Wednesday night at Trubadur

December 5th 2007 was the first show where I used my new live-act concept. Thanks goes to Bobby for making this show possible and also to Robert Henke for the technical concept.

Next Time

I plan to play there next Wednesday also. If you're in the neighborhood drop by. I'll probably appear between 8pm and 10pm. Let's hope someone will record a video clip of me so you can see it online later. At least I'll record the audio. This first time was really more a test, so it's better I didn't record it.

Hardware/Software

I know there are a lot of people interested in computers and other electronic hardware, especially among readers of my blog, so I'll reveal what equipment I own and use. There's a simple desktop PC with MIDI controllers Edirol PCR-300 and Evolution UC-33e. Tonight I used UC-33e for the first time in public since I bought it a few months ago. Unfortunately, I don't have a laptop yet, and also don't have a TFT monitor, so I have to bring my 19" CRT monitor. On the other hand the PC is quite new, I bought it two weeks ago. It's a Core 2 Duo E2140 with 2GB RAM. This model of CPU is the cheapest Core 2 Duo today, but it works great! The main software I use is Ableton Live 6, and the main resource it requires is RAM, so those 2GB give it plenty room.

The Concept

My new live-act concept is based on the grouping ability of Ableton Live. One MIDI channel can contain a group of instruments where each instrument is placed on a separate "chain". The "chain selector" envelope is then used in all MIDI clips to select only a specific chain. Actually, there is a chain selector matrix, and each chain can belong to a range of numbers (maximum range is 0-127). If the range for a chain is 3-5, then selecting numbers 3,4,5 will make the chain active, otherwise the chain will be inactive.

This way I managed to put different projects into one big project and still have separate control over all the channels from the original project. Bass drum channels from all different projects are in the same channel in the big project. The same goes for claps/snare, hihats, bassline, melody etc. For now I have 8 MIDI channels and one send channel with a reverb.

The idea came to me when I saw Robert Henke's project in Live where he used the same thing. I knew the grouping function before but didn't realize it's potential.

About The Place

Trubadur is a small bar near the Train Station. It is well known for it's jazz music, but sometimes there's punk, electro, disco, techno, house etc etc... There aren't many customers and that's the way the owners like it. They want Trubadur to stay a sweet little fancy bar for friendly regular crowd. If you come there with the only purpose to listen to my live-act that's OK too. Plus I'll be very happy to see people who actually want to listen to my music! Pathetic, aren't I?

Back To The Future

Anyway, I don't plan to play there for the rest of my life. The goal is to get experience, perfect my show, and off course, become more popular.