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What is your ideal live set?
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kabbalisticvillage
IsraTrance Senior Member
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Posted : May 12, 2011 17:44:53
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Kolishin Methud
Started Topics :
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266
Posted : May 12, 2011 23:34
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if it was my track. and had the project files and everything for it i would use Tom Cosm's method of performing. (using ableton live) by rendering all drums,synths, etc... into different group channels. then in Live, chop them into loops and such. then play! imo that would seem to be the most logical rather then strictly djing using cdj's or a midi dj controller or something along the lines of that.
or if you have the cash and the band. maybe for drums and percs electronic drums... but that would take alot of time, money, and of course practice. it would be pretty sick to see though!!    http://soundcloud.com/brentmalik |
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willsanquil
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : May 12, 2011 23:50
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I can totally see how Tom Cosm's method works and from what I can tell that is the 'standard' - bounce stems, chop stems into loops, re-arrange your song in the moment on a more detailed level than a DJ could achieve with a 3/4 band EQ.
However...I am not really enamored with this way of doing things for psytrance.
I've tried it - it's fucking hard. I spend a lot of time working out how and where things should be in the song...work a long time on tiny, tiny details...so to just willy-nilly chop and re-arrange at random is possible...but the results that I get are inevitably worse than the original version.
At this point I see more potential in bouncing out your stems and adding FX/Dummy Clip automation through sends at the stem-level to change the sound or to create new sounds while keeping the original structure of the song intact...oh and also some MIDI sequencing ideally with performance friendly patches that you have a bunch of smart macro knobs for.
Still trying to figure out a way to do this though. Hard to think about live performance when I'm still slogging my way through learning how to produce in the studio 
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch...you must first invent the universe
www.soundcloud.com/tasp
www.soundcloud.com/kinematic-records |
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PoM
IsraTrance Full Member
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162
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Posted : May 12, 2011 23:56
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by using a real console and mixing ,would be a lot of work to set up but lot of fun in live. ableton is great too, similar and make things more easy to set up.
if only a computer is used, pressing space or doing something else is the same for the crowd, for a live performance it needs more than that imo. |
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Axis Mundi
Axis Mundi
Started Topics :
75
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1848
Posted : May 13, 2011 00:13
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Quote:
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On 2011-05-12 23:50, willsanquil wrote:
I can totally see how Tom Cosm's method works and from what I can tell that is the 'standard' - bounce stems, chop stems into loops, re-arrange your song in the moment on a more detailed level than a DJ could achieve with a 3/4 band EQ.
However...I am not really enamored with this way of doing things for psytrance.
I've tried it - it's fucking hard. I spend a lot of time working out how and where things should be in the song...work a long time on tiny, tiny details...so to just willy-nilly chop and re-arrange at random is possible...but the results that I get are inevitably worse than the original version.
At this point I see more potential in bouncing out your stems and adding FX/Dummy Clip automation through sends at the stem-level to change the sound or to create new sounds while keeping the original structure of the song intact...oh and also some MIDI sequencing ideally with performance friendly patches that you have a bunch of smart macro knobs for.
Still trying to figure out a way to do this though. Hard to think about live performance when I'm still slogging my way through learning how to produce in the studio
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To me personally the point of playing live is having room for errors and fuck-ups from improvisationally oriented rearrangement and mash ups. One could take it a step further and save all your presets and get the same results using MIDI instruments and effects, only with even more control and personally I feel that this method stands out to people when executed properly. You don't need an intimate knowledge of the platform to do a spacebar set, but you DO need to know your music inside out when using the Cosm method and even more so when using MIDI instead of audio stems. Granted the sound isn't as precise and professional as a studio track, but hey, it's about as live as it gets, and there is a definite difference in the sound of those styles which I for one personally appreciate.
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supergroover
IsraTrance Junior Member
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1505
Posted : May 13, 2011 00:45
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I don't know if I really wanna go through all that trouble if the dancefloor doesnt care. Who does care? just you and the knitpicks on isratrance? i think i ll prefer to spend time in the studio making good tracks in stead of spending hours and hours perfecting something that does not seem to matter much.
soundcloud.com/supergroover |
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willsanquil
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : May 13, 2011 00:50
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The point of playing live is having room for errors and fuckups? I would consider that a risk of playing live, not the point 
I would think the point of playing live is to create something in that moment that is not pre-recorded...or to significantly alter or manipulate the music in real time in a way that is different than your released versions. To take the energy of the crowd in that moment and use it as inspiration for what you're doing...
The issue I run into myself is that I rate the quality of the music as being higher on the priority list than a burning desire to turn a knob or do something 'live'. I would sooner play out (or hear) material that is set in stone and mixed well as opposed to attempting to re-structure something in the moment and having it turn out poorly.
Then again, I suppose that is the risk you run and hopefully the potential benefits outweight the risks...
Kudos to all the people out there who can use the Cosm method (or any other method) of playing Live and do it well. I can't do it yet, but then again I've only been making music for an incredibly short amount of time.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch...you must first invent the universe
www.soundcloud.com/tasp
www.soundcloud.com/kinematic-records |
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willsanquil
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : May 13, 2011 00:53
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Quote:
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On 2011-05-13 00:45, supergroover wrote:
I don't know if I really wanna go through all that trouble if the dancefloor doesnt care. Who does care? just you and the knitpicks on isratrance? i think i ll prefer to spend time in the studio making good tracks in stead of spending hours and hours perfecting something that does not seem to matter much.
