Nah, i’ve never had fundamental failures live beyond one time i got too drunk to sing. That was a great one.
I have no malice towards the idea of using renoise live on its own as much as i worry about the idea of live music being lost on so many people, to the point where it stops being about the expression of the musician and more about justifying the personal appearance.
Personally i applaud those who are totally in touch with that and just play a DJ set of their tunes rather than try and mangle their own art into something they can swiftly alter in a live context.
This is exactly my point. Renoise as an element of a live performance is useful, interesting and completely doable as is. It doesn’t have to become a pseudo-ableton live to fill that role.
Yeah that was pretty harsh. But i get honestly upset when i see people who produce brilliant music degrading their sound to fit into some imaginary notion of what live music is, to the point where their labors of love are broken apart and retrofitted to a context in which it doesn’t actually work. It kills the soul.
When you play live it’s for the paying audience, sometimes they travel far to see you, sometimes they’ve wanted to see you play for years and finally they can. Reducing your art is disrespectful to everyone.
What is the point of any rant. Obviously i feel strongly enough on this subject that i’m not worried about working it for popularity? My point all the way through was that compromising your vision to base your live set around Renoise is a bad thing, and i’ve seen it done so many times i feel it’s worth shouting about.
To take a step back, obviously there are genres where loop swapping and filter tweaking actually has a real place. I’m mostly concerned about music where expression, dramatic flair and subtlety has immediate and important value.
None of those musicians make electronic music. One of the purposes of electronic music is that it doesn’t have to played live, or in otherwords it requires no physical ability, its all sequenced. I don’t need 10 years of experience playing piano to compose a piano part. If you were to write songs around your playing abilities, I think it would only limit what you could do compositionally.
What I like seeing live is on-the-spot programming. Autechre does this with a few drum machines and synths: http://youtube.com/watch?v=4Ig3nHtWJFQ . They probably have the sound sets already picked out and a rough sketch of what the songs should sound like, but the rest is all improve.
I am guilty of repeatedly coming up with suggestions for new features, and using the term “good for live performance” - that said, I largely agree with sunjammer.
However, his points are only valid when we are talking about solo performances. If you happen to play music together with others, you are constantly challenged and need to respond. I write my own performance software to get those abilities, but those home brewed patches are never actually sequenced, but played 100% live.
I think Renoise is something like 80% of the way towards becoming a killer live sequencer, something that more “compositional” music creating methods would surely also benefit from ?
Fair enough, I’m just advocating for good vibes and constructive criticism…I read it slightly differently, perhaps misread, to see it as an attack against instajungle-kiddies because of inferiority annoying you or something. That is what i see rants as, an opportunity to be misunderstood and have an argument. But I guess thats just me. Anyway, as the original instajungle kiddie, the hairs on the back of my neck instinctively prickled for a fight (I didnt make it… but he never really used it… and for the record, I begged him not to go public with it!)
Aye… though if you replace those band names with bands such as Nine Inch Nails, Atari Teenage Riot, Mindless Self Indulgence, Skinny Puppy and Throbbing Gristle, you will find that musicianship again enters the picture, even in an electronic context.
Second of all, the reasons I personally want more live features in Renoise aren’t so I can play my regular compositions, but instead to use Renoise to compose brand new things in a live environment. I want to chain my guitar, synth, and a mic through Renoise, and it would be nice to be able to loop like ableton does, or to be able to do other neat stuff (better routing plz kthx!) with live inputted sound. Currently it’s impossible to do things like lay out a new pattern while another pattern is playing… this would be nice to do. For those that have a multi-out soundcard especially, it would be nice to have one set of patterns playing to the audience, while the ones you’re working on are piped to another output, where your headphones are plugged in. These are just some ideas I’ve had for live composing on the fly. True live composition, not simply muting or effecting channels. Renoise is one of the fastest tools for composing, and I’d beg to guess that it’s fast enough that you could compose entire sets on the fly if you’re fast enough… you’d just need to have the right features implemented, and a lot of practise. Renoise could revolutionize live electronic music in a way ableton never could with the right changes
Or KCS never did. Point being: the challenge is to implement such features. Feature-wise, KCS was way ahead at it’s time (mid-80’s), but it was really hard to learn.
Its possible if you duplicate the Renoise.app in the finder first. Then you can launch the original and the copy side by side.
Or you start the Renoise.app twice in the terminal.
I’m preparing 2 live sets with Renoise. One is a hardware set with loads of analog/vintage stuff where I can do improvisation but maintain the drum patterns, bass lines and chords. The other is a laptop set with loops from tracks I made earlier (I have to go by plane so I can’t bring the hardware with me). All my tracks are single-pattern based so it isn’t hard to implement that in a ‘live’ setting. The only problem is the sound of the analog effects, since I can’t use them I try to compensate it with effects I can’t possibly do with my analog stuff (like a LFO chained to the Mixer EQ and oscillating the mid frequency for some nice variation in the overall sound of the chords).
sunjammer is so right!!!
a live is something acted with hands, knobs, pads, risks, sweat, freedom, improvisation, surprises, livemade beats and breaks etc…
previous/next/filter/cut is not live performance, it s just wanking… with renoise, ableton or anything else…
Lets not forget that DJing is the traditional and logical way to perform electronic music. Not to mention its amazing fun! I highly recommend buying a pair of decks (vinyl or CD) and a mixer. You’ll never go back! Plus turntables and CDJs don’t crash…
Having said that I can’t wait for the arranger to be implemented, as if Renoise wasn’t powerful enough!! Then I can use it as a third ‘live remixing’ deck. Ahh the possibilities.
And one more thing, DJ mixers with more than two channels are immensely useful performance tools. Even without decks, you can plug in your laptop/multi output audio interface, hardware synths, kaoss pad, drum machine blah blah… and with the addition of channel EQ and an assignable crossfader you have precise, tactile control over almost every aspect of your sound.
I don’t have my all tracks on vinyl, hence I won’t be caught DJ’ing often (caugh, on traktor, caugh) …
luckily my laptop never crashed during a liveset (YET)
i keep it simple renoise is not a good live prog really.
Just use atomik virtual dj and a usb mixer you can really mess with the sounds in it also…easy and fun, i would
rather spend time making tunes than trying to learn live et al.
