RAVE RAVE, TECHNO TECHNO!

FedEx apparently showed up yesterday while we were at lunch, leaving me a little brown and yellow sticky note on my door. Today, as promised, they returned - the two IDE to Compact Flash adapters arrived finally! They stuck me with a $22.60 CAD import fee, on top of the $16 USD shipping - total price, about $60 USD total...

One week until the show in Calgary, and the set is *finally* playable... well, almost.

Currently I have twelve finished tracks, with another four partially loaded up - the four will be worked on later on, when I have more free time. Basically, all that is left now is practice, practice, find and kill bugs, practice, practice, and more practice.

The only real hole in the set right now is the lack of transitions (ie. how to get from one song to the next, there's a million ways!), but the only thing I can do about that is practice until I know the material backwards and forwards. That's a *huge* part of building and maintaining dancefloor energy - I can partially rely on the fact that the new techno is damned good, but nothing can replace *really* knowing the set, and that can only come with time. With the set coming up next weekend, there's just enough time to spare.

Really though, I don't think I've ever played a set where I wasn't thinking that I could have used an extra two weeks of practice. If you don't get out there and actually *play*, you can spend years building the perfect set in your basement...

w00t!

In a few hours, I'll be officially off work for ten days!

Erin, my lovely fiancee, and I are taking seperate vacations for the first time ever. We only get so many vacation days per year, and we have slightly different ideas of what "vacation" means - I, for instance, draw a very broad difference between "vacation" and "travel". "Travel" means to go to other countries, explore, meet people, see the sights, and really drink deeply of a different culture. On "vacation", otoh, I just want to sit in the sun beside a body of water and have someone bring me drinks with little umbrellas in them.

Anyway - for this vacation, Erin is going to New York to go shopping and wander around, then to Toronto to visit with friends. I am taking a lovely all-expenses-paid tropical vacation to a very exclusive resort: my basement. While Erin wanders around the Big Apple, I'll be getting up in the morning, having some breakfast, then hitting the studio to work on my live set.

I can't wait. Ten days of free studio time, with no interruptions or time limits or responsibilities! I'll have to make a really big point of remembering to eat...

I'm feeling so great about this new set!

I've been spending every weekend in the studio, working on the "framework" of the new liveset, and it's now locked down completely and rapidly getting populated with bomb techno. The final version looks like this:

x0xb0x playing 303 acid riffs (zawzum!)

Nord Micro Modular playing synthlines (flexibly, both outputs go to the MOTU 828, and two outputs from the MOTU go into the Nord's inputs, so I can use it as one or two synths, or an FX box, or a vocoder). MIDI comes from the MPC1000.

MPC1000 playing drum samples, being a drum machine (what it does best), and one-shot samples. It's also the master clock for the live rig.

IBM ThinkPad and MOTU 828mkII as the mixer and loop player - 11 tracks in Live; the kick, hats and misc.samples from the MPC, the two from the Nord, the one from the x0xb0x, four tracks of looping Live clips (percussion from the drumcloset, perc from the ER-1, basslines, and misc sample loops), and a pair of mics.

And lastly, the Behringer BFR2000 control surface thingey - I'm particularly proud of the setup here. There's sixteen buttons above the eight motorized faders; I have them blocked off (mentally) into four groups of four. For each "song", I have three basslines, three ER-1 loops, three percussive loops, and three synth or vocal loops. For each "song", I have four sets of three 'clip start' buttons, and four 'clip stop' buttons. Live is setup with just these clips, and they're all mapped to MIDI CC#'s, so the laptop doesn't even have to be open for the live set!!

I firmly believe the way to a solid live rig is to lay out a rigid-but-flexible framework, and build tracks within that framework. I'm *very* happy with this framework, and the way it's laid out, I can now look at the set as a whole and figure out all the spots where I'm missing bits. Then, on my upcoming 10-day vacation, I can rock out every day, and find the spots where the techno is weak, and replace it with stronger techno. This setup also has no "song mode", so every time the techno is played, it'll be different - I can stick with the patterns I've set down for each song, or explore strange new combinations of any part from any song.

For instance - there's no SH-101 in this rig, but it'd be trivial to add it in. Or, if there were a gig somewhere that required a smaller rig, I could record all the other instruments as clips in live, and bring out just a laptop... that'd mean a lot less synthy flexibility tho, and it's not something I'm willing to do right now - but at least the option is *there*.

I planned this framework so that it could hold 16 songs, but it's looking like that's an artificial ceiling. An average one-hour liveset takes approximately 12 songs, tho it could easily be more - this year, my focus is on not just building energy, but maintaining it for longer... keeping the dancefloor energy high even *between* songs, and then taking it upwards even further.

MAN, I love this stuff. I can't wait to get back into the studio!