I’m sure this subject comes up a lot but I could definitely do with some tips / advice.
I seem to spend more time thinking about the planning of a live set and all the things that could go wrong rather than just throwing some loops and samples into a sampler and getting a synth and drum machine together and just starting something.
A big issue I have is the translation of a finished track and replicating it in a live scenario. I can’t seem to get out of the rigid thought process that everything live should sound exactly as it should when it was recorded including fx, transitions and arrangement etc but most of the time I don’t think that’s realistic and that’s what puts me off ever actually doing a live set.
I’ve also started recording some ambient tracks that I would love to integrate into a live set so that has thrown a whole new spanner in the works.
I’ve spent a lot of time researching this online and watching videos etc but sometimes with so many different ways to approach a live set it ends up just causing more confusion due to my overthinking. Listening to a lot of other live sets I am constantly left asking myself the question ‘how did they do that?’
My advice is to setup some gear, and hook it up to a recording device (DAW, Zoom recorder, your phone, whatevs’).
Then setup a stopwatch for 25 minutes. Start the timer, press record, jam for 25 minutes.
Then turn off all the gear, go sit on the couch, get some headphones, and listen to your ‘set’.
Did you like it? Was it cool? Would you listen to it driving home from work? Figure out what you liked and keep doing that. Figure out what you didn’t like about it, and change that on round two.
Proceed to round two. Rinse and repeat until you have 8 hours of demos. (That’s 16 sessions)
After that, call up the local hipster tea tasting room and setup your gig. Go play the gig and remember, you’ll be the only one who cares what gear you’re using, what tempo it is, what genre of music it is, and how skillfully you built up to your drop - unless you bring along a fellow synth nerd friend.
Have fun!
Get a gig in two months or something like that, the pressure will force you to prepare everything and if you won’t manage to prepare everything you will learn how to work with unfinished stuff live.
For me that’s the only thing that motivates me enough to acutally build something. (But Suspect_Frequencys way is of course the smarter one… if it works for you )
I love this. But I have to ask, is this process tested? Is it how you have done it? (FWIW it sounds like a great process, and I like it when there are steps to follow)
Mate, I did a 15 minute open mic last week with just a tracker and acidbox. I got there early and the sound tech offered me a wee soundcheck. Unfortunately I’d left my acidbox in bandpass mode without noticing, so spent about 15 minutes fucking up all my settings to get the low end working, which failed anyway.
By the time I’d noticed the bandpass was on, it was too late so I had to try to get everything set back how it was in about 5 minutes without being able to hear it (pack headphones kids).
Then, when I started my set, the kick on the first two patterns had completely disappeared, so the crowd was treated to the sound of two hats on their own for at least the first two minutes while I tried and failed to find my kick. At that point I gave up giving a shit and spent my last 12 minutes rocking the room, and all 12 of the audience seemed to thoroughly enjoy it.
Don’t overthink it, just make sure you have enough material to fill the allocated time and fuck it up as much as you like, no-one will really notice anyway.
I have now seen a premonition of my first live set, whenever and wherever it may be. Thank you for the reassurance that my certain-to-happen failures on stage can still turn out all right.
A friend’s birthday; easy crowd I thought. But it was awful 'cos another friend DJd such a blistering, joyful, pop-meets-hard-techno mash-up set that my home-made techno sketches just sounded terrible. Everyone left to sit down and catch their breath after over-doing it to the previous guy. I totally lost my confidence and rushed through all my material in 20minutes.
But, boy did I learn some stuff. I learned I can go from zero to 10 tracks in about 8 weeks (working only after putting my kid to bed, and including taking a whole week off in the middle). I made 30-ish sketches, trimmed it down to 12, worked on those for a couple of weeks and then took two more out of the set. I got my mixing game and my compression game up (still weak, but stronger than when I started)… learned some good tricks with AR performance pads; and (the best lesson) I learned I need to practice more than I did to a) trust my material and b) perform it better
Lots of good advice already, I’ll attempt to systematize it somewhat:
Practice - it’s up to you to determine how much practice you need. @Fin25 was able to pull a win out of a situation that could cause many people to freeze up. Maybe you operate that well under pressure, maybe you don’t. Practice will reduce the pressure.
