Mixing Elektron gear for a live-set

The Lounge General Discussion
43

when you have such great hardware gear, why you wanna just mix itb and with ableton?
my sugestions based on my experience playing live shows is:

  • mix inside the hardwar units - most elektrons have an audio in for chaining / mixing
  • or buy an analog mixing desk (or ask the promoter to rent it) - ofcourse no Behringer :wink: which may gives you some inserts for hooking up a smal master compressor like RLNC - Really Nice Compressor

I bought a small Yamaha MG10 mixing desk to send 3 Elektrons through it and a reverb and a Korg Volca Bass. This is way more fun and better sounding then in mixing in the box with Ableton (which I´ve also done in the past). Depending on the OP amp on the mixing desk, it also will colour your sound a bit and maybe will give you some saturation or slightly compression. You even can use the Lowcuts on the mixing desk. The Yamaha is around 150 EUR and not bigger then a 13" macbook — so it´s a steal for a small liveset up and you can integrate some hardware fx like a reverb and / or delay and / or phaser/flanger.

But if you still wanna mix inside the box with Ableton … I would suggest run it at least 48khz (or higher). When you use compressors on single tracks, go with opto compressors / LA2 emulations - or set attack 10ms - 50ms and release to taste. You can set attacks smaller like 5 ms - but that will cut you the transients on drums etc. Ratio I would go with 2:1 to 2.5:1 and try soft or hardknee. You also can experiment with peak and rms … but the opto style compressor looking more for rms. Gain reduction 1 - 2 db. And on the master I would go with an ssl bus compressor style like ableton bus compressor which emulates the behaviour of the ssl bus compressor … attack 30ms (longes), release 100ms (or it says 0.1) ( shortest), Ration 2:1 or 4:1 - it has different knees! Gain reduction max. 1db

Just don´t push it to the limits inside the box. The soundguy can always turn up the PA if your signal is good. But when it is distorted or clipped from inside the box it would sound shitty also on the best sound system.

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45

You can get an AH qupac for the price of a macbook. In terms of processing for live, I’d say a qupac can easily do what the laptop does, and it will never run out of CPU and start giving you dropouts in the middle of a gig. So I don’t really agree on the ”ITB is the only way to process well”. You don’t need to splurge on a 10,000$ ”premium outboard” Manley/Chandler rig for a live show, a decent set of parametric eqs and compressors and thats it…

But tbh I’ve never missed having such mixing/processing power for a gig. A live PA’s biggest advantage over a ”recording” IMO is the huge dynamic range available for the gig. We can let the sounds breathe more, you don’t need to be able to pull off things that will make the song sound good on earbuds… much more forgiving.

Sometimes I feel like the endless options for processing that DAWs allow these days can dreate an expectation that you need to use it everytime… and thats just not true. Keepin It Simple Stupid works most of the time :diddly:

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46

I understand where you’re coming from. But what if your levels are off and you can’t hear that on stage? Are you sending separate signals out of your laptop to the FOH?

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@stutech well said, I see your point now.

@IVAN_B I have 8 outputs I can use from my soundcard. And regarding levels-are-off scenario, I’ve been thru a couple of these with a mixing engineer present and they didn’t hear what was wrong and couldn’t correct it. I guess soundcheck solves all problems probably, where I can have the time to listen to it myself as well.

I think it depends on the scenario then, if there is a good PA system and a good FOH person I can just give them direct outputs from the equipment. And if that’s not available and if I need to take matters into my own hands, I can use the soundcard and mix ITB.

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48

Yeah a good approach, be flexible :slight_smile:

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How would anyone in the audience know they weren’t playing live? It’s not like a rock band where there is someone playing every part, some of it is inevitably going to be sequenced and the audience expects that. I know only because I’ve performed with them and got to watch them set up and sound check. There are even plenty of rock bands who use a backing track for synths, like Public Image Ltd and Skids, but it doesn’t ruin their shows. It’s just a decision they make to not stuff around with a keyboard player on stage/tour.

You make a great show by engaging with your audience. If you want to be impressed by musicianship, go to a recital. I am far too busy entertaining the crowd to worry about how well I can play. Standing in front of a keyboard and playing is boring anyway, it’s not something I’d pay to go and see.

EBM is not dance music, it’s rock music and we play rock venues with mostly rock audiences. i.e. Little or no drugs beyond alcohol.

If you’ve had lots of computer trouble over the years, it’s likely because you don’t know what you’re doing (common with musicians). The first time we toured Europe, in 2005, I took my mini-tower PC with us and borrowed a monitor from our German label’s office for the shows. That thing got battered about from pillar to post and never even looked like letting us down. We moved to a laptop in 2007 and in all that time we haven’t had even the tiniest technical issue. Everything just works, every time. Or maybe you’re on a Mac? Those things seem terribly unreliable, which is why KMFDM have two running in parallel on stage - if one breaks they switch to the other.

OTOH, I’ve had Zip drives fail during soundcheck (floppy disk backup saved me that night), synths decide to freeze/reboot mid-song, countless cables screw up, DI’s break and, last year in Germany, my shiny new Monologue ended up on the floor because of an excessively bouncy stage (and me stomping around on it). The more stuff you put on stage, the more critical points of failure you create for yourself.

