What is your live set philosophy?

My philosophy is that close to a band. I write the songs and play them loosely the way they are written but have a lot of room for variation. I’ve seen great improve bands that can entertain me, but I am always more into the idea of a dynamically written song over a free flowing one.

Right now I am just using a MD and MM with a mixer and KP3. (I have my POs and Volca to plug in for added fun but not required.)

Run down of how I got my latest set.

  1. Load a bunch of fun samples and drum hits into the MD…

  2. Pick a general style. Usually is good for me to pick a tempo first then write a few in that tempo to see where it goes. I decided 130BPM kinda bordering on some dancey late 90’s vibes.

  3. Write a bunch of a songs. Before even deciding how I was going to perform the set, I just wrote a bunch of songs and decided how to organize them on the machines. I gave each song 8 patterns of space so I knew I could hold 16 all together but ended up going with A,B,C,D banks with 2 songs each bank and E,F,G,H with 4 songs each since some were not needing 8 patterns. Those are my more jammy songs with less of an idea of song arrangement.

  4. I practiced each song individually a bunch to see get a loose idea of how I want to perform them live (like memorizing a set workflow for each song to get into and not loose track of where I’m at). Recording the jams to video also helped me motivate to get it to a place I like so I can share the videos.

  5. Figure out how to blend the songs. Thats where the KP3 comes in. I figured it would be best to make a loop of the portion of the song I’m playing and then queue up the next song on the MD and MM while the loop plays, then build in and mess with the loop of the last song to make the transition. It turns out its a lot of fun and give a really fun back and forth feeling while performing so you’re not just sitting focused on one instrument. I think the crowd can recognize it a little and helps them anticipate the next song is coming up.

  6. Practice the set and play it live :slight_smile: That’s the scary part!

Here are some of the jams I recorded:



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What stereo distortion are you using? Almost every search related to distortion gives me many many guitar pedals in mono, but maybe I‘m looking in the wrong places.

EHX Operation Overlord… Not very transparent at all but lots of character. I think there’s a thread about it on here somewhere.

Not sure if this was said already but I focus mainly on the performance macros when building a live set.

It took awhile for me to really find my workflow to actually finish something (mainly used DAWs as writing tool for years so it was a task to let the limitations of the my dark trinity become assets).

I now use the Arranger on the OT to sequence the macros on AR and A4 as well as the song itself. When the song it “done,” I change the MIDI out CH on the OT and loosely aim for the previous sequenced stuff.

Works good so far except there is a lot of note taking as I’ve learned my brain is just not reliable enough on it’s own.

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This is something I’ve been wrestling with for a while. I have an album coming out soon and want to do some gigs with the tracks I’ve made, but they were all made in Ableton.

I have an OT so it’s easy to play them. Too easy. Trying to find the right balance between ‘just pressing play’ and ‘playing’ the tracks.

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See here Machinedrum + analog filter/overdrive - experience

Just learned that I’m going to play live in two months at a big venue here in Oslo (with Cuckoo among the acts:) so I better get my s**t together:)

Strategy: DT and DN with a set of atmospheric techno patterns. DT will have only one bar patterns so I don’t get lost and variations will be plocked and played live along with some live ctrl all action (gotta practice that a lot for maximum effect), sample changes and muting-unmuting of parts. Having just one bar length will allow me to quickly punch in patterns and change the groove. Samples and sounds are loaded into the pool by types for quick live browsing. Will try to program some clever fills and make use of the conditional trigs for muting on fills and the Nei ones. DN will have bass, pad and some kind of lead sounds on tracks 1-3 and will keep t4 for live playing on top. At home when I’m relaxed it goes very well, I’ve noticed that allowing my self to step back, listen and dance a bit to the groove makes me figure better out what to do next and introduce changes slowly which makes for better effect, especially in the techno genre (that feeling when you drop the high hat after 5 mins of kick drum on top of some toms and dreamy pads;)

When writing, I’m trying to stay away from definite melodic structures because I’ve noticed that it forces the music towards some kind of closure and if you don’t pull it off on time it just becomes repetitive. I’m leaving chord progressions to hang for lack of better words. So more open-ended sonic experience than a melodic/compositional one - something that Elektron gear allows very well for.

Hope I’m useful with those ramblings - it’s just my second time live so very excited about it! It’s going to be Elektron-heavy night - after me is the main act with just an OT playing insanely good techno.

