The Live Remix Gig 


last night was great! 

The show on Thursday was really wonderful. The Stranger gave us some great press, both Chris Delaurenti and Dave Segal mentioned the show in their columns. Ffej did his usual amazing set, Syphilis Sauna turned in a surprisingly noise filled set, Tableland was great, and I even surprised myself. As usual, for Seattle, the crowd could have been bigger, but they made up for their sparseness with some serious enthusiasm.

Ffej's solo performances always blow me away. He performs with just an old analog mini-synth and his MPC 2000XL and his voice and he can coax the best sounds out of that gear and really put on an amazing and rich show. It really shows what you can do if you know your gear inside and out. It shames those bands (including me sometimes) that show up with truckloads of gear and don't put on half the performance he did.

Patrick from Syphilis Sauna has a dedication to hardware. He's not a fan of the laptop show and I can understand why, but I was fully expecting him to bring a laptop for this show since how the hell could you remix a twenty minute set with a hardware sampler? Well, he proved me wrong in spades.

Tableland was surprisingly good. My other project, transPacific played with them a while ago and they were good then. They sounded pretty great, but I was pretty busy.

I was supposed to be sampling Tableland so that I could remix them immediately. I was woefully unprepared equipment-wise. If I had been really planning, I would have shown up with 8 mics or something, but instead I showed up with one. I was hoping that there was equipment there I could use. Luckily, I was able to hook into the monitor board, but there was a problem and for most of the set all I could get was the guitar. The sound-guy helped me out and I was able to really record the band, but it didn't give me a big diversity of sounds.

Once Tableland finished their set and inexplicably took down their equipment I was able to get started (it took me about 20 seconds to get set up and ready to play, but I had to wait 20 minutes for Tableland to actually leave the stage - I hate that). At that point, I maybe had 30 different loops in Live, but I'd given up trying to label them uniquely, so I had no idea what most of them sounded like. Then I had a few more technical difficulties: I had decided at the last minute to bring my Kaoss Pad for external processing. I hooked it in, but couldn't get the sound to come back into Live. I also tried to do my loopback trick for cueing (I send the Cue buss in Live out to tracks 3-4 and then bring them back in to the track 3-4 inputs. This way I can use the live input monitoring for cueing. Well, that didn't work either. At the time I thought it was an issue with my FA-101, but now I realize that it was a bug in Live. It had gotten confused with all my earlier recording or something. I just went for it, and I have to say that I surprised myself. I don't know if was my of my all-time best performances or anything, it just didn't suck. It sounded like me, but it also sounded like them and that is the hallmark of a good remix, isn't it? 

Posted: Fri - July 8, 2005 at 01:24 PM          

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