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I think, basically, my problem has been for a long time…
When I started playing live about 15 years ago
the problem has been that its obviously quite difficult to reproduce
electronic music in a live context, because you can't really travel with your entire studio set-up.
And what, basically, saved me and, I think, a lot of other electronic musicians,
is Ableton Live, which, I think, about 90% of the people using these days.
The good thing about Live is I think that it's so flexible.
You can obviously use it for kind of quite abstract stuff.
Main challenge for me was that a lot of my music obviously
quite rigidly follows certain chord progressions and
has a certain harmonic melodic structure, so it's not so easy to combine
elements from different tracks, so this is why I think that this set-up...
Probably, quite a good set-up, if you working with music that follows
more conventional, harmonic and melodic structure, but by no means
this is like an ultimate way to do things - obviously, there's plenty of other.
So even sometimes, when I play stuff live, I realize that certain things can be combined
in a different way and actually may end up on the record even that way.
So I'm just going to try to activate one part here.
Okay, so here's I've got everything playing and I'm just going to try
sort of make some kind of structure.
So, I basically had a bit of a problem with the song,
and this is going to be on the next record as well.
I couldn't really think about suitable ending part for it, and I had
two elements which I just sort of accidently combined in a live set-up.
I realized that both of these elements together could actually make nice
additional part for the song, and that actually on the record.
So it's based on this sequence, which kind of forms the first part.
And I had this baseline, a back-up track for it in the actually verse
with the rhythm track with some resonating delays on it. And I actually did realized
that this works quite nicely with that sequence, so I'm just going to make quite transition.
This is obviously a very computer-based set-up,
but I think it can't hurt having a bit of hardware with you.
I'm using one of my favorite effects units that I'm constantly using in the studio as well,
which is this one, Ensoniq DP4.
This is mighty effects unit with some very nice filters and very nice modulation effects.
Very underrated this days, because everybody switching to plugins,
and you can pick up one of those for 100 pounds these days.
And it works quite nicely on its own if you just feedback the effects
This just the DP4 amp...
But it does react nicely to…
put it on some other stuff that you got coming from computer.
So you see it's quite good for making sort of quite
dynamic transition, if you just want to beat something.
You could see this as fixed playlist. You see, when I scroll down here
this is kind of the order I usually play.
Every gig is a bit different, sometimes you play like a quite sited.
You focus on the more ambient aspects.
Or it's like a club gig, you want to play some of the more upfront stuff.
That's what I enjoy about it, it's really flexible.
And one thing that can be a bit of a pain, as if you have really long reverb time effects
on stuff and to find the right looping points and stuff like that.
But yeah, I think the good thing that once you've done
this for a little while you build up like a basic library,
then you just add some stuff now and then
and you already have a solid foundation to beat on, so it's alright.
One other sound is...
this is the type of sound when I played that sound on my own.
So this is a good example, let's start this one.
Bass is one of the few things, where I'm not really using synths.
I'm basically using the sampler, so what I do quite often - I have like a Sine Wave
and I put that through guitar foot pedal effects. That gives like a nice crunch,
and to be honest I've got like an ... pedal from the 70s,
and I've looked around for plugin replacement for many years,
but I think nothing sounds as nice and crunchy as that pedal.
So I think sometimes it's good to use hardware, definitely.
So this is basically element with some,
some main scenes here,
some additional things, some low-endy stuff, I've always put like a name here,
so I don't lose the overview completely.
Аnd here's some kind of quite distortion elements in this pile.
It does the sequence here... maybe I should just play some stuff,
it would be more understandable, I suppose.
So some of you know, I'm fading the stuff in now
and one after ones you can basically see how it builds up into...
And then what I usually do - I separated them
I have harmonic elements on one channel and beats and bass separately,
so that I can give sound engineer more flexible set-up to work with.
So that would be just the beats track.
That's just the one of two.
And basically... yeah, this obviously just loops and then you just have to
Sort of try to create transition and... Fading in and out...
Yeah, put some effects on it and just try to create transition so that...
rather then it's just track by track, you got a musical movement, that's the idea.
Sometimes I switch around to this, I have two set-ups, the other one quite large,
so this is like envelope control filter with a bit of distortion and delay
and the second set with some pitcher thing
and I'm actually got a really nice reverb here. Let's try this.
Not that one.
Let's try that one.
That's a nice reverb in DP4.
To me it's never been so much aggression about replacing something,
because plugins can definitely do a lot of stuff that DP4 can't,
but also the other way around, especially filter in DP4 sounds very unique,
the same filter effect that was in Ensoniq ASR 10 sampler that they had in 90’s as well.
And that a really nice filter, so I wouldn't Give up it just for some plugin. So...
You always depend on your choices.