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…it depends on the question, i f i have to reproduce already existing trax or not…

played mostly seated audiences in the last few years and there i always need some fixed sonic backbone…so, yep, ot is providing pre fixed stems triggered by one shot trigs…and i only have a few things to twiddle along with that and the rest is pretty much pretending…

because…stop thinking of cheating…ur only cheating if u play stuff from others and pretend it’s urs…
live is live as long the stuff u play is really made by u…even if u just hitted once a play button…

so forget about the cheat issue…but of course it’s boring to just watch ur gear do great all by itself…

so at least one or two lead elements should be always ready and waiting for u to tweak the hell out of it…

this winter i started also perfoming in clubs again…so less songs, more tracks…and there i improvise a lot…there i can surprise myself on the fly, wondering in realtime how did i get here…

best of both worlds is always to have the track available to just shoot out…and whenever u feel the mood to leave that path, u go for dedicated jam patterns, where are some of the elements u got running already are seamlessly waiting to be twiddled and taken anywhere u want them to go…

if u hit stages without computers, there is no way around proper preparation…

and in set up…i always use an ot for granted…and an analog heat for granted…

depending on the live mission…i add a dtone…and or the ugly swedish model…which is doing a great job on stage…as i’m finding out these days…

i never use more than three elektron boxes at once live on stage…because of loosing the overview…

and it’s always a good thing, if u got the ot in use, to stay strictly to basic rules…like…only one track/song per bank…a scenes are always used as snapshots…1-8…b scenes are always slider progressions…9-16…16 is always affecting master track settings only…etc…

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More thoughts: pay attention to the audience, work the vibe, it’s for them not for me… Nudge from where they’re at and build up, don’t slam em if they’re not ready, bring em there…
And then, Just f’n go for it! By all means necessary…
Don’t worry bout nothin, just try to stay in the zone…

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I am a classical/jazz trained drummer.
I do not live from my music but music IS a way of life for me :slight_smile:

Started mixing drum’n’bass some 20 years ago and quickly got an interest in gear/home studio. Went for it and set up mine in France… Then dropped the ball as life does sometimes throw things at you… That was 1999.

Couple of years later, got myself into it again :slight_smile: but as technology is supposed to be here to help/facilitate I decided to go the “digital” way. Traktor and Maschine were there :slight_smile:

I am usually mixing 3/4 tracks in Traktor and a fifth track from Maschine. Using a MODEL1, my approach of mixing has really evolved: I select whichever frequency of a track (say a kick) with whichever other. In the end no one really knows the tracks I am playing. This has led me to approach live situations from a different angle: improvisation. This has led me to the purchase if a DT which I will now include in my lives :slight_smile:

I ditched my 2 NI X1mk2 (Anyone interested?) and reprogrammed my Maschine Jam used both in MIDI mode (to control Traktor) and Maschine mode. Also use it to control my synths through CCs.

Nowadays, concentration goes to the vibe, not the tech side of things. I often end up not mixing tracks in Traktor but use it to play my own stuff.

Next: making sure I have assimilated the 5000 code lines for Maschine Jam :joy::rofl:

Interesting, I’ve been perceiving this matter very similaraly! When doing mixes/sets, how are you handling any kind of progression of the root note (?) of your tracks? To me it seems like there’s always the two routes of mixing; smooth blend between the two tracks, or quick cut from one to the next. Obviously this wheel of fifths is an unbelievably solid guide, but it gets a bit too banal to just progress around your fifths. Sometimes it seems as if some kind of definitive melody is the third option of mixing. With the machines giving you so much control over the programming of your tracks, a short melodic transition from one root note to the next could work very nicely too.
But at the same time you’re absolutely right, melody seems to be the antidote to the sculpturesque character of techno. At least the… ahem… good kind of techno. Things often begin to sound very cinematic or unbearably cheesy when there’s some harmonic thing going on in the tracks.
It’s a thin line to walk, I guess.

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don’t care much for the root note - my drums are on DT and tonal stuff on DN. I just mute DN, leaving a kick or something else to hang from DT (global mute) then changing patterns and then gradually unmuting tonal stuff from the next pattern on DN. I guess fading and root notes are more a dj thing when mixing.

Otherwise totally right about the melody, I’ve fallen in this trap many times, wondering why it sounds cheesy:)) Remember watching an interview with Alessandro Cortini, talking about that, was very on point. It comes also from the tradition of abstract music and minimalism. If you look for minimalist music in Wikipedia, there are examples of classical music that stays away from resolving melodies, starting from Eric Satie and his Gymnopedie, through Steve Reich and others. I guess this is where the difference between “song” and a “track” comes from - songs are much more in the domain of pop music in general - a definite form.

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a bit more about the transitions - imagine a sparse tonal riff going on, I dip it in endless reverb then mute it, leaving the reverb swell go along the remaining beat. Then I filter the reverb and switch to the next pattern (again, global mutes) where the next tonal riff penetrates through the reverb tail of the previous pattern along with the new beat (or just the kick of it). I’m also a fan of hard transitions, even pressing stop, leaving longer samples to hang, switching patterns and pressing play again.

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Yeah I suppose this is what I meant by smooth blend or quick cut. Not in a DJ way of thinking, but as a much more general idea.