Practice can be as simple or complex as you want. In 10 minutes of practice for a 40 minute live set, my Sony HR-MP5 crashed twice. In the next 20 minutes, my Roland SRV-3030 crashed once. I ended up playing with an Alesis INEKO. The Alesis was easily the lowest quality reverb I have owned, and that set called for a good clean reverb. I ordered an Eventide Space the next day after the show.
Planning can be as complex as you want. I knew I could reliably jam for 15 minutes, so I divided my 40 minutes up into four ten minute sections. I made notes for myself to turn these knobs in the first 10 min, those in the next, etc.
BRING A TIMER. The first time I played live (as an adult) I brought a timer. The first 30 seconds took about an hour to pass, and the remaining 44.5 minutes went by in about 10 minutes. Without that timer I would have been extremely lost and disoriented.
Bring your own mixer and extra cables. Assume you aren’t allowed to touch the house mixer. Assume the house cables are shit. Bring two of anything you depend on. Bring friends to heckle you from the crowd.
I played a set a couple weeks ago. It was techno into ambient, but right before I left my house to go to the show, I grabbed this bamboo flute I had.
I opened up and played a few flute riffs to this dub pattern on the cycles.
People were shockingly into the flute…
From that point on, it felt like I really won them over. I did prepare and practice for a few days leading up to the show, but all anyone mentions to me when they see me now is “that flute, man!” So finding a way to directly engage the audience is a strong piece of advice.
The other bit of advice I have is, don’t try to replicate perfectly your existing tracks for your show. Build from the ground up with simpler methods, and also just use them as a template for building a live set in your own style.
Yes. Bring a plugboard; any PSUs you need; your own DI box and XLRs; all your own USBs. Ideally, have a bag packed with your stage cabling and leave it packed whilst you’re at home. I’m the kind of nerd who’ll recommend you bring your own cable ties too, but I know I’m going a bit far with that.
Timer is the best tip! Forgot it everytime i played and it always leads to a fear of not having enough prepared/rushing through the tracks too fast so in the middle of the set i have to ask someone how much time i’ve got left:P
One further tip: bring a friend who helps you with the cables, gets you drinks etc… it takes a little bit of the stress out of the situation
Just a thought which might be worth considering to get out of the rigid thought process… but I think it should be the opposite. If you strive to make it sound exactly like the record, then why would someone waste their time watching it? When they could listen to the record at their leisure? You’d be as well going to see someone get a perfect score on Green Hill Zone in Sonic The Hedgehog…
I’d much rather hear a musician do a version of the record that is different and has something new and interesting that was unique to that live experience. If it’s rougher around the edges so what? Not everything needs to be sparkling and perfect every time.
Just an opinion from someone who started playing music in traditional instruments live, then moved into composition (still suck at it) and then even more recently into electronic music
There is a huge difference between creating music and performing music. I would think hard about what parts of each are important to you and go from there. As mentioned above, making mistakes and actually doing it is the best way to learn.
For me performing music is really why I like playing it. It has absolutely nothing to do with trying to make it sound like the original, and in fact my favorite part of playing live is going off script, trying new things and musical exploration of a known song. It has way more to do with the warm and fuzzy feeling I get when hitting the right note, on time with the drummer.
I wouldn’t dream of taking an already composed song and try to reproduce it live the exact same way it was written. I think a much better exercise would be to take an existing song, and rethink or reimagine it in a way that leans into the performance piece. Use the limitations of your gear and your two hands to help guide you and the songs to a performance that is not only cool to listen to but fun to reproduce. It’s all about it being fun for you, if it not, no way the crowd will ever enjoy it, you just can’t fake passion, but you can hear it.
So many good tips here, and had a genuine laugh because I can relate so much to the stories being told. So I’ll just drop what i think to be the most important advice I could give to myself.
