So, on Saturday night I played my first live gig in about 5 years and it was all very last minute - I got asked on the Tuesday morning and so it was all a bit of a trial by fire to get things done in time. I got some really nice feedback from folks (and one guy even spotted that there was a pseudo-Autechre cover in my set) and I recorded the set so thought I’d share it here for anyone who’s interested. It was only a 20 minute set which was probably why pulling it together in such a short space of time was feasible.
It’s a bit ragged in places and there was a lot I learned about how I can organise things so I can get a better balance of what I’m doing - it was played with the DT and DN and I leaned more towards pattern shifting, wrestling with mute states, and volumes. Did some more other tweaks of filters and such like but not as much as I’d have like and I didn’t really get confident enough with it to dive off into the realms Ctrl-All and such like. But overall, I was pretty pleased with it given that I pulled it together from scratch in 4 days.
Hope you enjoy it and I’m happy to answer any questions about the process and such like if anyone is interested.
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Sounds great! Amazing what you can get out of just those two machines.
How did you go about organising the set and managing the sample pool etc? I’ve not played live (tho I’d like to, maybe i should post about this), but I’ve slightly apprehensive about the limited memory for projects in the Digitakt
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Thanks for listening and for the nice feedback!! There was room to get more out of the machines if I’d had more time to prepare… they really are fantastic devices.
As far as organising the set, I played four tracks that I’d previously written and took some samples from the DAW projects. A few one-shots and a few loops that it would’ve been too hard to recreate otherwise. But most of it came from having the DAW project open and then re-programming melodies/bass/pads into either the DT or the DN. With the DT, I was using a lot of one-shot samples and in a couple of instances single-cycle waveforms. Broadly speaking most of the chords come from the DN although some songs had sampled chords from the DT.
I then created a single project for the live set which had patterns for the songs I was was going to play in the order I planned. Then I had a cheat-sheet bit of paper which showed which songs had which parts on which tracks of the 2 devices and a note of the patterns that were used for each song. Again, the patterns were roughly in the right order though I had flexible to go back and forth a bit on them. The key to that working and flowing well was in the use of pattern mutes as opposed to global mutes. I did get my mute modes on the DN mixed up on the last song and managed to not play a couple of bass variations and the end of the set was a bit arbitrary.
Here’s a photo of my notes which hopefully helps (you can see that I’ve a spare few tracks on most songs)…
Hopefully that’s useful, give me a shout if there’s anything else I can help with.