Still, I sometimes find two tracks with clashing harmony hard to slowly blend together without losing any momentum. Nice to go into reverb and filter ambience territory, but I feel like this requires more time to fully develop. Kind of slows down all the pacing the mix might have had before. Or I don’t know, maybe I’m losing myself too easily in these ambience things.
Alternatively, a hard jump as a transition works, but you can’t have your whole liveset full of cuts.
Lately I found it nice to take an element from the incoming track - one that doesn’t fit with the current harmony - and introduce it with a melodic variation. Like a tom or some acid tweet that’s tuned to the current root note, but already hints at the next root note. When the next track comes, I gradually take the emphasis on the previous root note out of the melody.

I really have no idea where I’m going with these posts, haha. Seems like I’m arguing some point, but really I’m also just rambling about.

Any chance you still remember which interview of Alessandro Cortini you watched?

I’m building a live set right now, so I can’t tell how it works out yet, but I thought I share what’s my strategy while building it. I’ve played in a jam band for some years so I’m building on this experience.

TL;DR: Perform and listen to your performances when you build up a live set. Start off with a very crude version of a track (like a single pattern) and then automate things you are not happy with and iterate.

There are two things which are important to me:

A) I need to to feel like I’m in control of what’s happening in the set

If I get the feeling I’m not in control of the live set it would feel like ‘acting’ instead of performing and I know that I’m a terrible actor. Also performing is much more fun than acting for me. How much actual control I need to have over the things happening to achieve that feeling depends in my opinion simply on skill and in the exact opposite way one might think. I consider a real musical Zen master who is able to perform live by just pressing play and let an mp3 run for an hour while still having the feeling of performing and being in control. Beginners like me however need a lot of boxes and knobs which do stuff to achieve that feeling, but I hope to get closer to actually DJing once I get better as a musician. Having actual direct control means to me being insecure in how things should sound.

(I know this might be controversial and you can disagree with everything I wrote; It’s just my opinion)

B) What I do shouldn’t be annoying to people listening to what I play

Of course there will always be someone who doesn’t like what I’ll be doing, but at least I shouldn’t be annoyed listening to what I play. What I learned from the jam band sessions is that you can have an amazing jam and feel like Joe Satriani the whole time, but if you listen to recordings afterwards you want to through up. It’s really easy to fool yourself while playing, so, even if it seems like a no brainer, I think it is important to actually listen to what you are playing when you are not actually playing.

The trick is now to find the balance between A) and B) as they are opposed to each other: More freedom means more can go wrong and potentially be annoying. Less freedom means being less in control. What I do to build the set is the following. I jam out at home until I arrive at a pattern of 4,8 or 16 bars that I like (most of the time it will be 8; It is very hard for me to come up with something that is 4 bars or 16 bars that is not annoyingly tedious because it is too long or to repetitive). This would be the basis of a track. Then the performance of a track will consist of building and deconstructing the pattern. I usually record several performances of a single track and then try to get rid of the most annoying hickups by automation and try different ways of constructing and deconstructing until I converge to something which I’m confident with. This I do with every track in the set. When I’m done with that (which currently is not the case) I go and tryout transitions between tracks in a similar manner.

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@Martebar It went great!

It felt more like a dj set than a live performance, as it was taking place in a bar and people were here to hang out and weren’t really paying attention to what I was doing.

Some aspects I need to work on for next time:

  • try to have transitions between tracks. (I will use some of the good ideas discussed above). This time I was fading each songs to silence. The tempos differ a bit but I could keep a melodic element or a pad while I transition the pattern tempo to the next song’s BPM.
  • take more risks/add more live playing. I ended up not using the microKorg as I felt I had not rehearsed enough with it. I could also do more live tweaking than I did.

I recorded the set so I can work on improvements. You can check it out here: https://youtu.be/XHx93zCsUTA
(Sorry, you can’t really see what I’m doing as I could not find a suitable filming angle)

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what i love about detroit techno is the fusion of this into more trad songs and melodies. Both can exist at the same time (and things can be cheesy in the most romantic way)

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How I approach live performance:

What kind of ACTIONS and EXPRESSIONS do I feel inspired to do when my music is LOUD?

For example, if you like to do DJ style interactions (cutting, crossfading, beat juggling, send/return style effects), then load everything into Octatrack and use the 2 pairs of stereo outs and connect to 2 sides of a DJ mixer that has 3 band EQ and an effects send/return system…Anything else is icing on the cake.

Start SIMPLE. Live performances are incredibly disorienting, especially in the dark. Unless your performance context is a well-lit, stand-very-close-and-dissect-everything-the-performer-does-type event, most people will care more about the music than what you are doing to it live. You need to focus on setting things up to give you the control over the most noticeable parts of the music.

This is why muting, unmuting, pattern changing, and synth tweaking are the most common elements of a live performance.

Here’s an example of me explaining a recent setup after a show

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I like your thinking and appreciate the explanations.

Looking forward to the full live set on here soon :wink: