|
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!
 |