Being playing 5/6 shows this year, started producing electronic music 2 years go so this were my first experiences (being playing other instruments but always with a group of people, never alone) of live electronic music. I am getting the feel there are many factors to an accomplished show and a lot of them are outside your control (the venue, the people, the timetable, the overall vibe) but the most important for me is that you are probably not gonna be able to hear what the people hear. So my advice would be that you don’t have to rehearse to know perfectly your arrangements (that helps, but, after a certain point, you can arrange pretty much everything if you understood what an arrangement is) but you have to perfectly know your sounds. Assume that you could be almost deaf and still manage to pull out the whole set, then you’ll be prepared. The fact that I jammed so much with my patterns I can hear the sounds in my head it’s what saved me every time.
I’m sure you’ll get plenty of technical advice here, but a tiny cent or two of philosophical:
Don’t overthink anything in life. Period.
Definitely give everything a little thought. Don’t do anything important without a touch of planning.
However, with music especially, planning does not equal art (necessarily), and think about what your audience wants to hear.
They want something simple, catchy, with a nice groove, that they can let go to, regardless of genre (within reason). They generally don’t care about the intricacies, the math, etc. unless listening at home, or are into progressive wank-a-thons in the first place
So, put your vision into it, don’t think too much, give it your best without overthinking, and I’m willing to bet, more people will enjoy it than if you spend three years planning every detail down to the note. “Most people” (whatever that means) notice the big picture, unless they’re a critic of your particular area of art.
It’s a tradeoff of course, but you’re talking live set, not magnum opus album of the century.
An album is where you could dump all that extra effort.
Woah, this was almost exactly the process I did with a friend to play a live set.
We had a time slot of 45 minutes and quite a lot of samples/stems from jams in the studio, we booked 2 days/week to rehearse/prepare the material. I’d jam some days by myself to create grooves and when we met we would use that and layer the existing material on top, record the jam and stop. Crack 2 beers, sit down and play the recording taking some notes.
Rinse and repeat and we worked slowly on each track, each transition, everything that sounded a little off or not exciting was changed/removed and I was pretty impressed with how much we got done in the little time we had to prepare since getting the gig, like 20-25 days from when we got booked to the day of the event, working just 2 days a week together with proper focus and always working to move it forward.
It wasn’t a perfect or great set by any means but it was pretty enjoyable to play and we got a lot of people dancing.
Just vouching for this process because it does work, haha.
I noticed during gigs with my first band (in which all the sequencers were human), that the shows with the “mistakes” - bum notes, early entries, etc - were the ones that got the best audience reaction. Many “mistakes” appear as “novelty” or “musical surprise” to the audience, and the tension that arrises on stage between the performers as they frantically coalesce around this new idea carries across as intensity, passion, communication etc. Rehearsal became much more about training ourselves to respond musically to “mistakes” than about consistently repeating a perfect performance. You have wriggle-room.
If you do want it to sound exactly like the recorded version you can always bounce stems/cips and use a laptop (BOO HISS) controller and ableton to rearrange/dub mix your original stems.
Obviously this is cheating and hardware is the only valid form of live expression, but I just thought I’d mention it as an option in case you’re prepared to be massively transgressive.
(I’ve done both this and much more hardware based improvised stuff and it kinda feels like they’re both just options and you just have to decide what you’re trying to do… if you want to represent your recorded tracks as they sound then that’s cool and you can still introduce some “live” to those sounds.
If you want a bit more chaos and “sounds different every time” do that.)
TLDR: I think you should overthink it
I do think “live” is much more forgiving than recorded because people only hear it once, and they’ve already comitted to hearing you…so as others have said you can afford to be a bit rough/flabby/crazy.
one other thought: write stuff down.
Like… write down what you want to get out of it (showcase my music, avoid getting pelted with coins)
and then start making notes on what would help those things happen, and eventually you’ll kinda have a plan and can work out how to technically do it as best you can. it’s going to be a compromise of some sort unless you have literally limitless resources and eight arms.
)
Love it!
