| StoreTags: liveset, minimal, machinedrum
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Heya peepz,
as you may have seen, I am building a new liveset, expanding upon the concept of my last one. Basically, I want to do it all hardware, so I settled on using my elektron machinedrum and my nord micromodular, as well as a elcheapo behringer mixer for mixing. I use the machinedrum as the main groovebox, it contains all the drums, as well as most midi sequences for the nord. The machinedrum has 16 tracks on which I can load drumsynth sounds, sample sounds, midi tracks, as well as control and resampling tracks. My basic setup is: 12 tracks for drums, 1 track for MIDI, 2 tracks for resampling (record and playback), and 1 track for controlling. This may slightly vary for some patterns, but mostly that's it.
I had some kind of "insight" into how to do techno beginning of december (I blogged about it), and since then I've been pretty busy building patterns. I started by analyzing a set by Richie Hawtin pretty deeply (DE9 - closer to the edit), and started "copying" that. I made a lot of percussion loops, as well as the standard four on the floor bassdrum, recording that onto the computer and sequencing it in ableton to try to get a sense of the flow. That first try was pretty hectic, and also I figured I'd never be able to do the smooth kind of mixing Hawtin has on the record (there is no cool way to have faders for the 12 tracks on the machinedrum, for example, as using an external midi controller would "jump" when switching patterns. That's a kind of skills limitation, maybe I'll try that again in the future though.
So, mp3 for that first try is link . I noticed also that my flow did suck, that I had to linger on patterns longer, that kind of stuff. Here is my analysis of the first minutes (15 or so) of closer to the edit: link
I was then recommended sets by Mikael Stavoestrand, which is very cool, and I also listened repeatedly to one set by akufen. Both of these guys use computers, so they have pretty complex evolving layers of sounds which I wouldn't be able to do on the machinedrum (limited to 2 bars per pattern). That's another kind of skillz limitation though, so maybe I'll try that in the future. However, I learnt some things from those sets as well, and often I'd "drop the needle" somewhere in their set and try to copy the feel on the machinedrum. Learnt a lot that way. That's about the time where I started to patch synth sounds on the nord and sequencing them from the machinedrum as well, which is very cool cause it gives a more "edgy" synth sound, which is hard to do with just the samples on the machinedrum.
Regarding samples, I have a few bass sounds on the machinedrum, as well as 3 vocal samples, and 2 minor chord pads. I managed to learn a lot from tweaking these samples, doing percussion lines with the vocal samples (very very very versatile, especially doing hat sounds with vocals give the whole drumtrack a very nice feel). I also learnt to tweak those chord sounds to make them sound like piano, like strings, like pads... All in all, you can do SO MUCH with just 800 kB of samples.
So, I built pattern upon pattern upon pattern, generally going for 2 feels: the funky house feel, often with swing and a "disco" bassline, as well as the hypnotic feel, with lots of single sounds (one hit for 2 bars), with delay, more machine like kind of feel, Hawtin-like. Mixing these two is very cool. One trick for the machine kind of feel is to think about the bassline not in term of notes or percussion, but in term of sound, like just using a big lfod sinewave, for example.
Having these patterns, I would very often go back to them, listen to them, and tweak them again. I have pages and pages of notes of what to fix, what to change. This would give me a list of things to do when I felt like doing "grunt" work. In creative phases I'd make new patterns.
That's one of these todo lists: link
When I had a good bunch of patterns, I'd go back on them and look at what kind of sounds I could tweak, what transitions I could make, and write those down:
link
Then I'd assign a control parameter to these sound parameters and store that in the last track. That's pretty machiendrum specific, you have different pages for all the parameters, and a control machine allows you to group a bunch of these together on one page, which makes it easier to tweak, rather than go parameter hunting all over the tracks. Often, these parameters are just track volumes to bring things in and out (mostly bass / chord / weird sounds, the basis of the drum I bring in and out by muting). This is a part of the liveset I haven't practiced much yet though, I'm sure I will discover cool things there.
