Hey guys,
After a couple of years of instrumental live-looping and a few more of Ableton Live-based performances I’ve made the move to play dawless!
It took some time figuring stuff out but I’ve managed to transfer a few songs from my Ableton set to the OT and AR and even wrote a couple of new tunes that I’ve gathered while doing my Jamuary jams!
So I’ve played my very first dawless electronic live performance on January 25th 2020. I was really nervous - there’s just so many things that could have gone wrong - luckily no major f**ck-ups happened. Apart from one song that I’ve started like 15 bpm too fast, haha… I knew that this HAD to happen at some point.
The feedback from the audience was very nice. The performance was far from perfect - still I’m very happy about it. It definitely made a lot of fun performing without my laptop. Dawless is my way to go for my downtempo set!
I know that I’ve only been scratching these boxes’ surfaces and I’m looking forward to diving deeper into the Elektron gear.
All of the drums were coming from the Elektron Analog Rytm Mk.2 - I’ve used a lot of the engines for the basic grooves as well as some samples from my older songs, field recordings and percussive stuff that I had recorded the week before.
The Elektron Octatrack was used to play samples as well, most notably bass, pads and lead elements like vocal samples. This is also the brain of the setup providing MIDI Clock for all the other parts.
As far as live looping goes - it was all done on the Pigtronix Infinity pedal - also synced to the clock. It’s an amazing machine and stays in sync like a boss!
My violin is a seven string Wood Violins Viper through a Line 6 Helix - it’s just an awesome combination of machines, from clean acoustic tones, to dreamy textures and distorted guitar amps.
I’ve also brought this pedalboards with effects, mostly delays and reverbs used in transitions and on lead parts.
All these inputs were fed into the Allen&Heath Xone:96 Mixer in the following configuration:
Track 1: Analog Rytm
Track 2: Octatrack main Outs
Track 3: Octatrack Cue Outs
Track 4: Violin
Return 1: Guitar Pedals (hi-Z)
Return 2: Looper (Loops only)
Send 1: Guitar Pedals (hi-Z)
Send 2: Octatrack Inputs for Resampling