RAVE RAVE, TECHNO TECHNO!

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!

heh!

in the last few days, I've gone from feeling liberated and productive, to feeling panicked and despondant, back to feeling relieved and hopeful.

Back story - my buds in Calgary have booked me to headline a party there in early May. That's just the push I needed to get off my ass and work on my liveset every day - not that I wasn't working on techno anyway, but there's a difference between the 'puttering and experimenting' days and the 'focused and working on a liveset' days. Those Calgary guys rule, and a couple of them recently threw it down hard at a party we threw here in Van, so I absolutely *must* blow the roof off the place. That basically means having a solid, kickass liveset and practicing the hell out of it, preferably on a few big soundsystems. The live rig, however, is not currently in a "playable" state, and I've got about six unfinished tracks on the desk... and I'll need a few more tracks on top of that before Summer.

So in my last post here, I mentioned dropping the MPC in favour of my ThinkPad running Ableton Live. I worked all weekend porting my older tracks into Live, as well as all the basslines I recorded a few weeks ago, a new set of 20-some kickdrums made in Stomper, and 40-odd weird rhythmic percussion loops made in the insane drumcloset (note to self, post pic of drumcloset here). I grabbed a pirated copy of Native Instruments Battery2, against my better judgement (it would be the only pirated software in my rig), and ported over most of the one-hit drum samples and vocal snippets from my MPC set into two instances of Battery2.

Anyway, things were coming along swimmingly - tracks were starting to take shape, everything was looking good... but this was all on my desktop PC. Tuesday night, I decided to give it a whirl on the laptop, just to see how it would work. Good thing I checked, 'cause what do you know, the laptop is simply NOT gutsy enough to handle even the most cut-down set!!

PANIC! WTF DO I DO!!

I started playing around with some latency settings, but no matter what I did, I was still sitting at about 60% CPU utilization, and was getting dropouts, weird audible glitches, and the odd nasty highpitched whine. After experimenting for a few hours, I figured out that over 20% of the CPU use was Battery2! When I removed it from Live, suddenly CPU usage went down to about 38%, and the audio glitches completely stopped.

So there came the question - with my music style I have to play back short samples a lot. I could use Ableton's free sampler 'Impulse', but that's only eight samples per track in Live, and I really don't want to have to have like 20 tracks just for samples. I could render the samples out to audio clips, but as the set is currently in development, I really need to maintain the flexibility to change the patterns.

Basically, I needed a software MPC replacement that could hold a tonne of samples on a single channel, took very little CPU, was stable and sounded good, had good control over the individual samples' sound (filters, envelopes, etc), and preferably that had a slightly better sequencing interface than the (*yuck*) Live piano roll. Don't get me wrong, the piano roll is great, just not for drum maps! Live could really use another MIDI sequencing interface or three... or better yet the ability to route MIDI out of VSTi's, so you could use VST MIDI sequencers.

Anyway, as I was wondering where I was going to find this magic software that'd do all the functions of an MPC, it suddenly dawned on me... there's already an MPC sitting right there. :)

So yeah. The new rig seems to be stabilizing as: SH-101, x0xb0x and Nord Micro Modular for synths, MPC1000 for drum sequencing, MIDI sequencing and one-shot samples, Ableton Live for looped samples and mixing of all audio sources (via MOTU 828mkII and Behringer BFR2000 control surface). Simple, straight forward, and makes sense. It's not as cut down as I would have liked, but we'll see - maybe there'll be more changes in the future, but for this upcoming show at least this setup should kick major ass.

Anyway, fortunately I've been saving all the audio I'm working on, so all the percussive loops and basslines and kicks are still useful... though I've basically fucked myself out of the last two weekend's worth of working on sequencing and arrangement. Oh well, at least I know now, and I have a clear path forward - I have a *lot* of work to do, but at least it's all set out in front of me. I've got just under two months to get a full hour of music together, rehearsed and awesome, so expect more posts here in the near future. :) Goddamn, doing live-pa is a lot of work!

Oh - one final note - if you're looking for a good software EQ, check out Elemental Audio's "Eqium", it's fucking *awesome*. It sounds great, super easy to use, and it's lightweight enough to use on every channel. I've been using the demo tonnes, and I think I'm actually going to buy it - this will be the first VST I've ever bought!

Well, the writing is going well - I've setup a "loop station" in the closet, comprised of the ER-1 MIDI-out driving the Simmons SDS-800 and SDS-9 and the TR-707's audio outputs triggering the newly-acquired Tama TechStar TS-305 drumsynth. I'm a sucker for old drumsynths, it would seem - I'd be all over the Waldorf Rack Attack if it just had a better interface, but I don't see much value in it over the software version.

Speaking of software, the new MPC OS didn't work out nearly as well as I'd hoped. There's still a few crash bugs, for instance, but really my main beef is with the "slice" feature. I mean, it seems so obvious - if I want to sample my basslines, just make a bassline on the synths in the studio, record it into Live, tweak the loop until it's perfect, then export the loop and play it back in the MPC, right? With the 'slice' feature, I should be able to cut that loop into 8 chunks, then play it back as eighth-note samples, it should sound perfect, right? And maybe I can screw with the order of the loops to create new basslines, right?

Wrong. Turns out the feature is optimized for drum loops, and adds 5ms of silence between samples, so it doesn't play back sounding the same as it went in. Furthermore, there seems to be some kind of weirdness with Ableton Live exporting loops, so what sounds sample-accurate *perfect* in Live comes out sounding like it's off by a few ms, which changes the whole feel of the bass.

I've now spent, on *three* seperate occasions, the entire afternoon trying to get stuff that already sounds awesome in Live to port over to the MPC1000 smoothly, and it's just not working out. Live can't export multi-track MIDI files, and the MPC has problems importing single-track MIDI files. If there's too much bass in Live, I can adjust it, too much bass in a sample loop on the MPC requires more tweaking. And so on, and so on. All this silly file management crap is really starting to cut into my creativity.

Anyway - screw it. I'm going to try assembling a live set using Ableton Live as the center piece. I still have a problem with people who stare at their laptops for their whole live set, so I'm going to try my best to keep all the control interfaces... I'm going to try to setup my BFR2000 so that I don't have to touch or look at the laptop at all. I'm still planning to bring out my SH-101, x0xb0x, Nord Modular, etc - the only thing that's really currently changing is that it may well be the end of the MPC1000 in my live rig. :(