's more like a toy. The reality is that if you would like to create something well, you need to be static. You need keyboards and a microphone in front of you. What I use all the time, that's better than any clever application that I have is iTalk Recorder. So when I'm driving and I come up with an idea, I can pick up my phone and hit a button and sing into it. I don't have to do anything else. Featured Freeware: Google SketchUp. Do you think mobile music recording is a fad? I don't think it's a fad. I think it's developing. I've seen more and more people using iPads onstage. Whether they're using them as music sources, synth sources, backing tracks, or guitar amplifiers, persons are using them and there are companies making dedicated iPad stands for them. They are slowly but surely slipping into daily use. Can you describe your touring setup? When Ultravox goes on tour we have four laptops onstage and even the MacBook Pros are created for use in your home or office and even the connections are not designed to be toured, so they're still very flaky things. They're stable, but we use those because that's the stability that we need. We need something that's a big screen, something with a keyboard; we need the software that's big enough to do it and an iPad hasn't quite gotten that yet. Although I saw Howard Jones a couple weeks ago and he was using iPads onstage. What is your studio setup like? In the studio, even before Mac purchased it, it was Logic for recording and sequencing and there's a software that comes with Mac called MainStage, which is a live version of the studio with the ability to use sounds you made during the actual making of the records, so they can be had by you split across your keyboards, which eradicate the 26 keyboards we used the last time we toured in 1985 or '86. We used MainStage when we did the tour of America, recently, and on the "Live in Chicago" album. We used it on both sets of keyboards and it's instant and really quick and very easy to change. It's not a problem saying, "I don't like that string sound, let's do this." And as long as you have the software, it's really easy to use. You're very active on Twitter and Facebook. Do you consider social media a thrill or a burden? I think Facebook was something i avoided for quite some time probably, meaning I didn't start dabbling in it again until Ultravox got back together again, like four years ago, and I just thought it was a great way of letting them into the relative back door, if you will, the inner sanctum, but doing it painlessly completely. You could interact with persons when you decide to interact with people, so I started tweeting and doing the Facebook thing, so people could see that Ultravox really were back together again and really were going to tour. It was a valuable tool for information, but an interesting tool for an artist, as well, because these days there is nobody fighting in your corner besides you. It's actually an incredible tool for just saying, "Hi." So if you're curious about what I'm up to, I have webcams in my studio and sometimes I do a little video or write a blog, whereas to the Internet we never even saw fan mail prior. There was no way for anyone to actually feel near to an artist. Are there any contemporaries of Ultravox, whose social media campaigns really impress you? The person is thought by me that stands out in this field is Peter Gabriel. The amount of content that they come up with, and not just historic content, is amazing. thepiratebaycape on this page. They have archived everything he did, so sitting next to a video of Peter doing a concert in 1979, you'll have a new piece with Peter singing a new song or showing you what he's up to in the studio. Whether he does all this himself, I don't know, but he's certainly engaged with it, and did it much, much earlier than I ever did. He's always on the cutting-edge of the technological revolution. Why did you launch a music social network, Tunited, back in 2009? I wanted to redress the balance of the scale somewhat. I wanted to build a one-stop shop where fans, artists, and songwriters could go and get a fair deal, where people could come as a collective together, kind of folks power in a way, and basically give them the given information that they need to find and generate an income from music. It was a good idea and we almost got there and then the recession reared its ugly head and we lacked funding. You post a lot of photos on your pages. Which is your recommended app? The one I use the most is Camera Plus. And it's great, because you not only give attention to your subject, but can change the aperture and so on, so you have more control than you would with an SLR camera.
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