Electronic Music 411 - What's your live setup? -

EM411.com
Electronic Music Production, MP3's, Live Shows, Blogs and Community

Share your music and get feedback.

madeofoak's emID

milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA

Message me

View my emID

What's your live setup?

Store

Author: madeofoak on April 28 2008

Viewed 2252 times. 21 people liked this blog. You can rate it below if you haven't already.

People who enjoyed reading this: Fognozzle, Roshi, license, yghartsyrt, sAMsKi, VC, abel, Leo, DrexonField, Otterfan, airliner, ModuLR, korgborglar, nightowl, lematt, bla, zach, hecanjog, implexgrace, nagrom, ignatius

--> i've been trying to settle on a live setup lately and been alternatingly exhilarated and frustrated by the whole thing. the point i keep coming back to is that there's really no other group of musicians that have to essentially "reinvent the wheel" every time they want to do something. trumpet players can just pick up a trumpet and learn to play it, but every electronic artist (with the exception of those who just buy one piece of hardware and learn to "play" it, i suppose) is forced to first INVENT the trumpet (so to speak), build it themselves, and THEN learn to play it.

anyway, it's all just got me wondering what everyone here uses. how do you make your live setup work? do you use a lot of backing tracks? click tracks? all live sampling? effects? midi controllers? hardware? software? even just within ableton, there are so many different possibilities. how are you all making it work?

i'll start:
right now i'm finishing a little environment in AU Lab (a basic little thing apple includes in their install discs that hosts audio units) that has a bunch of sooperloopers synced up as well as kt granulator and some delay. i haven't hooked it all up yet, but i'm planning on controlling it with some midi footpedals and (maybe?) an mpk49. i'm not totally thrilled with it though, as right now i can only do live sampling and can't "perform" tracks yet. it's getting there.

Digg it | Delicious

Read madeofoak's other blogs.madeofoak's Recent Blogs

What's your live setup? (Tags: )

sxsw (Tags: )

Just checking in (Tags: on tour, motels)

I'm a coding moron (Tags: max/msp, programming, coding)

Going on tour (Tags: polyvinyl, headlights, touring)

Comments

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

04/28/08 + hardvoltnine

I use a Mackie1407 to glue a Machinedrum, Er-1, Ea-1, MS2000R, Kaoss Pad 2, Alesis Effects thing, and SP303 together. My MD makes my MS2000r talk and sometimes my ea-1. I have an alternate out on the mute section that goes to my KP2. My effect sends go to my gates on my er-1 or my MD. I'm thinking of optimizing my sends for the real time sampling on the MD, but haven't yet. Then I have an effect send to the SP303 for effects or sampling and an effects send for the reverb or atmospheric effects. I also have a cheap compressor on my ea-1 in hopes of thickening it up abit.

Recent blogs: Us is MotherFunktion, HAHa, I posted on NYC Cragslist., That is Baby Friday Live PA

04/28/08 + seanh

solo: evolver, tapco mix120, delay pedal, reverb pedal, minidisc walkman to record to. then i will grab something else to bring along; singing bowl (which also requires a sure sm58), spring reverb (as an audio source), sp-202 (i have used once), palm (as a simple sample playback device). i keep my setup small enough to fit in a back pack (deuter giga II) because i usually bike to my shows.

Recent blogs: autechre liv? so!, learning max/msp, new purchase

04/28/08 + korgborglar

laptop: algorithmic acid techno in max with all functions linked to keyboard keys--z randomly generates 1 bar bassline within certian parameters, shift+z toggles continuous random so that the bass loop rewrites itself each time through, 1-8 and shift+1-8 set loop point for bassline, s toggles snare, shift+s randomizes snare pattern, etc etc. ive found that the less I use the mouse the more it seems like i'm "performing" and not just some guy playing mp3s on winamp while surfing the internet, so less mouse more keyboard

hardware: electribe emx+er1+juno 106 into a berhinger shitmix 1002... emx does most of the work, er1 transitions between emx patterns, juno is set on manual mode and i toggle the midi channel to hop around to recieve different emx melodies. i also try to maximize pitchbend joystick action... the general form is rock pattern 1 on emx, cut bass, fade in er1 kick, fade out emx track, cue up next emx pattern, fade emx in, repeat forever

every time i try to mix two in a live performance setting nothing goes right... someday i'll get it all straightened out and build a beastly max patch to control the hardware, but damn that sounds like a lot of work

Recent blogs: child prodigy, damn you google, peter w. belt audio treatment

04/28/08 + drewzle

hey seanh, what app are you using on your Palm for sample playback?

04/29/08 + packetst0rm

Why is it that we feel need to "INVENT the trumpet (so to speak), build it themselves, and THEN learn to play it." ? Is it a inferiority complex for how we don't look as cool playing live as guitar bands? Is this a can of worms?

Recent blogs: Field Recording on the Cheap!, Radiohead, Reaktor Online Documentation

04/29/08 + lematt

to really honest: what i prefer now is to have my vynils... and my laptop with traktor alongside the turntables.

Recent blogs: Ryoji Ikeda, Back from a fresh performance, wow BINAURAL BEATS !

