About Live Performance

People in generally tend to take themselves too seriously… especially in front of other people. Life is too important to be taken seriously.

Importance is too serious to be taken lively.

My point was that it doesn’t matter WHAT you do but HOW you bring it.
You can DJ Winamp and act like a fool or be locked in your own knob-tweaking world,
but people will love the fool over the genious anyday.

I’m not discussing it 100% seriously… but I am very interested in the topic… it seems to me that a lot of people really get hung up on the live performance aspect of things… and for some reason, those same people end up doing their live performances the same as everyone else… knob tweaking with ableton. Why not do something different if you’re so concerned about the act?

Well put, Byte.

what’s wrong with that? at least they don’t just talk about it, but are DOING it

i’m doing live performances and jammings… i think maybe 90% of my musical creation is totally non automated. i like to play my samplers like others play guitars. i did my own sampler(loops and pattern based sequenced sampler with massiv glitch shit included…) with ni reaktor for that, bought 4 midi controllers and a macbook for getting things really to work.

sounds like this(base loops/samples are done with renoise…) -> http://psychotronic.podspot.de/files/Die_Knospe.mp3 (intro is to long… just zapp to the middle of the track… )

now you ask why?

cause painting or coding tracks to a perfect state and then rendering them pisses me off. i just want to rock the shit myself and put my feelings into the music.

anywhere we can check your ensemble out??

sure…

dev thread
http://forum.electronicattack.de/showthread.php?t=7924

ensemble
http://psychotronic.electronicattack.de/tr…ribox_0.95a.ens

tutorial video
http://psychotronic.electronicattack.de/tr…x_anleitung.rar
(language is german, sorry… did this for my german musician community… just look at what i’m doing… i think you’ll understand… and yes, it’s recorded a year ago or so… on an older version, avi/mp4 codec, 230MB rar packed… use vlc to watch)

and for that oriental instrument in the track, thats an instrument included in this software -> http://www.ixi-software.net/content/body_s…_ixiquarks.html
i’m running it parallel to reaktor(standalone) using my mouse playing it
left hand for reaktor… right hand for ixiQuarks…

:yeah:

i no… i’m not a women… multitasking is just feeling. :blink: :D :P

I was just pointing out that I find it somewhat silly that many people who are concerned about having unique performance do the same thing as everyone else… it wasn’t meant as an attack… and it wasn’t directed at you. (do you even fall into that category?) … and perhaps it is hypocritical to be discussing live performance when I’ve not done it… but that’s the point of forums, no? discussion? philosophizing? … Anyway, I’d rather discuss these issues with people who have done it before I get up and make an ass out of myself :P

the only people I’ve met who use the exact same way of performing, are using Traktor to mix their mp3’s.

all that “projection” stuff reminds me of a court métrage that I’m working on right now (pre-prod only)

I hope I’ll have the chance to see that ebay performance.

I wanna see like 5 guys with Yamaha DX7s

i think you need to find some way to have control over your music on stage

playing a pre-recorded laptop set or playing off DAT are “cheats” which people might never notice, but then again, performing to a crowd under any capacity is really both about reading the room and reacting to feedback, and of course expressing your own intent/artistry as a musician

it might be you playing and mixing CD’s of your tracks off CDJ’s… it might be setting a track to play off a sequencer and playing certain parts (drums, strings, samples) in live on a keyboard… anything which lets you become a meaningful part of the performance and allows you to bridge the gap between the music and the environment

as far as laptops go, it is quite obvious the term “laptop DJ” is becoming pretty much as derogatory as “laptop journalist”… a lot of people don’t want to see someone sat behind a laptop, playing minesweeper for all they know, while itunes churns out a bunch of mp3s

i think performance is becoming an ever more important part of being an electronic musician - not only for promotion, but as a way to supplement your income with record sales bottoming out - so i think it’s worth going to the effort of doing something interesting and interactive while you’re up there… autechre do a great job of getting their sets packed on to an MPC and a few hardware sequencers/synths… even though a lot of their stuff’s obviously heavily programmed and processed, you can still think about ways to turn it into a very practical, loop-based performance, with only minimal gear

The only things I play from my notebook are MIDI signals in combination with a bunch of hardware and analog effects. This is a pleasant way of performing in my opinion as I have total control over everythings that happens (all my tracks are based on single 20 line patterns).
My performances actually don’t differ that much from my recording sessions at my studio… :)

¿Huh? I used to do something simular, songs made from lots of short patterns grouped together in ‘clusters’, each approx 8 patterns in length. Then, using pgUp/pgDown, you could navigate between the ‘variations’ and create the song flow on-the-fly.