So that was building the patterns, fixing them. My approach to live mixing is the following: I have pretty much filled all the tracks I could on my patterns, with multiple basslines and things, and then defined "combos" of these tracks, which are basic grooves that work well on their own. SO with one pattern, I'd be able to have like 2 or 3 combos which I could then work on mixing over form one to the other. While playing, and having something like a bassdrum without most percussion, I'll trigger resampling the pattern, so I have the "background" sounds in the RAM machine (the sampler, basically). I'll then work my pattern further, and then switch over to the next one, having just the playback running (so just hte sounds from the old pattern). I'd then be able to tweak the old sound (disto, filter, whatever), making it a backgorund pad, bringing in the new percussion. This is the basic way of switching from one to the other. Another cool trick is that I have a pattern filled with "slice" tracks, which allow me to reverse parts of a beat or so to do nice transitions.
All in all, and as I have about 150 patterns now (with about 4 minutes per pattern, tht is a whole night playing !!!  , I can't ever possibly remember all that stuff, so I wrote down cheatsheets and made a nice bookklet out of it. That's an example for 20 patterns:
link
You can download the samples and the sysex for these patterns here if you have a machinedrum and are interested:
link
I haven't played this live yet, but test recordings (crappy recording and mistakes included :
link
link
As you can see, this is a lot of work, but i'm really f****ing glad I did it, cause I'm getting very confident that it is a dancefloor rocking liveset, and I think about the best music I've done up to today.
At the moment I'm busy organizing all that stuff, practicing, and building cool visuals in java | |
Comments
01/08/08
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Roshi
Great blog...will check out samples when I have time.
Yes, when I used to make techno I loved using the same sample to make 4 different sounds in the track.
01/08/08
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atum
lots of info
01/08/08
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bla
if you can have lfo's that dont retrigger when the patterns starts again but keep going then you can get long evolving sounds out of different interacting lfo speeds
01/08/08
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daswesen
yah that's a good one bla, i have done that a bit, but not too much. I'll have to look into it.
01/09/08
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lematt
De9 is my favourite minimal tech CD. good choice !
i'm sure what you're preparing is damn cool. i'm really looking forward to hear this as soon as i'm back in france in february
01/09/08
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drewzle
good work man, very interesting to read about your workflow
i've been playing 'firt-test' for a few days. it's really quirky but remains very danceable. you can tell it is "hands-on", i reckon the liveness of the performance enhances the music. gonna download the second attempt now for a listen
01/09/08
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cbit
interesting, on-topic, blogpost as usual dw! good stuff
01/09/08
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quip
cool. i like you ideas. separating grunt work and actually making something worthwhile
is interesting.
i too have been trying to build a hardware set as opposed to ableton.
at the moment all i have is a dodgy reaktor ensemble with some sequencers in it.
i may try just sequencing my nord from the esx.
01/09/08
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korgborglar
i really enjoyed this post. ive got an all hardware live set ive been workign on for a while and im definately gonna steal some of your ideas, a cheatsheet booklet is a great idea
01/09/08
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bla
when im doing a live set with my mmt8 i find it effective to put lots of different midi data on each track and spread the data for each sound across all the tracks so that when i hit a track mute button it affects all the sounds- eg- the midi note for the kick drops out,the pitchbend for the bass stops changing and the mod wheel data for the snare goes aswell- all from 1 button press- rather than having 1 track for 1 sound which would mean the track mutes just switch on/off a different sound each- which is much less interesting
01/09/08
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quip
i need a better hardware midi sequencer.
suggestions?
01/09/08
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bla
get an mmt8 for cheap while you search for a better one
theres a MAM sequencer thats really good
01/09/08
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bitmarch
outstanding work! ...totally sick. great job, and have fun playing out
01/10/08
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daswesen
01/10/08
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fichu
very inspiring!
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