Hey my dear Elektronauts friends, I’m planning to do a few gigs soon, and I’d like to limit my setup to a few machines, i.e. DT + DN (with possibly a sp404 at the end of the chain to get a few extra effects for some live fun).
I have to admit that I’m not very wealthy, so the idea of having ableton on stage is something to forget because I wouldn’t have a reliable enough laptop.
But then I come up against a major difficulty in my musical adventure: as I play techno, I need to pay attention to my nasty bass.
My setup would be DN->DT->(SP404mkII)-> club mixer
However, I’m a bit worried about my audio levels, especially when it comes to the machines, as I don’t have any rooms that have been acoustically treated properly, so I’m working with headphones and I’m afraid I won’t sound good live.
So that’s about all the problems I’m having. If any kind souls want to give me some advice, I’d love to hear it!
Also: If there is one, buy the local sound-engineer a beer so he will level you in properly
If there isn’t one try to get familiar with the clubmixer beforehand, and take care of your gainstaging.
Personal “advice”: Set the main level on the DT to noon and don’t touch it again. Try to get your sound good with the internal mixer of the DT and the clubmixer first. Only raise the DTs main volume if the signal really isn’t strong enough.
Also also: Don’t sleep on the DTs compressor! It will surely help a lot with your bass/sound concerns.
Lastly: Accept that your beats will sound different from what you are used to on your headphones. Use your improvisation skills to adjust your mix on the fly, for example by (heavily) filtering the individual tracks on your boxes.
Take advantage of the filters too, I don’t know for the Digitakt, but the secondary filters on the DN are great for taking out problematic frequencies in synth lines, so with every tracks on, move your high pass filter until you hear your sound change, then move it back a little, you’ll get rid of anything that you can’t hear but might give you trouble on a big sound system.
It is a good thing to worry about, audio levels for a live set. I messed this up a few years ago in a liveset and now I always pay really close attention to the levels while I practice the liveset.
A few suggestions:
record your practices, play them back in different listening environments.
listen on something other than headphones. If you have to listen on headphones, try listening to it very very quietly. The reason is that loud signals on headphones naturally get compressed by your ears so it’s hard to tell when one part is too loud… its more obvious on speakers, and it’s more obvious at low levels when something is louder than the rest of the mix.
do NOT leave this problem to the day-of and think you can adjust it all on the fly. Especially with the SP at the end of the chain - I’m doing the same thing on my live set and depending on the FX you use and the levels of the incoming signals VS the SP-404 itself, you need to have your patches programmed to the right levels or you can’t really fix it on the fly in that scenario. Also I’ve never had good enough monitoring on stage to make proper mix adjustments either.
TLDR practice, record your practice, try to get it right ahead of time.
Lastly, if you want to boost your bass the way to do it is to turn down and high pass everything else first… if you overload your mix it will not help.
Having a compressor/limiter device at the end of the chain is always a good idea, if only for the level meter so you can see how much headroom you’re using.
Record and reference to something in the same style. Played on a rave this summer on a big system(no tech just stereo out) and my shit was way to bassy. I used a mixer with eq so it was easy to just wing it down a bit. Maybe get a small cheap mixer that sounds good in the red if youre worried about levels. like some Bx. Its also fun to have a mixer live I think.
If you have access to a low pass filter for your master, you could use it to just check your low end by cutting the rest off and just balance the very lows between your kick and bass with the DN and DT filters, a bit like in this video, but with filters instead of EQ:
I wrote a lofi house ep on a sp-404mk2 with headphones when i was travelling a lot. On the master busi’ve got the lo-fi efx (bus 3) and 303comp efx (bus4).
This summer I played that live on stage with a big pa. It sounded fucking awesome. 500 People were dancing and freaking out.
