The Absurdity Of Performing Electronic Music Live

hey there this video is kind of an overview on how i perform live without a laptop or a digital audio workstation and it's also about the emotional roller coaster that comes with me every single time that i perform live and if you are only interested in one of those two things then feel free to use the time stamps however maybe give it a chance because i feel like the two are quite entangled in fact originally i wanted to make two entirely different videos one that kind of went over the gear and technical stuff and then another one that would be one of my exhausting monologues over analyzing the philosophy of being an electronic musician who performs live however i feel like this very complete behind the scenes take does the job of both a lot better so a really really brief setup when i was a kid i was a guitar player and i worshipped virtuoso jazz players like buddy rich and joe pass in west montgomery however as i got older i kind of liked machines more than people if you don't count things like talent shows in grade school i've been performing since about 1995 and my first tour was in 1999. i've always hated flying however a string of bad flights turned that into full-blown aerophobia and so if it were possible to play a show without flying i would drive to that show even if it was thousands of miles away and this kind of opened up the opportunity to bring an excessive amount of gear along with me in some visceral part of my brain i still have that weird jazz virtuoso complex from when i was a kid and that means that i absolutely hate staring at a laptop screen while performing i don't have anything against other musicians who do it i totally understand that it is a million times easier but for some reason i just don't like it and so in like 2007 or 2008 i stopped using a laptop when performing live and that made things even more complicated and excessive in early 2010s i designed funded programmed and built my own three-dimensional live visualization setup and it was awesome [Music] however due to venue limitations and me having to hire a small staff to assemble and disassemble it for every single show i lost about 14 000 in the course of a summer so then i decided to scrap all the visual stuff and i just took a deep dive into the virtuoso musician thing and i did an improvised midi guitar tour electronic gear seems to be aimed more towards djs than instrument musicians so instead of building a sick lighting setup for my shows over the last couple of years i've been building this setup from a guitar that has no computers no visual interfaces no backing tracks and the goal is to be able to write music with my guitar in real time and bring it to any direction that i want so every song will have never been heard before and it'll never be heard again and hopefully it'll be as challenging and exciting for the audience as it is for me on stage [Music] only a select few venues and theaters believed in my vision here and most just wanted a the flashbulb show instead so that's what i did i played flashbulb shows until the apocalypse and what you're seeing here is my first show in about two years and my last show for the foreseeable future finally let's have a little talk about covid19 if you watch my weekly stream then you've probably been following my neurotic analysis of infection rate data to figure out if i should or shouldn't play this show ultimately my decision to not cancel the show was based on me looking at the infection rate data of the delta variant in the united kingdom in india it plateaued and then just dropped off really fast and i was hoping really hoping that that would happen here and it cut it pretty close there for a second however here in georgia the infection rates have dropped by 80 percent in the last month thank god i even privately talked to z dog md who i'm a huge fan of and you should absolutely follow his channel or listen to his podcast if you want a rational scientific and most importantly empathic take on the pandemic so the festival did do a temperature check and some other common sense precautions i think they could have done a little bit better i think they could have done a whole lot worse at the end of the day considering some fans of mine spent over 200 on tickets i think that they deserve the liberty to make these decisions for themselves if somebody did attend who didn't have antibodies or was unvaccinated or immunocompromised and they didn't follow the proper precautions they will assume the vast majority of dangerous consequences all by themselves and if you disagree with my decision to play the show i completely understand because i went back and forth with this for a long time so earlier this summer i booked a show to play the main stage at infrasound alongside a bunch of musicians who are friends of mine that i really like and i'm not that huge of a fan of playing festivals but this one seemed like a great way to just get back into it after two years of not performing and this is going to require a whole lot of work and rehearsal and new gear to sort of get my live set up to speed [Music] so i bought this four channel standalone dj system gemini sdj4000 the reason for this purchase is because it apparently has the capability of sending a midi clock out to other devices that are made by gemini and i thought that would happen out of the usb port as well as the ethernet port but apparently it only happens out of the ethernet port so i've been analyzing all the midi data and i can't find a clock so now i'm going to have to analyze the ethernet data hopefully that midi data is not proprietary and encrypted and i could turn it into a din