zorg wrote: Fri Jun 16, 2023 4:04 am
Does anybody actually bother triggering anything live? Is it just fucking with a few parameters for a prearranged playlist in Traktor and tweaking the mix, and that's it?
I've seen a lot of different variants of this:
- Squarepusher on his pre-Ultravisitor tour, which means he had an ~8U rack of shit and a laptop in front of him but also a bass strapped on and a ton of pedals. Constantly either playing bass or tweaking something, occasionally stopping the pre-sequenced portions of the show to just play bass for a bit
- Luke Vibert opening at this same show with a DJ set. He was sitting in front of the laptop playing the mix, looking like he was reading his email, smoking a spliff while ppl lost their shit on the dance floor
- Mike Paradinas touring the states in 2004 (ish? Bilious Paths tour). Basically playing a long set of the album tracks from a laptop, occasionally swooping in to tweak a filter or timestretch plugin while he danced
- Autechre's mostly-hardware shows on the Untilted and Quaristice tours
- Autechre's fully laptop shows since then, where it's clear that the music is substantively pretty different each night with some common themes / touchpoints
- Flying Lotus very clearly playing a huge single Ableton set of his own songs and triggering lots of stuff from a pad controller - so mostly sequenced but lots of opportunity for structural change.
- Alessandro Cortini playing his entire album front to back from a laptop, but playing only the main melody from each song on an OP-1 run through some pedals etc
- Alessandro Cortini bringing a small modular setup and mostly noodling but playing a few recognizable melodies/songs of his
- Plaid playing with laptops and hardware together and having a bad crash, show was stopped for 20 minutes (this was early 2000s)
- Plaid playing their recent tours, where it's clear a fair number of tracks on each song are prerecorded but there are 2-3 sounds that they're fucking with during each song. mostly laptops, but also a live guitar player
- Starkey playing with Serato using his own tracks, having to stop his set because of hardware trouble
Distance from home / quality of accommodations probably has a lot to do with how much someone wants to risk "technical issues" or bringing out the really expensive gear.
