stagefright

borg · Post by **borg** » Thu Dec 11, 2003 6:29 am

hi folks,

it's been a while, but i've been busy with stuff other than browsing and drinking coffee in café Z.

one of those things is getting a live set together. it will be the first time in four years i'll be up there on my own.
lotsa lotsa pulsar sounds, but no CW hardware... i couldn't get the magma working on my laptop

(i just plunged in and got myself a RME multiface, which is a great (but expensive) audio card.

so, people not living too far away from antwerp are hereby invited to drop by.

on the bill:
at 22h me, myself and i with the known borg style broken electronics. (the other option was playing a techno/electro set at 3AM, but i'd rather play my regular stuff).
23h: spunk (local band)
midnight: mauro pawlowski and monguito (moog'n'guitar'n'sherman filter)
1AM: rudy trouvé sextet (former dEUS headman)
dj's will continue until the morning..

saturday 13th of december
squat scheld'apen
herbouvillekaai,
antwerpen

if the show gets recorded in a decent way, i'll let you know here where to download...

_________________
andy
 the lunatics are in the hall 

[ This Message was edited by: borg on 2003-12-11 08:33 ]

Post by **hubird** » Thu Dec 11, 2003 8:13 am

good luck Borg (200 km is too much without having a car)

borg · Post by **borg** » Thu Dec 11, 2003 8:37 am

thanks huub

i'll need the luck... murphy's law... this last week i've had as much hardware failure as in the previous eleven months

no car? you must be a musician then...

kensuguro · Post by **kensuguro** » Thu Dec 11, 2003 8:54 am

Good luck my friend. Live situations always have caused problems for me. But after the show, there's always this awesome feeling of having spent the time of performance together, with your audience. The fact of being there together is what's cool about a live performance. (for me atleast) Hope you get everything together!

ChrisWerner · Post by **ChrisWerner** » Thu Dec 11, 2003 8:58 am

Yes good luck Andy, playing live is something special, you´ll feel the emotions directly while you make your music and you can steer it.
I remember a rock concert for a birthday party we made. Our audience, tons of bikers, that was very special. We had a program for aprox.2 hours and we played it down in 1h 20m.
No applause, then we decided to play another 2hours only improvisation.

Then comes the moment when you get your first applause, hopefully. Hmmmmm, enjoy.

Arecording would be great,
damn, no car here too

[ This Message was edited by: ChrisWerner on 2003-12-11 09:01 ]

borg · Post by **borg** » Thu Dec 11, 2003 9:02 am

ha, ken
first of all, congrats all the best in your new adventure!!! and thanks...
i spent the last days streamlining the project files as to reduce cpu stress as much as possible... so far the laptop, running ableton Live, and RME have been real stable... fingers crossed, facing the last straight line to the finish with confidence...

over and out.

borg · Post by **borg** » Thu Dec 11, 2003 9:03 am

thanks chris and michu, too.
indeed...

the mac needs a real good kick and some extra ram... first thing on my list for the holidays.
_________________
andy
 the lunatics are in the hall 

[ This Message was edited by: borg on 2003-12-11 09:08 ]

Michu · Post by **Michu** » Thu Dec 11, 2003 9:04 am

pity i won't be there...
you know everything will be fine (no mac involved

)

heh, good gig gives such an incredible boost,
it's been too loong i did it... <sigh>

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Fri Dec 12, 2003 11:06 pm

Best thing about playing live (besides the vibe) is having your music facing the test: which pieces "work", which fall a bit flat; maybe a song that you were unsure about getting an excellent response.

I always found it very interesting to listen to a tape after the show to see which tracks got the best response - usually not the track I thought was the best...

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Sat Dec 13, 2003 3:25 pm

Good luck there...

Having both worlds at your feets, it's just too much! First the real performance and then technology, it's aperfect match.

Hope everything goes well, and hope you have tryed everything as it should be before going... Bay...

petal · Post by **petal** » Sun Dec 14, 2003 8:30 am

So how did it go?

Can we have a listen somewhere?

Thomas

borg · Post by **borg** » Mon Dec 15, 2003 1:25 pm

well... mmmmm, dunno.
next time, i gotta do it completely different. the hours after the set, i thought "well, it wasn't that bad". most comments made perfect sense, and rather reassuring. the sound was good, some liked the grooves, others liked the more 'sound design idm' kinda things.
yesterday, i thought to myself "this was crap". it all went too smooth. i had done my homework quite well. it went so smooth, that it became boring on stage. ergonomics where bad (stage too small, table too low), i didn't feel that comfortable anymore, and started thinking things like "shit, got nothig to do the next twenty seconds. lets turn the mid freq of channel x a bit up. should i turn up the send of that channel again?...". so i started rushing through my songs the second half of the set, even skipping tracks. i felt a bit embarrassed. all i did was triggering loops and beats, some filtering, fx, here and there some sound i mangled with some weird vst's. all controlled with midi keyboard/controller and mackie mixer.
i'm never gonna do that again, unless it is not announced as live act, or better, unless part of a bigger concept... video art, dance,... whatever. as long as i can sit in the back or at the FOH, more like live mixer/dj of my own sounds.
i felt miserable at the front of stage, i couldn't help thinking 'fake'.

