How do you make your live shows interesting?

Modischmusic · Post by **Modischmusic** » Wed Mar 05, 2008 2:36 pm

I think lighting is great and all, but I can't exactly afford to push a lot of money at more stuff. I am ultimately looking to make a live show interesting by the performance itself. The music is good enough to stand on it's own, so I think that thats the most important part. I definitely don't believe in turd polishing, so I was just looking for things that other people do when they perform, outside of their gear.

hambone1 · Post by **hambone1** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 8:28 am

It's a given that the music can stand alone, or you wouldn't be there.

I don't think it's as much about 'turd polishing' as it is the visual show-biz entertainment spectacle that is somebody hunched behind a laptop looking like he's checking his e-mail... not!

IMO, video, lighting and crowd interactivity done well can synergistically enhance the whole experience and multiply the impact of the music. It's not meant to be a substitute for crap music.

friend_kami · Post by **friend_kami** » Thu Mar 06, 2008 9:24 am

think it depends though. i mean for example otto von schirach at the dour festival had a whole band with him making a fake metal performance, and he had capes on and all that, but he could just aswell just been watching his email instead. it was entertaining to look at, those few moments you actually did look at the scene instead of dancing your ass off.

noone would care how he looked, people were busy dancing. like it should be.
granted vsnares was boring as helll, but that wasnt because he was standing and drinking beer while occasionally turning some knobs. he is boring because his music bores me. when i saw in copenhagen some two years ago for example, it blew me away. his performance on stage was still as boring to look at as always, although id idnt care because i was busy dancing my ass off.

so yeah, it really doesnt matter. if your music is good, people wouldnt care.

getafix · Post by **getafix** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 1:33 am

Haha awesome video pitch black, thats in duds at refuel huh ahh good old dunedin. That wasn't by chance where your horror story also took place, at orbit 107 was it? hehe dropped synth

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Sat Mar 08, 2008 6:59 am

getafix wrote:orbit 107 was it? hehe dropped synth

Aye!

. . .

You don't want your money back, do you?

getafix · Post by **getafix** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 11:02 am

haha nah was awesome, just cool hearing the other side of it. I guess perhaps not so awesome for you guys on second thoughts.
Was quite amazed to have the memory bought back via ableton forum

beatpoet · Post by **beatpoet** » Sun Mar 09, 2008 3:34 pm

No mousing, laptop to the side not in front of you and your controllers in front of you, also leave room for mistakes, don't quantise everything to 1 bar or 4 bars. Let it run free, trust your timing.

Get a few pad controllers.

Whacking things in half a beat out of time and then in time can be very effective and looks and sounds very live.

Live looping, play in your synth lines and loop them instead of just triggering loops. Same with vocal lines.

Assign controllers to sample start position, loop start, loop end.

Duplicate and retrigger, live recorded parts from different positions.

Chuck a beat repeat over your live vocal.

Enjoy yourself, nobody like a moany pants.

Modischmusic · Post by **Modischmusic** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 1:18 am

Yeah thats what i'm pretty much making happen. I think it will be a good show, and thanks for the input beat poet.

Pitch Black · Post by **Pitch Black** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 2:10 am

beatpoet wrote:...looks and sounds very live.

I would like to reinforce that point: if what you're doing, you have to look at the screen as you're doing it (say micro-tweaking a parameter) there's a good chance it's too subtle for a Live gig. It should be a fully satisfying thing to do with you just playing your controller. This will help the audience "get it" too.

Be as un-subtle as you dare! Most live electronic acts just don't sound that "live" to me - mostly I can just hear the timeline arrangement going through it's paces. And that's one obvious thing: use Scenes and the Session View people! You should be moving on in the song when you and the crowd feels like it is time to move on - not some arbitrary decision made in your studio months ago. Free yourself from the tyranny of the timeline. You should have no fear to drastically rip things apart - the more live and hands-on it sounds, the more your audience will react, so you will react back to them. A virtuous feedback-loop.

I can't stress enough how important it is to what we do, to have multiple channels of audio to work with. OK dubbing it up mightily might not be your cup of tea, but simply being able to add more sub to just the bass, or push the hihats up for a section, or just EQ the kick to sound fat in that particular room, is vitally important IMO. A mix comes alive, and it means a song starts, and by it's end it is really humming on the PA system. The mix comes alive and sounds alive. It's probably way more dynamic than what you'd do for a listening mix, but this is a one-off live event godammit!