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Yeah, this is an attitude I keep returning to constantly. Performing live (done well) is an entirely seperate skill from spending hundreds of hours in the studio perfecting a track...and if no one really notices, is it a waste of time?
The question I come back to is...am I making music for the average punter who doesn't even hear 1/2 of what's going on in the music? I make music for myself primarily and if other people enjoy it that's awesome. So therefor if I enjoy performing and mashing up my tracks in a live manner, shouldn't that be good enough?
My trouble is that I barely have enough time in the day to write music, let alone splice the shit out of my past tracks and spend time learning how to re-arrange them.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch...you must first invent the universe
www.soundcloud.com/tasp
www.soundcloud.com/kinematic-records |
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Axis Mundi
Axis Mundi
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Posted : May 13, 2011 00:57
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Okay, I agree with that... I guess my main point was if I were to drop dead and nobody would ever notice then it's not live. (I'm not even sure if that could be considered "DJing" in the "traditional" sense of the word  )
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Axis Mundi
Axis Mundi
Started Topics :
75
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1848
Posted : May 13, 2011 01:00
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On 2011-05-13 00:45, supergroover wrote:
I don't know if I really wanna go through all that trouble if the dancefloor doesnt care. Who does care? just you and the knitpicks on isratrance? i think i ll prefer to spend time in the studio making good tracks in stead of spending hours and hours perfecting something that does not seem to matter much.
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I guess if it matters to nobody else then it matters to me... something doesn't seem right about being booked as "live" if I'm just pressing space bar and turning some FX knobs at most... at that point I'm not even mixing whole tracks together on the fly as a DJ would be doing in my place. I'd rather have something I could be doing to alter and sculpt the sound... without ever having time to wave my hands around or even to glance up at the crowd because I'm concentrating so hard on what's going on in the set.
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willsanquil
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : May 13, 2011 01:08
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I agree that the plethora of Dead acts is really, really shitty. My personal way of dealing with this is to not book other people as Live acts unless they meet my standards of what that means and to not sell myself as a Live act until I feel that I am deserving of the title.
Artist DJ set is perfectly fine with me.
I think its commendable that you spend so much time on your live set, but not even glancing up at the crowd? IMO one of the most powerful parts of the Live performance is internalizing the crowds reaction and vibe and putting that into your performance. How can you do that if you're not even looking?
Hypothetical situation. Say you go on stage and you just start firing away, you have this grand scheme to start at like 145 BPMand go up to say 170 BPM. You're rocking out, oblivious to the crowd, going faster and faster - getting increasingly more frenetic and into it. However what you fail to realize is that the crowd is in a more mellow mood and you're progressively losing them because you're way too deep in your laptop.
I've seen this happen with DJ performances as well as Live performances...connection with the crowd is very important imo.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch...you must first invent the universe
www.soundcloud.com/tasp
www.soundcloud.com/kinematic-records |
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loki
IsraTrance Junior Member
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429
Posted : May 13, 2011 01:10
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Hm, I enjoy a slightly tweaked version of the so-called "Tom Cosm Method".
I only just started doing live sequencing, but I have a good repertoire of sounds to fit together. The way I like doing it - and it's starting to come together, so far at least - is to treat all of my 8-bar loops as jigsaw puzzle pieces. Often, most of the loops in all me G natural minor tunes will work with all the others in the same key... so when doing a live set, I can just say "I want to arrange these clips in the same general area of my session view, and I can jigsaw them together however the hell I want."
The better I know my music, the better the results - and it's also a great way to mix seamlessly between tracks... I can be playing 3 tunes at once, and then go off in the direction of any one of them, come back to elements of all 3, then to a different one, whatever.
This sort of live jigsawing, to me, is the fun part about performance. That's just for me, though - I won't hate on anyone who does live differently, and I hope they wouldn't hate on me.
Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room. ~Kurt Vonnegut
www.soundcloud.com/mixyott |
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willsanquil
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : May 13, 2011 01:22
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Nope. Invalid. I don't care that you're having fun and enjoying yourself, I just want to bitch about how not-live your method is
JK of course. Question though - when you say 'live sequencing' that means MIDI to me - is it mainly audio based loops that you're working with?
The main problem I have been having with setting up a Live set is that I want to do MIDI stuff, but I'm totally not sure how to organize the clips and patches in a way that would work for more than one track.
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch...you must first invent the universe
www.soundcloud.com/tasp
www.soundcloud.com/kinematic-records |
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PoM
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : May 13, 2011 01:26
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using more than one instance of the same program, or using 2 different daw at the same time is the way to go ! can make things more easy and more fun if the daws are stable.
renoise is also very good for live and i think more stable than ableton.(renoise is maybe the most stable daw)
if i was making a live using only a computer and a controller i would go with renoise, more fun , more psychedelic,more a scientist tool..lol .
during a live the screen could be used for visuals in the partie when using a psychdelic color scheme lol the action on the screen is that much trippy . |
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willsanquil
IsraTrance Full Member
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Posted : May 13, 2011 01:31
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