04/29/08 + bla

my next set (for stfu marseille) is going to be a tx81z and an mmt8 (and possibly a dj mixer so i can adjust bass/treble if i need to)
the plan is (im afraid i havent got that far with programming it yet) to play 8 songs , each made out of 4 x64 beat sections that just play themselves without any human interferrence and 4 x16 beat sections that loop 4 times each that i will mess with by hitting the track mutes on the mmt8 to change the data sent to the tx81z
so far ive only done 1 16 beat section and it still needs a bit of work
last time i played live it was with an sr16 drum machine, mmt8 sequencer, k4r synth module and 7u of processors (2x quadraverb gt, studio quad v2, mb76 (mixer) and 3x 3630 compressors)
that involved just continuouslu hitting the mutes and occasionally fading in and out the 4 drum tracks through the mixer- i think i messed with the compressors settings a bit too
i try to do something different for each set

Recent blogs: programmers please help, bla live at bitjam at the rigger feb 08, alesis hr16

04/29/08 + cartesia

Thats it.

..cos i dont want to play music in an expressive way, i want to look cool as fk. and make sure all the ladies know i am a virile sex god.

Recent blogs: counter-intuitive ftw!, non-random use of random numbers?, My first max dabblings

04/29/08 + lematt

yeah i hate rock and roll guitarists giggling like stupid adolescents even if they are 50 years old

Recent blogs: Ryoji Ikeda, Back from a fresh performance, wow BINAURAL BEATS !

04/29/08 + zach

Roshi said: "Now I'm curious what ambient disco sounds like"

Some of AFX's Analord tracks and discs 2 and 3 of Pan Sonic's Kesto make me think of a spacy disco.

(And Plastikman.)

-

It's really neat seeing what other folks are using!

My live setup is super minimal: MicroModular + mixer + reverb/delay pedal + UC-33 midi controller

(I wrote about it here: link )

When my wife bought a new computer I was able to put her G3 iBook to use for live changes to the MM patches with the Nord Modular Editor. I also set up a very basic Pd patch to modulate some of the MM settings - real basic up, down, and up/down cc messages - alongside my live knob tweaking. Eventually I'd really like to get a small, portable, midi-controllable LED panel and get deeper into the use of Pd (or Max) modulating the MM (and the panel) live.

04/29/08 + sweettrip

packetst0rm said: "Why is it that we feel need to "INVENT the trumpet (so to speak), build it themselves, and THEN learn to play it." ? Is it a inferiority complex for how we don't look as cool playing live as guitar bands? Is this a can of worms?"

maybe he just simply meant that when it comes to playing live electronics, there's waaay more possibilities of structuring the live set up.... which is why we're all talking about our own set ups and experiences?????

Recent blogs: Ni Ten Ichi Ryu, a badly written essay by Sweet Trip, Sweet Trip's Paprika Potatoes, Music you didn't at first, but eventually grew up on you...

04/29/08 + crabster

Monomachine+Machinedrum+Warp9 WASP filter clone+Korg SD-200 analog delay+Radioshack realistic reverb

Recent blogs: Drowning in wires, Orwellian swedish legislature, My mind is blown

04/29/08 + ejectorset

our first show was a nightmare combination of hardware and software with so many controllers i had to bring a usb hub, which i fried during soundcheck.

our second show was mostly live synth and live guitar and some knob twiddling with backing tracks as scenes in live 6.

i hate the backing tracks way. we are both musicians and i hope that any future shows would be computer-less. we got an akai headrush looping pedal and its amazing how much more fun it is using that and some instruments you can play than anything i've ever done in a computer.

i saw a guy perform at sxsw (not this year but last year 07) i have no idea what his name was, but it was amazing.
he had an electric guitar, delay pedal, tremolo pedal, mic and a turntable. not a turntable that any dj would scratch or spin on, but just like an old home unit. the turntable was hooked up through the delay so he could get some static off the record or skip the needle or put the needle on the label and get some nasty loud abrasive sound which he then tweaked the knobs on the delay until he transformed it into some sort of glitchy rhythm which he would then play guitar over and sing occasionally sometimes with the mic going through the tremolo pedal.

we were blown away by his set. it was unreal how musical and creative and new and free he was able to be with such little in the way of gear. it was definitely one of those less is more things.

i wish i knew who he was so i could buy some music and check out more he has done.

Recent blogs: adventures in blogging, I cares, binary solo

04/29/08 + seanh

for the palm i just use an mp3/ogg player to play some pre-edited feild recording stuff.

Recent blogs: autechre liv? so!, learning max/msp, new purchase

04/29/08 + madeofoak

as far as the whole "invent the trumpet" idea goes, i was just referring to the fact that there is no tried-and-true method to "playing" electronic music, like there is with any other instrument. we are forced to conceptualize our own means to perform. i find it hard to believe that any great trumpet player would have come up with the trumpet independently had it not been available for them already, and this is what separates us. most electronic musicians are forced to invent their own instrument.
the comment didn't really have anything to do with looking cool on stage, though i admit that is kind of a problem for most of us and should be dealt with in a different blog entirely.

Recent blogs: What's your live setup?, sxsw, Just checking in

1 | 2 | 3 | 4

You must be a member to reply or post. signup or login