clock out so i can have it automatically send a clock to my other midi gear on stage 12 hours later we have this little usb 3.0 ethernet adapter and cable and i'm going to try and capture the packet data with wireshark and see if i could figure out some form of midi clock from there then i guess i'll be plugging this either into maybe a raspberry pi i feel like that'll add too much latency maybe a axoloty and then writing a script on one of those that would translate it to the baud rate of midi din out big moment of truth here oh we got it i was actually able to sniff data out of the dj controller but it's all in hexadecimal [Music] so using an axle od board with a usb ethernet interface and a mod duo x i've been able to convert the gemini dj sync clock to a din midi clock that allows me to control other gear but now i have to go through every single song and assign the actual bpm beat grid to each stem and sync it all up perfectly in time otherwise what's the point of having a clock out that would do gear because no dj interface is going to be able to detect that properly i don't know why i'm doing this to myself [Music] i guess that's the closest thing to a downbeat so my end of chain is a pioneer rmx 500 which is like this old remix station effects processor and i like it because it actually has a pretty good bpm detection algorithm just put a hi-hat in there it has like reverb on the other side spirals and then if you want to kill all the effects at once you could just like hit this kill switch and then add in different things like so [Applause] [Music] it's a bit of a disaster [Music] [Music] okay so you're probably wondering what's going on here this is my dallas infrasound festival setup now in the past as a main mixer i've usually used something like a mackie 1402 but i wanted to simplify things a bit so i chose a gemini sdj4000 as my main mixer since it has two analog inputs then to the side of that we have a mod duo x for effects which is a powerful device that i've done a few videos on that can run max msp patches and lv2 plug-ins and so on and then here we have a little axle-loaded protoboard for doing some midi translation then over here we have a voice life touch which is an incredibly powerful vocal processor it was made before tc helicon was inquired by behringer no further comments up here we have a pioneer rmx 500 which to my knowledge is the last cool dj effects box to come out unfortunately then my end of chain is a dbx go rack which is a reliable little compressor and anti-feedback an eq and volume control unit that people weren't even buying when they cut the price down to 20 yes you heard that right when they were liquidating this product in 2017 you could buy one for 20 on amazon it was easily the best value in all of pro audio and now you can find them on ebay used for about 200 hours all right now down here on the 4 we have a boss sy1000 you could find an extensive review of this thing on this channel i later regretted choosing this and wish i had gone with the bg99 for this gig and then to the side of that we have the excellent aero salute studio to the right of me on a keyboard stand is a yamaha montage which pretty much does everything under the sun and in combination with the midi guitar and looper allows me to improvise my little heart out not that i would want to do that at an electronic music festival i'm using a shore headset microphone for vocals but just to simplify this illustration i'm drawing a little traditional microphone all right so audio cables will be red digital slash data cables will be purple midi guitar audio and data goes to the sy-1000 sy-1000 goes into the aeros looper that goes into a massive custom effects chain on the mod duo x then out to the input of the dj mixer my microphone goes into the voice live touch 2 which then goes into the audio and vocoder input of the montage then out to the dj mixer the dj mixer goes into the rmx 500 and then that goes into the go rack and then into the pa system the custom bpm metadata that i made for each stem gets sent via ethernet to the axle od board then out to the splitter the splitter sends us data in midi to the mod duo x the aero slooper the sy-1000 and the montage and that believe it or not is the most simplified and condensed version of my live setup that i've had in the last 10 years it allows me to play familiar music that i have released in the past with a pretty high degree of customization or improvisation being able to play the guitar midi guitar keyboard electric piano whatever it is also adds a lot to the performance of this cable just take a oh roland why really [Music] these cables are like 50 bucks you gotta be kidding me [Music] i'm gonna have to solder this i intentionally have a 50 millisecond delay on everything that way i am just a little bit more cognizant of the difference between the slap back that i'm hearing on stage or the monitors being off time or even things that aren't really the sound engineer's fault at a festival where you know i might be placed somewhere on stage or i'm hearing the bounce from the back screen more than i am hearing the actual monitor and i have in-ears i like to not use them if possible in situations like this but i may use them however the monitors are usually louder than the in-ears and half the reason i wear the in-ears is so i don't go deaf from the monitor so anyway i set up an intentional delay here [Music] so that way i get a little bit used to it uh all right let's just go and see if i can make something [Music] do [Music] when you watch behind the music or something like that the one thing that they never show you is the labeling of cables that all rock stars definitely