We could not do this if we were just dropping stereo mixes or even 3 or 4 submixes. We drop a snare into a big reverb - the crowd responds, so we do it again, bigger - the crowd responds again, bigger. We have just made a connection between us and the audience. This stuff you can't program on the timeline.

Check out this vid: the audio is live off the desk from a gig - no edits or overdubs - it sounds like a live mix. Sure the congas are a little too loud, perhaps, for a listening mix, but that is what sounded exciting on the day. The synth that comes in at 1:30 is too quiet for 5 secs until it gets pushed up. Decisions made in the heat of battle, i.e. LIVE.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=9mIptzDFxLo

cheers,
paddy

massiveheadpain · Post by **massiveheadpain** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 6:47 am

i do peter hook dj spasms all night twisting the same knob over and over violently without wearing headphones so the audience thinks im telepathic and use my brainpower to beatmatch for me

Angstrom · Post by **Angstrom** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 11:29 am

massiveheadpain wrote:i do peter hook dj spasms all night twisting the same knob over and over violently without wearing headphones so the audience thinks im telepathic and use my brainpower to beatmatch for me

of course, if you are performing your own music you only use headphones very very rarely.

j0shu@ · Post by **j0shu@** » Tue Mar 11, 2008 9:24 pm

i play the keyboards and loop it. dance a bit, move around.

video:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... pr=goog-sl

otto · Post by **otto** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 4:22 pm

As far as dj-ing goes I'm not really qualified to answer. Though I would hazard a guess and say if you are performing big moves are always a winner.

I have a band that gigs 2-3 times a week and performance is something I think about a lot. I often think I was moving then look at the video and I'm standing like a stale bottle of piss. I love wah pedals and find if I'm playing it and singing there is not very far you can go.

For your singer I would suggest making eye contact with the crowd and smiling works a treat. Dont stare to long at one you'll make em nervous and dont take yourself to seriously. OR and its a big OR be so %@#&*#!!intense in the delivery of your lyrics that people are just mesmerised even a little scared of what you might do next. In the beginning they called it religious fervour then it became soul. Again pacing/walking/dancing as you sing will all work well . Dont be put off by reserved audiences they are often the ones that compliment you the most. Be consistent, good gig or bad. People come back if they like you.

Tarekith · Post by **Tarekith** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:02 pm

One thing I would suggest is not using lots of tracks and channels that require too much from you to make the song sound decent. What I mean by that, is you don't need 16 or 24 channels of audio per se, if 8 highly tweakable channels would suit you better. When I first started doing live sets in Live, I was running a template that used 16 tracks, all my sounds broken out nice and neat. While I felt like I had a lot of flexibility, I soon realized I was spending way too much time micromanaging all these seperate parts, just to keep the song progressing and the arrangement happening. At the time this meant a lot of laptop watching too, whcih we know is a no no if you can avoid it.

Anyway, eventually I started groupin things down until I was only using 8 channels. This let me focus on the sounds themselves more, and eliminated a lot of fluff that likely didn't matter to the audience anyway. The other benefit of this is that most midi controller manufacturers have decided (for whatever reason), that 8 channels (or some multiple of that) is the ideal layout. This makes it a lot easier to come up with a simpler controller scheme for interfacing with your live set.

CBirkholz · Post by **CBirkholz** » Fri Mar 14, 2008 5:56 pm

hambone1 wrote:Video and lighting tightly synched and choreographed to the audio, live percussion (out front), remote pan/tilt/zoom cameras, wireless PS dance mat that lets the crowd launch audio, video and lighting samples.

And minimum mousing and staring at a computer screen, plenty of eye contact with the crowd, and looking like we're having fun even when everything's going wrong!

I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a rusty spoon than fist-pump, full-body-motion EQ/filter sweep, or head-bang while doing alternate knee raises... I gotta draw the line somewhere!

Wireless PS dance mat?? Are you speaking of the ones that are used with dance dance revolution?

I'm curious how you set the I/O with midi? Are you using max? This gives me a great idea for visuals...

How do you make your live shows interesting?

yeah maybe...

Goodd Call