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I used to do a lot of live shows on the hard dance circuit. Right from the start I wanted to make sure it was as live as it possibly could be and not just shaking my head behind a stack of keyboards that weren't even plugged in while the music came off DAT like many of the "live" acts used to do! The shows were called A.L.I.V.E and I ran them from 2006-2009. There was myself plus I had a turntablist for scratching, a guitar player and a singer. We played most of the big arena hard dance events at the time and for the most part it was a lot of fun!
I used Ableton for the shows with 1 short controller keyboard with loads of midi sliders/buttons, one long midi controller keyboard, a drum pad trigger, a small Mackie mixer and an external soundcard. Because of the space needed we had to have stage space, we couldn't do it form a DJ booth.
The tracks we did were a combination of my original material plus remixes of all sorts of genres.
With each track I'd break it all down into 8 bar loops and then separate it into component parts spread over 8 channels. I used a combination of WAVs and midi parts playing VSTs. Typically the channels were 1.kick, 2. snare and hats, 3. percussion, 4. bass, 5. synth parts 1, 6. synth parts 2, 7. FX, 8. others/spare. Each loop was bounced out of Logic at the required level so the faders in Ableton could remain at 0db.
I would then arrange the parts in scenes. Each time there needed to be a new part of the song I'd move the play bar down to next scene. For parts that were longer than 8 bars, for example with 16 bar riff patterns, I'd simply let it play the full 16 bars before moving on to the next scene or loop it again if there was plenty of laser reaching going on! The whole set was pre determined in terms of the order of the songs but if I wanted to I could easily jump back and forth to different scenes depending on crowd reaction (I had 2 control keys on one of the keyboards assigned to scene up/down) All the keyboard keys were labelled for functionality and I never used the mouse during a set!
Each of the 8 channels had FX on that were controlled from one of the controller keyboards (delays, filters, manglers etc) plus I had a whole heap of things that I used to trigger from different keys on one of the controllers (drum rolls, kick rolls, build ups, perc loops, extra hat loops, SFX etc) I also had a mute/un-mute function assigned to each channel so that I could drop parts if needed.
Working this way was a lot of fun. I had lots of scope in terms of playing with a song's arrangement, bringing parts in and out, dropping the kick and adding a drum roll, building tracks up, taking them down, adding the synth line or FX from one track to another, twisting an individual part with the FX .......it was far more involving than just mixing two records into each other and far more interactive with the crowd.
Occasionally I used to play musical parts live but this was normally pads or slow riffs. Playing 1/16 pace riffs at 148bpm in a hot sweaty club aint gonna happen!
The singer, scratcher and guitarist used to feature on about 30% of the material. Having the guitarist play the lead line on an Adagio For Strings remix was always a winner!!
There were problems though, the laptop crashed a couple of times mid set and it's hard to get a live set like that to sound as punchy as records, no matter what processing you have on the master out inserts. It also used to take up a lot of time prepping, normally a couple of days for a 1 hour set!
I well recommend it though, personally I found it more fun than DJing and you can get away with more than you can in a DJ set.
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