next time, it's gonna be the old korg ms10, my nordrack2 baby, guitar and mic and an empty ableton live file, and just start recording/looping what's being played. maybe invite people from the audience to join in... so it's basically: you have the tracks you work on at home, fully tweaked, cut, automated, seasoned with carefully programmed breaks... and the adventureous live set, which might succeed or not, and has nothing to do with what you cooked up at home.

ah well, that was saturday, it was a good experience, i learned a lot from this night. like 'do your show and have a good time after instead of letting yourself being talked into doing PA of the two bands playing later that night.' what annoyed me most was not being able to hang around and listen to friends/strangers what their impression was, have a quiet drink at the back, you know...

no, it didn't get recorded... too bad, but not really

good things: the gear was rock solid! (thanks at0mic!!!) and some art/exhibition guy was really euphoric about 'the more abstract, evolving sounds and the deeper emotions' and whatnot, but 'that i had to get rid of those hip hop like beats' hehe. i guess he was right in a way.

Post by **Neil B** » Mon Dec 15, 2003 2:05 pm

Look back on the positive - you did it!
About 10 years ago I worte a 90 minute concept thing that was written to be performed as well. Okay, I was using Cubase version 18BC or something older plus a lot of outboard gear.
I'd written all 12 tracks, recorded, made lots of cassettes up to sell, rewrote every track leaving sections out of each of the tracks. These were the sections that were meant to be played live, but not too hard that I made a right mess of it.
I practised it until I was sick of hearing it all. I practiced it in the church where it was to be performed and changed all the settings due to the acoustic differences of the church.
Then I lost my nerve and never performed it !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So well done you. You will always be more self-critical than your audience.
I take my hat off to your courage.

petal · Post by **petal** » Mon Dec 15, 2003 2:46 pm

Yup, I agree - it takes courage.

Your description of what happened on stage sounds exactly like what seems to happen to almost all those laptop-concerts i've been to, and these were still good concerts.

Still I understand your point, and it sounds like an interesting idea you have about using instrument and live on stage.

No recording of the concert.... You said you had done you homework.... Doesn't that mean that you have the performance ready to record somehow, so that we can have a little taste of what you were doing up there?
No, you want get off the hook that easy - I'll be watching the music-section for the next few days

Cheers!
Thomas

borg · Post by **borg** » Mon Dec 15, 2003 3:25 pm

thanks for the encouraging words. of course i'm glad i did it, and like i said, it was a good experience. good to know what to do better next time.

thomas, you're right. it should be dead easy to recreate the live set. (don't know if that is a good thing

). who knows... at the moment i feel more like doing completely new stuff.
now i know why autechre perform in complete darkness... nothing to see, so why go through all the trouble of hiring a lighting engineer?

Nestor · Post by **Nestor** » Mon Dec 15, 2003 4:28 pm

Chinese have a say: "When you win you learn something, when you fail, you learn everything". Fortunately, you cannot say you have failed, cos you did your concert, it just didn't go the way you spected.

I would review it fully, would go back over and over again, thinking about all the aspects, tecnologycal and feeling aspects of it, to leanr what to do, and what not to do.

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Tue Dec 16, 2003 12:13 am

Prerecording too much is always a temptation. I played in an electronic band for a while where *everything* was pre-recorded and we all just mimed ! We had a lot of lights and a couple of dancers to keep other things moving...

If you're not going to leave tracks free to play, then I think the only choices are to fake it, or make a virtue out of doing nothing like Kraftwerk. Their ability to stand there not doing much (and getting away with it) is brilliant - I think because they are honest about it and don't try to gyrate around a tiny knob as if it's of supreme impotance.

But don't be too hard on yourself ! You did it, didn't get pelted with anything, and got a lot of knowledge out of it. That's a success !

And one of the most important things you also got right: the technical set-up didn't let you down. There's nothing worse than a shoddy set-up and a string of live technical problems. So success for you again

[ This Message was edited by: Spirit on 2003-12-16 00:14 ]

ChrisWerner · Post by **ChrisWerner** » Tue Dec 16, 2003 1:24 am

On 2003-12-15 15:25, borg wrote:
... who knows... at the moment i feel more like doing completely new stuff.

Ha, that´s it. You have closed a chapter and start with something new. Gratulations to your success, everything will become better. See it as another experience nothing more.
I´m curious to hear the "new" borg.