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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.
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04/29/08
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ModuLR
imo one significant difference is that a trumpet, while clearly capable of being played solo, is a relatively solitary instrument. Many electronic musicians tend to fall into the "one must do it all" category. That in itself is quite different conceptually. You are attempting to perform the roles of what would traditionally require multiple people. So it's not so much creating the instrument (sure you can build 'em in reaktor, max, etc), as it is creating a means of performing with multiple instruments all by yourself.
04/29/08
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Roshi
This trumpet comment is sounding like a troll.
My live setup is the way it is because I love the cello. And it's a way to expand the sonic possibilities of the cello. Looking cool has nothing to do with it.
04/29/08
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madeofoak
exactly roshi! not about coolness! cello is the jam!
i see what you mean, modular, but even with the one man band thing i still think we have it somewhat harder. even the guy playing trumpet, kicking a drum and playing cymbals with his knees still had the instruments first. he didn't have to think to himself "i wish i had a splashy, high frequency sound to accent certain areas of the song" and then go about deciding that two metal discs being struck together would be his best bet. know what i mean?
04/29/08
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hecanjog
"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."
Mos def - pretty much every instrument in the orchestral family has at least a few hundred years of evolution and refinement behind it. Laptop performance is barely 20 years old. Another interesting thing is that really early electric instruments like ondes marionent aren't 'black boxes' obviously - they've all got very focused individual sounds. When we're talking about laptop music or electronic music performance today, you don't associate that with a particular sound the way you can when you talk about trumpet performance.
The actual instrument sound-producing happens on the software side, and for most of us is fed by some other acoustic or external sound source like a guitar or a hardware synth or whatever. Then we also extend the controls of it with midi controllers and other devices so we don't have to use a keyboard and mouse - they'll do in a pinch, but we all know they were not designed with music performance in mind by any stretch of the imagination. Modern midi controllers are only slightly better I think. They either ape another instrument (keyboard, sax, drums, etc) or a piece of recording equipment. As much as we slide between the process of recording and performance nowadays - look at ableton, which was designed with this idea in mind: kind of a souped up multitrack recorder - they're still different things. All this is so young - there isn't anything approaching a standard, though I think a tradition is already emerging, even if it's totally all over the place right now.
Anyway.
My setup isn't any different - I build a max patch the way you've put together your rack of audio units, and then figure out a good way to control it with midi controllers or audio triggering/tracking or just the plain old keyboard and mouse. Then I figure out what the sound source will be - for the last couple years it's mostly been a little casio keyboard plus small noise makers like cable buzz or homebrew mics for my non-cedar av stuff.
It's a weird thing when you have to build your instrument first, and even then it's more a network of instruments than one focused evolved instrument like a trumpet. I think it's a love / hate thing for me - I'm never happy with the way my setup is working, and always reconfigure and rebuild between shows when possible. Bryan and I talk about this a lot - and we both agree (not to put words in his mouth) that it's way easier to spend too much time on the instrument and not enough time practicing it. Most of the time this blurs together, since you can always adjust as you go, but more and more I'm finding that if I work within the limitations of a simple setup and practice with it to get what I want, rather than continually adding bells and whistles every time I think I need to be able to do something else, in general I have more fun playing, and I tend to be much more "live" anyway. The road of bells and whistles can often be a road of automation and loops, and then suddenly you're a glorified cd player, and that's no fun.
Just my 2¢ - looking forward to seeing what you come up with Nick!
04/29/08
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hecanjog
Haha, I just reread a bit - I stopped for dinner in the middle of that post somewhere. The thing I was trying to point out in terms of the 'black box' is just that somewhere along the way, probably in the 70s - the capabilities of electronic and emerging computer instruments were so vast the idea of building focused instruments like the theremin sort of went out the window. Even supposedly dedicated synths in the hardware world were made to be jack-of-all-trade synths rather than something dedicated like a trumpet. Laptops are like the worst case scenario. You can reproduce just about any sound in any configuration with a laptop, and so the temptation is to do that.
Part of my recent attempt to be more focused with my instrument building is to consciously exclude the orchestral possibilities of my laptop. I'd rather learn how to play something much more limited better. The alternative like I said quickly goes down the road of laptop-as-glorified-cd-player.
Okay, done! Nobody's going to read this, too long!
04/30/08
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cartesia
Part of my recent attempt to be more focused with my instrument building is to consciously exclude the orchestral possibilities of my laptop. I'd rather learn how to play something much more limited better. The alternative like I said quickly goes down the road of laptop-as-glorified-cd-player.
Okay, done! Nobody's going to read this, too long!
I read it, and agree in entirety... this is what im trying to do too. . . its very hard though!
04/30/08
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packetst0rm
As I suspected can of worms! Sorry! I shall keep my "mouth" shout next time...Still it spawned some interesting reading for avoiding work!
04/30/08
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madeofoak
great insight, erik. i really like the part about how we're just trying to emulate other instruments with either our computer or our midi controllers. you're definitely right that we're focusing, though. that's essay material!
the more i think about this, the more i feel like there's a book in here somewhere. i haven't really found any text centering on the modern electronic performer, and i think we could compile some essays that would help other people like us. ideas?
04/30/08
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bla
some of its like real time composing rather than playing an instrument
04/30/08
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Roshi
I personally think more people should make their software more like a musical agent that reacts to your playing rather than trying to play this game of controlling too many parameters at once.
I've been thinking about this for a long time - and I think we finally have enough computational power to do real time analysis of incoming signals to do some useful things in this manner. Of course, the rules of musical interaction are the tough ones, but I think there is some machinery (cellular automata, perhaps) that could interact in surprising ways to your playing.
04/30/08
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Roshi
I guess I'm saying I want an AI bandmate who doesn't make poo jokes every five minutes (just kidding mlbot).
04/30/08
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madeofoak
my AI bandmate would fart on cue. to each his own.
04/30/08
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dach
I use an esx and emx to provide a simple basic groove, and then run a bunch of circuit bent gear through them. I use a lot of volume gating and tempo synced delays to chop the circuit bent noises into rythmic clicks and farts. I focus on this when playing live, and just change patterns/toggle mutes/move filters occasionally on the electribes to keep it moving forward. I've yet to try it on front of an audience but i think it'll go down ok.
Previous live shows have been entirely ambient with circuit bent toys and involved several suitcases of gear, including a TV and a sega megadrive (for visuals)
04/30/08
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bla
suitcases of gear... i dont want to do that again
minimal as fuck from now on
04/30/08
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implexgrace
current live setup:
[ voice -> line6 delay + synthesizer + computer (reaktor) ] -> mixer
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