Building A Live Rig

S L e e P y

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So I've been slacking in the music department the past couple of weeks, and upon checking my emails I was kind of surprised to see one from a fellow that invited me to play a local show he was setting up. This would be a perfect chance to show off some of the techniques I was talking about in a previous post regarding improvising tracks live, but actually setting it up on stage would require a bit of tweaking to make everything flow smoothly and I thought it was worth collecting some feedback on the most efficient way to do so!

The actual performance aspect of the music comes from an Organelle, which is basically a small synth that you can program to do pretty much whatever you want. In this instance I use it as a looper that change both the pitch and speed of a 30 second excerpt from a song, as well as change the start and end time within that sample. This works well for the ambient ecco-jams kind of thing I'm going for, but in a live setting I need a way to create fluid transitions and in order to load each sample I need 30 seconds of downtime to actually load the samples. That being said, my plan is to have a second device that can play pad / drone sounds to fill in the empty space as well as small synth to play some simple chords to break up the monotony a bit.

So essentially this idea could be summarized as having two alternating parts, one loading samples and manipulating the speed / pitch to perform the actual tracks while the other would act as a transitional tool to move between the songs. The gear that I'm looking at is as follows;

- Organelle (main instrument)
- Tablet / Laptop (for pad / drone sounds)
- Volca FM (synth for transitional pieces)
- Volca Mix (3-Channel mixer for the units listed above)
- Midi Controller for the FM
- Various Effect Pedals

That's sort of what I'm looking at right now, but I'm interested to hear suggestions on other methods of setting this up. Any ideas? :)
 
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reQverb

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I heavily use a sp404 when working in live situations regarding vaporwave, the on the spot sample manipulation and decent bank size make it irreplaceable in my rig.
 
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Eis-T

The Taste of Late Capitalism
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I agree with the above. Or broader: you need a way to trigger and manipulate samples on the fly. as you are bringing a laptop a USB controller (mashine, ableton push) would work well. Though an old school MPC sampler that looks like a cash register (and has a floppy drive) is wayyy more aesthetic ofc
 
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electricdreams

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yeah, the Sp404 is a really great addition, even for recording sessions and stuff like that
 

aesirav

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(first post - waddup!)

i'd recc. anyone looking for a reliable, flexible live rig look into the roland mx-1 | i use it for all my geo metro/bonneville/etc. stuff and its proven to be a swiss army knife of sorts. combines a high quality sound card with toughly built controls that stand up to plenty of enthusiastic abuse in a live scenario - pair with an old thinkpad (i use an x230 myself) and you've got a live rig that'll withstand a bomb.

plus, its a visually impressive piece of kit that really lends itself towards allowing the user to give a passionate, physical performance without worrying about audio dropouts etc.
 
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kevin

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If you're looking for a customizeable way to cue and manipulate samples on the fly, the one thing that comes first to my mind is Max/MSP, a visual programming suite that specializes in audio and video manipulation. The upshot of this is that after you build the functionality of cuing samples, it's completely hardware agnostic and you can use anything from your computer keyboard to a MIDI device to an N64 controller to take inputs. Although it's a pricey thing as far as software goes (less so if you have an academic affiliation) it's a nice "in-the-box" solution that you can use for plenty of other things down the road. And if it's between that and single-purpose gear, I know where my vote would be. The only other downside is that there's a heck of a learning curve if you're not familiar with general programming concepts.
 
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