Well I've had the laptop for a year now and on Monday, with the help of Becky and Jim, I finally got to use it to make music live in front of people I don't know at theCandle Club open mic night.
Becky played flute and sax into mic 1. Jim played a Kompakt soft synth patch via a USB midi keyboard and sang into mic 2. Both mics went directly into my laptop (running Live) via the mic pre's on my EMU 1616m, two outputs from which went to the pub's PA system.
You can see more photos here.
Each act gets 8 minutes to play and 2 minutes to setup.
Here's my view on how things went....
The Good
1) It worked! I seriously had my doubts that we'd be able to set everything up in the alotted two minutes - it usually takes at least five to get everything out of the bag and untangled. But I booted the laptop during the act before and then rushed the stage at the earliest opportunity. Imagine the relief at seeing Live's input meters respond in the required manner to a quick tap on the microphones!
2) The audience response was great. I'm not saying it was the most polished performance from a musical point of view, but after an hour of watching angsty young men with guitars I think the change in musical tack was appreciated. A couple of people came up afterwards and were very interested to know how we all put it together.
3) We had lots of fun - or at least enough to make us want to do it again at some stage.
The Bad
1) One of the tracks hosted an instance of Reaktor which crashed right at the start of the performance spewing out a stuck note. We had to kill the track and do without.
2) During one of many nervous pre-performance equipment checks I managed to unknowingly drop my EDI cable (the one connecting the soundcard to the computer) on the dimly lit pub floor. If Jim hadn't stepped on it as he was getting up I'd have only discovered its absence once we got on stage!
3) Mixing the loops on stage proved to be a bit of a nightmare. The headphones I used to do this in rehearsals were well overpowered by the foldback monitors. Need to work on this aspect more.
The Ugly
1) Must improve on the "man receiving distressing email" look when on stage.
 
Southampton, UK
About me
I make music on my computer with friends in Southampton.
For other tunes see kwyj.com or tricycletunes.co.uk My Gear
sw:
Sequencer: Ableton Live. Synth: Reaktor 5, Kompakt. hw: Computer: Centrino Laptop, EMU 1616m. Controllers: FCB1010, BCR2000, PC-300, SL880, monome 40h kit x 2 Synths: Nord micro. +Most Recent Blogs
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Electronic Music other: The Candle Club
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Written June 21 2006
Comments
did you record it? let us hear please.
Well we didn't hook the minidisc up to the 'puter because of lack of setup time , but I think someone may have recorded it using a microphone in the crowd so I'll have an ask round. I'd actually like to check it out myself but I wouldn't be surprised if it just sounds like a noisy mess. Check out my release "wheels within wheels" for a recording from our last practice (recorded live directly from the soundcard outputs). That's generally what we sound like at the moment. We need to develop some more styles though.
kwyj said: "3) Mixing the loops on stage proved to be a bit of a nightmare. The headphones I used to do this in rehearsals were well overpowered by the foldback monitors. Need to work on this aspect more." you might want to check these hphones: link i have some, yet to test them at a gig though.. kwyj said: "1) Must improve on the "man receiving distressing email" look when on stage." LOL! i don't think you can improve on it, its perfect as it is ;)  congrats. I hope to live to do this someday.Signup to comment
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