Live Tips
2003-05-28 by erik_magrini@Baxter.com
You could help me alot in detailed description on how do you prepare your live sets: >>>Live sets to me are 90% about the preperation, and 10% about the performance. I think there's two main schools of thought when it comes to playing live, planning so you can improvise, and planning so that you give the audience a repeatable performance. I personally am the former type, I like constant threat of chaos when I perform, though certainly I plan on some sort of back up plan too. Please keep in mind that anything I list below is JUST MY METHOD of doing things live, there's certainly many, many ways to do it. <<< How many patterns you're using for a song. >>>For live stuff, typically only one. I tend to think always think of each Pattern as it's own song, or shall I say the fundamentals of the song. All the parts are there, and it's up to me to perform it in a way that adds variety and interest. That being said, I do keep my past XL-7 contest songs in the XL-7 for use in case things go south (er sudden trips to the bathroom too), as I can just load those up and press play and know that everything is done already and I have 6 minutes to grab another drink or get rid of one. Not that I would do this for a larger show mind you :) Anyway, right now each of my patterns is 16 measures long, though I'm toying with the ideal of shortening this back to the 8 measures I used to use in the past when I did live sets. 16 is nice because I can program more variations within the pattern, but it's a pain when I go to switch patterns and realize I've still got 15 measures to go too. Each of my User Banks is organized by type so Bank 0 is 4/4 and trance stuff, Bank 1 is breaks, Bank 2 is DnB, Bank 3 is downtempo, etc. Bank 8 contains the Pattern data for any of my Songs, so I'm free to change up my Pattern order in any of the other Banks without worrying about affecting my Songs. Additionally, if I'm going to be playing out somewhere, I copy all of the Patterns I want to play in the correct order to Bank 7 and use that Bank live. I think of it as a set list, and it's easier to switch to the next Pattern than having to jump around between Banks, though that is obviously still an option if I think it's appropriate. <<< I'm asking this because my top notch patterns are 32 bar long some are even 64 bar long (yes it works ! bar counter stays stuck at 32 but you hear it all !!!): >>>HOW did you pull that off? :) <<< Do you make your patterns to fit only in their respective song or to be blended with another ones? >>>Well, I consider each Pattern as an independant Song. To help facilitate blending and switching between them all, I stick with a set Track/Mute layout. IE, BD is always on Track 1, Snare on 2, bassline on 9, Pads on 10, leads on 11-12, etc. That way I know where everything is instinctively when I'm X-mixing between Patterns. <<< Do you work on pre-defined transitions or just rely on improvisation? >>>Always improv. I'll do a trial run of the set first, just to make srue things aren't glaringly out of key or to get some rough ideas on what works between two Patterns, but that's it. Additionally I made custom Presets that act as drum RPS phrases in the Triggers (via arps, lots of info I posted on this if you search the message archives from last year), and I use these while doing transisions too. That way, when then switch Patterns, there's another level of consistancey playing. This topic could be a whole nother email though.... <<< rEalm [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]