do themselves the pickup just seems to all of a sudden not be picking up the a string and it's confusing the e string with the a string this is a midi pickup problem this isn't a normal pickup problem i could play the set without a midi pickup but it's a little bit too late to revert to that option and i could also just install a new midi pickup on here because i do have an extra one but that would take a couple hours minimum another thing that's going disastrously wrong right now is that my boss sy1000 is the screen is just glitching out it looks like it has burn-in or something i don't even understand how that happens with the screen like this and i honestly haven't used it other than reviewing it on this channel and then when getting ready for this show and i've always actually turned it off i think it has an auto off feature so it's not like i've left it on for weeks at a time or anything like that i've barely ever used it definitely never brought out the house before and i was kind of weighing i was like should i go with the old bg99 or should i go with the sy-1000 might as well go with the sy-1000 because i haven't really used it before and i've tuned all the presets and now it's a little bit too late to go back on that too so if this thing burns out i'm just gonna have to try and transfer the data over to a new one that i'd have to buy at a guitar center or something like that so putting on a nicer set of headphones and listening to me play the guitar or sing or play the keyboard has led me to realize that the gemini has this massive digital dithering problem over all of the audio that's going into the mixer it's that gemini all-in-one dj system it's deplorable it's as if somebody's running a bit reduction filter on anything that's under a certain decibel range like honestly if i had five more days i would send that thing back and reprogram everything for a different mixer setup it's like inexcusably bad and i say this honestly if this wasn't a music festival and the show was like in a seated theater or something like that i'd cancel it all together or i'd like just somehow restructure my entire set to a different mixer like it's that bad i intended on having everything labeled and wrapped up and matched to a case and put in a hard shell case and all locked up and waiting by my garage door intended on having all that done by about now and then i would start packing clothes and some other stuff but i am not even close i haven't even figured out which guitar i'm going to be using so now would be the time to actually panic i think now it's like where i panic i'm just gonna do one more run straight through a 60 minute set and then that's it and then i start packing it up and that's the end of it and then i the next time i touch this gear will be in front of either like 20 000 people or 10 people depending on how many people show up to that stage at that time [Music] uh [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] without us touching [Music] um [Music] [Music] how's everybody doing [Applause] [Music] so foreign [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] i hope that was enjoyable for the record the reason that was so artsy or music montagey is because every waking moment of a music festival is filled with audio that would bash my skull in with copyright strikes it also should not be a surprise to you that it is incredibly loud and generally impossible to hear anybody speaking i want to thank michaela bailey from akimbo studios for the incredible camera work during the event and i want to thank the infrasound artists and promoters and employees for being so accommodating to us shooting there for a whole day if you're interested in the music you heard during the video it is from my album nothing is real which you could get from my bandcamp or spotify link in the description and i intend on uploading a audio or video portion of this live set to my patreon in the following weeks speaking of that if you like this video subscribe to my channel if there's anything you want me to cover in the future let me know in the comments if you want access to an amazing discord community a bunch of audio assets monthly songwriting challenges and so on then my patreon is for you and you can join for as little as one dollar all right i'll see you soon bye

Channel: Benn Jordan

Views: 36,510

Rating: 4.907063 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 0WQSCE0Blro

Length: 25min 25sec (1525 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 10 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/BennJordan]

Hey y'all. It's been a while since I posted here, but since this is a common thing I'm asked about, I documented it for some show and tell. :)

[u/Willylyons]

Thanks for sharing!

[u/808909707]

I watched this yest on YT and felt an overwhelming sense of loneliness when were packing, unpacking and driving all by yourself. Maybe it was the artsy montagenes of it all.

I hope you have someone to share this stuff with (other than us weirdos on the internet).

Love your work dude - and stay away from Gemini.

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[u/HawtDoge]

Have you ever considered integrating your eurorack into a live performance? I bet with modules like O_c and zoia euroburo, you could pre-program a patch thats a bit more determinant.

[u/RobotConglomerate]

Thanks for sharing that was a great run down. I felt stressed out when you were having problems! Now that it is over would you have changed any of the gear or did the problems spur different a creativity?

[u/JunglePygmy]

Dude, that show looked awesome! Love that the crowd was loving it. Wish I was there. Any upcoming gigs?