pix wrote:
So why do you decided to take all the pieces separately to a live set? I belive that it's way more flexible but do you end up making that much improvisation in the end? I mean, do you really improvise and whether tweak the hats delay, or teh rhodes filter, or do you take your tricks rehearsed from home?
I'm asking this because I'm setting up a live set soon, and I want to get as much insight as possible about what can be doable and what can get in a way in a situatiion like this. I'm a total newbie in what concerns performing so I'm trying to consider all angles here.
Yes we really, really improvise - with the way our setup works, I can select any of roughly between10-20 scenes per song on the fly, play keys and trigger clips over the top, and when it gets sent to Mike's mixer, he also has control over the structure by using the mutes on the desk. If something is really happening we can stay there and build up the intensity with the dub, or if its not happening we can get the feck outta there.
Since you mentioned tweaking delays on hihats, this is one of the very things we DO do - the delay units are timed to the song (usually 3 16ths) and when you put this delay on anything rhythmic it double-times it and builds up intensity in a very spontaneous and hands-on way.
The big secret about dub mixing is you bring all your FX returns back into CHANNELS instead of just "returns". This is so you can use the channel send knobs to
send FX back on themselves and back to other FX. So a hat might send to a delay, the delay return sends to a reverb which sends back to another delay etc. You get these low levels of FX circulating thru your mix adding texture and complexity. The best thing is you HAVE to keep things moving - opening and closing FX sends, sweeping parametric EQ on the delay channels - so that they don't just degenerate into howling feedback. Thats the fun, playing the desk like an instrument and pushing things to the limit as part of the song arrangement. Our audience can really sense that this is happening in real time so they react more and we react to them and so on and so its all just a big beautiful energy exchange thang, baby.
Live's Return channels have sends on them so you can build complex "FX matrixes" - we just choose to do it in the hardware world.
Before Live came along, dub mixing on an analog mixing desk was one of the main ways we had to be spontaneous with technology. But now Live allows SO MUCH spontenaity whether you choose to have a very complex setup or a very simple one - its up to you. Performing can be whatever you want it to be - the main thing is build a setup that allows YOU to feel truly excited by what you are doing, and the audience will feel it too. Good luck with your endeavours!
cheers
paddy
