Tuning the Computer?
When I started deep into electronic music in the early teens I saw Ableton and just the look made sense to me. That was the beginning of this little hardware revolution too. Everybody had come from plug-ins at that point. I probably didn’t even know what a plug-in was or what the word meant, but hardware abounded.
2012 was when the Minitaur came out, and I was just trying to get the Police sounds. I knew they had something on the ground. I knew it was a Moog and looked up the Taurus and all that good stuff, so that was my path into it. Then a hardware revolution took over — Novation and Arturia and all this other stuff — and everybody followed. Plug-ins were horrible and all this kind of stuff.
Fast forward to where we are now and the plug-ins sound as good or better than a lot of the hardware. Hardware has nowhere to go and software has come a long way, and it all sounds great.
Case in point: my set this week would not be possible without the Sting2 sequencer. It’s an acid sequencer, but you can do about a million other things with it, and like any good machine, if you’re just using it for acid lines you’re kind of missing the point.
The creator of it came out with a video about how to sync basses to chords via chord device, and that really unlocked this performance for me. Another thing he says is that he’s a big proponent of the computer being a musical instrument, and it’s our job to — and this is me inferring from what he says — tune it.
Which is a super cool way to look at it.
So this week is all about tuning my computer and the Push performance. I’ve got to take my mind out now. I really want to use the Minitaur, but that’s not the goal. The goal is a good performance. I can always get that in later.
What it looks like it’s going to be is my computer with my set, the Push 3, and the L-6 mixer to record and just have some — you know I like going into that compressor live. It sounds really good.
So today, as I sit here, that’s the go-forward.
I’ve got a drum kit, got hi-hats, I’ve got a saw bass which has replaced the Chiral just for safety, got my 303 tuned a little higher, chords — which is a synth device I created when I did the dub techno record — sounds really good. I know it pretty well. And then a lead sound that I’ve been using for a couple weeks.
Would love to have the time to rec in some samples--movie quotes to start off the event. We’ll see if that happens.
I’m not going to get super worried about it. If it happens, great. If it doesn’t, I don’t believe anyone will die.