I wanna see 5 guys with nanoloops, LSDJs, midiNes abused with velvety vacuum tubes

About Live performance, is it really that important ?
Well that depends on the ratio of satisfaction between whoever is involved at such & such location. You, other performers, engineers, audience, that ƒU©k!NG wasted monkey that Peter always brings to the shows, who always ruins it for everybody because it starts throwing §h!† all over the ƒU©k!N place halfway through each set. There was §h!† all over my gear last time that ƒU©ker Peter brought his wasted monkey. Let me tell you, these fancy cake electronic gears do NOT like §h!† on them

About Live performance, is it really that important ?
Well that depends on the ratio of satisfaction between whoever is involved at such & such location. Its obvious that ƒU©ker Peter & wasted monkey didn’t give a hoot about the show. We should have been throwing §h!† all over the ƒU©k!N place just to satisfy that ƒU©k. But that wasn’t the ratio for that particular evening, so we continued to please ourselves & our paying audience who got off on pleasuring ourselves. So ƒU©k Peter & his wasted monkey, get the bouncer & place them carefully where they ƒU©k!N belong

If I didn’t type ƒU©k enough, here’s some more, just for the ƒU©k of it. ƒU©k!NG ƒU©k ƒU©k ƒU©k!NG ƒU©k ƒU©k ƒU©k > mutual satisfaction of audience & performer

O.o

a little aside about the whole laptop vs 1210 dj’s - i prefer to see a laptop dj cos tyou know that they can do a hell of a lot more than just play records.

dont care how it looks on stage (reading emails etc) because to be honest watching someone listening to headphones and looking constipated whilst turning a record slowly with their hand aint that interestin either.

Amen

I did a live jungle/breakcore set with renoise. with no backtrack(except starting up some notes on an external sequenser by turning mute on and off, to start reggea-loops and ragga vocal loops etcetera). And then playing on chopped amens trigged in renoise live from a midi keyboard(with an arpegiator for when i seriously wanted to fuck things up). It was good for the breakcore side of it, i could push several notes at the same time creating nice jungle-choruses and noisy drum sounds. but apart from that was midi keyboards not realy the perfect tool for playing drums. ^_^

So now im saving up for an AKAI mpd. Which is basicly purely the midi part of an akai sampler. I.e great drumpads with a legendary velocity sensibility that has been a cornerstone in nineties Hip Hop(i hope it will sync aswell as the sampler tough).

I have had some ideas about using a djmixer with renoise to improvise tunes also. but i have not had time to get deeper into it tough. Since my mixer was away for one year at a bollocks technician.

I have seen several people using trackers live btw. Some people back in the days used pro tracker and Fasttracker II live(and some probably still do). Buzz was realy nice for improvising(im a mac owner now so i cant realy compare buzz to current competition) and i have seen some nice improvisations with it. I would be a bit scared to use it live tough due to its capacity to crasch and make nasty noises at the same time.

But apart from that is the whole sequensing model for it right up my alley for improvising(i have not got into ableton yet).

Also i think there is an important + with performing live that is missing here. Which is the posiblity to shape your music around your goals based on the current situation.

When i first started to perform ( which was, around 2001 i used to just give my tunes to dj’s before instead) did i improvise with synths over my tunes on a minidisc.

The fact that i was so bound to the backtrack left werry litle room for flexibility and situations like when i had made a 10 minutes long deep house tune and someone comes up and ask me to play something more fast and banging, made me a whole lot more intrested in using drum machines and sequensers.

It made it a whole lot easier for me to connect with the audience amd a whole lot more fun to perform live.