Our laptop sits on the top tier of my keyboard stand. I load a song into the host software and press play. I don’t touch it again until I have to load the next song. My (minimal) interaction with the software is through a MIDI controller. Similarly, my band-mate’s drum pads are connected to my laptop and trigger drum sounds from within our host software. The laptop is just a box containing the sounds. At one stage even my vocals were processed through it so every sound the audience could hear was coming from the laptop. (I didn’t use any hardware synths at all for a few years.)

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Why would your levels be off and why couldn’t you hear that if they were? You can hear the PA just as well from the stage as the audience can, sans a bit of top end sparkle, unless you have a guitarist or a drummer or something.

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In my experience the sound on the stage (or in the dj booth) is somewhere between moderately and extremely different to what the crowd is hearing.

A simple way of checking levels before - and during - a set is simply to walk down onto the floor and check how it sounds, how it feels. And of course, when the room is filled with people, a natural form of compression is applied to the sound vibe.

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52

That’s great advice, both about external mixing and ITB. Thanks :smiley:

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@previewlounge put it perfectly:

In my experience depending on the venue one can actually hear the echo coming off the back wall of the venue jumbled up with your own monitoring. Trying to adjust levels in such an environment would make little sense to me. But whatever works for you :slight_smile:

55

I was never trying to defend bands like VNV Nation or KMFDM, I agree completely with most of what you say about them. In fact, when we supported KMFDM, they were coming to the end of their 20th Anniversary tour, and they had played exactly the same set 108 times in a row. Same songs, same order, every show. I can’t see how that could be anything approaching enjoyable for them but the crowds at the two shows we played with them went wild because they didn’t know that what they were seeing was exactly what everyone else had seen.

My point was that everybody draws the line where they feel comfortable with it but audiences don’t notice or care. I don’t play keys on stage because I think that’s what the audience likes, I do it because, even though I have never really considered myself a musician, I’d feel like an idiot and a fraud if I didn’t at least make some effort.

It was different when I first got up on stage by myself in 1985. I had no choice but to play two parts and sing at the same time. It took an unbelievable amount of practice and I actually got pretty good at playing. But being a good player didn’t mean anything to me so when I eventually got a full MIDI set-up, I stopped trying to do more than I had to so that I could spend time making eye contact with the audience and trying to whip them into a frenzy (with little success most of the time, if I’m honest). And that’s what the successful bands in our genre do - they engage the audience through interacting with them, not by showing everyone how good a player they are.

To me it’s the punk ethic and it’s what set music free in the late 70s and allowed me to get up on stage at all. Being a good player is much less important to me than being a creative song writer, a good arranger, a good producer and, above all, a good entertainer. It’s only vanity that makes me play at all.

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57

Whenever I’m putting together a set for live performance, and there’s FOH (or let’s be a real, a competent live mixing engineer, because I’m not friggin’ Bono), I try to keep in mind a target SPL and the Fletcher-Munson curves:

In particular, I try to make sure the mid-range and the ESPECIALLY 2.5-3.5kHz is not ‘too hot’, otherwise you are bound to fatigue your audience quickly.

Same goes with too much sub-bass. It does not need to be that audible in headphones, because on a PA system, it will get blown out of control.

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Guys the show was awesome! :smiley:

Thanks for all your help, it really made a difference.

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59

Man, this looks and sounds awesome. I would have headnodded away :smile:
So … Let us know how you approached the sound heck and stuff. And what exactly made the differences. Is there a longer video of this?

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Thanks a lot man :smiley:

I wish there was a longer version, I forgot to tell my friends to take videos haha… I’m going to do other parties tho, so I’ll be sure to have videos of these.

Well, for the sound, I tried to minimise the number of effects on each channel, I had 2, one for the A4, the other for Digitakt.

For the A4, I had a slight glue compressor to hold the 4 tracks together and maintain its levels slightly.

For the Digitakt, I was a little harsher, I put a compressor with a high ratio to try to crunch all its sounds together, though on the PA system, it sounded like the sounds were too far apart, I think I should have used something to even tame all of them together, or maybe better mixing of the sounds on the Digitakt, or both.

The drums mainly sounded a little piercing, the snare was way too hot, but when the synth sounds were higher volume, everything blended nicely, I guess I should try to maintain the levels in the whole mix so everything always blends.

On the Master, I used a multiband compressor to hold everything together, as well as a limiter just to protect the PA from any sudden sharp noises that might pop up.

Though when it came to the party, I disabled the master multiband compressor because it was making things a little too hot.

The PA was a little sh**ty, so it was hard to tell whether my mix was way off or whether the system isn’t that nice. I think I have to still test this on a better PA and see what will happen.

Cheers :slight_smile:

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I’ve said it before, but you can’t mix to a room without EQ. Use a friggin parametric EQ! Multiband comp is not the same thing, even if it’s fed through a three or four bands of EQ before hitting the detection circuit. Multiband also does not (always) equal dynamic eq!

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Oops I forgot to mention I had EQ on each channel.

I also tried mixing it to suit the room during soundcheck, had way too much mids going on.

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63

Bodies were moving, all heads were bobbing, the music was cool, even if you can get it to sound better, the mission was accomplished successfully…

I really like that weird lead noise you were workin and bouncy rhythm… :smiley:

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Thanks for the kind words. :smiley: :heart:

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i remember being told once that each room has a resonant frequency and for some reason this is why it is necessary to realtime tweak the mix, no matter how prepared the parts may be.