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Author: carlos on March 10 2007 Viewed 1559 times. 9 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.
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I've been running a live event monthly since November 06. The bITjAM events have been focused on pure electronic music, improvisation and experimental music. I have seen many people using Ableton live, in fact nearly all performers use the program. I've managed to steer clear and stick with 2 electribes, kaoss pad 2 and microkorg.
There seems to be a consistent thread of performers getting jittery about their laptops and live sets needing lots of time to set up, sometimes weeks of setting up. I remember this difficulty and put it down to too much choice with live and software, too many crashes etc. Life has got so much better with hardware, I do like the way I have to work harder on stage to create the set by improvising.
Of course I've got a few ideas and sample sets loaded in beforehand but I tend to start with empty or basic patterns! What approach do other people use or am I in the minority with the hardware?
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03/10/07
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sAMsKi
i use only hardware for my liveset. i like to be seen to do stuff live...even if it is risky / scary. in my case nothing is defined beforehand (even more scary)...except the samples on my mp3 player i guess. i sample everything live - from radio, guitar, mics, whatever. 
03/10/07
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energygiant
i dont really perform for people..but 75% of my music is made using strictly hardware
03/10/07
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datathinner
liar. i know you made them accordian sounds with supatrigga.
03/10/07
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energygiant
no no for those i use Absynth
03/10/07
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skab
i like a blend of hardware/software. ableton is great for sampling and screwing with stuff live. i think any good liveset needs time to set up, whether it's based around software or not. even someone purely improvising needs time to rehearse and learn the best way to interface with their equipment.
i like the idea of a duo. one performer with a laptop - sampling, dropping loops and providing a backbone, the other performer with hardware providing audio sources and doing more on-the-fly stuff that is sometimes hard to implement on a computer. with two performers i think there is a dynamic which is rarely present in a solo improvised performance.
03/11/07
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carlos
Yes the duo bit rings true, I perform as part of a collective called the Audiocongress, sometimes 2 people 3 or 4, I tend to build beats, glitch and some seq synth lines while the other guys add vocals, fx, pads and strings. We tend to work on metaphors, adjectives with a little technical info! Like all performers we need to know our instruments be it software or hardware!
03/12/07
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Inoyun
I think its important to use what you like, no matter what the medium. If you can get the sounds you like out of a baby toy, you use the baby toy and call it a musical instrument. Sometimes working in an unfamiliar environment produces the best results.
03/12/07
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mlbot
Good on ya. Hardware is cooler.
03/12/07
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Unknownforce
I would love to use hardware. But cost and physical size are 2 important factors
ps maybe you'd be interested in arranging something for Stfu music
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03/13/07
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ricemutt
yeah, my live setup is kind of complex... if I turned it into hardware I think it would fill up an entire boxcar. I like the elegance of just having a laptop, an audio interface, and a couple midi controllers.
03/13/07
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dach
I've been struggling to integrate ableton into my live set of improvisational, experimental circuit bent noise. I thought it might be nice to structure up some bleeps and glitches into overlapping loops and patterns. But it seems that ableton has a will of its own, and draws me into trying to put together beatz. I prefer to have my music be a lot more loose tempo'd and organic. Having struggled with ableton for a while now, and having listened to some live improvisation totally without computer, Im really starting to wonder if buying a laptop would actually help at all.
03/13/07
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straight
dach- check out audiomulch, it has a similar live loop based setup but is much more open ended than most DAWs with the ability to patch things all o ver the place. in my opinion it is the closest thing to physically wiring things up live
03/13/07
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dach
About the only thing I want to do is have loops recording and playing, and running some fx on them. I'm slowly getting into max/msp but it takes a lot of time to hook stuff up. My loops don't even need to be synced, in fact I think it's the loop syncing and breaking things into little blocks thats annoying me about ableton live Will check out audiomulch and see how it does stuff, thanks for the tip
I'd be totally curious to hear how other people approach live improv, soundscape and noisey styles
03/17/07
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carlos
I tend to break my set up into sequenced periods with the electribes and microkorg but break down into quite abstract pieces, live sampling synths on the kaoss pad, playing audio from a pda (like William Burroughs/Orson Wells) to be sampled with the kaoss, lots of synthesis.
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