Buster Klumpy wrote:
By the way, would be great to have so mp3 or something like that of of those EGG-temptaion-586 medleys. Never had a chance to hear those and I certainly would like to.
On another note, and to once again agree with Steve C. and take it a bit further, sequenced stuff and things like that are norma with electronic music, I mean it goes with the medium/instrument.
You can't pretend to like people who do electronic music and than complain there's loops and everything. But, as I said before, even if it's just triggering some sequences by pressing buttons, you have to actually press those buttons, that's playing electronic music live, that's normal. And as Steve says, things at least can happen.
On the other hand, what can happen with tapes/dats/etc except for dat failures And miming over tapes must be the ultimate insult...
Doubly so from the band who turned down their country's top music show 2 ( or maybe 3) times cos they wouldn't let em play live....before BM's success forced their hand.
I'll see about zipping up some NO electrostupidities and figure out a way of gettin em to you.
FOr now...check out EGG and Temptation on Taras, and the entire Milan 82 gig.....the encore is beyond belief....New Order, wasted, playing a Sparks song for like 20 minutes, most of which is in the "I wonder what happens if I press this button" category.
I offered the following to a ranting guitar cave creature one day...
Right mate, set your amp, guitar, strap, pick and cable down. I'll tip out my kit bag and unload the rig from the van. Now I'll go into that room with your gear and a tape deck, and you stay in here with mine, and I'll see you in an hour to compare results.......oddly enough he mumbled something about not even knowing where the wires went and declined. ( I also made a DJ the same offer when he shot ME down for calling his lots thieves and conmen...I even offered to plug it all up and preload sounds for him....no dice....coward).
I've played 100+ gigs as a bassplayer (mainly cos at college I was fuckin rent-a-bass), and 30-50 as a "machine tamer" as I like to be called (or as a flyer once reffered to the show "live misuse of technology"). And let me tell you, playin a few string, havin a laugh, trying to ignore the singer and guitarist without losing your way, and simultaneously trying to hold a telepathic syncronisation together with the drummer.....is a lot easier than standing behind that wall of machinery....wonder what you forgot to do....wondering what the little bastards are plotting, trying to figure out which one of them's gonna go for a solo for no reason, trying to 2nd guess exactly how overloaded the Juno will be ( Campbell's first law of audio engineering "the juno is too loud"....every single time I've committed one to tape, the first time I listen back all I can hear is a juno 106 or 6 or 60 shrieking with some other sounds in the background).....and of course suddenly remembering that what you forgot to do was load the drumkit so when you throw the fader up expecting to see the hall errupot, fuck all happens and you look really stupid.
It's interesting what Chemical was saying about choosing what shou'd go in what format. Generally most stuff we do is sequenced ( tho sometimes on the fly, from empty), much of it is based on the manipulation of relatively short looping midi parts. Manipulation via MIDI, via control panels, via the sequencer, and via the mixer. We also do a bit of live playing too, things like the Moog, my bass, the occasional glissando guitar part.
BUT, I have used play-in material as an engineer, both during a bands performance and in between bands when I served as a psuedo-dj keepin the music going while things were arranged ( the best thing about the proliferation of the billions of bedroom DJ's was that it enabled to fook off to the bar between bands). And the thing I always find with prerecorded material[1], is it's impossible to match to the perfromance. If the band a sucking ass really badly, the playback can really show them up ( especially if it's only used on one or two tracks which suddenly sound spectacular), and if the band are really on fire the playback can be a total bucket of water over them.
BTW...FWIW, I think of MDF's (that's midi data filers) as exactly the same as tape. Yes the machines can still go wobbly but, there are 2 other things to take into account. 1. and MDF is a playback only unit, not an insrument in any way, it just spits out what you put in. 2. they are inavarialby used by the sorts of people who buy korg M1's and other annoying workstation machines that have shite all interactivity of their own, and rarely fail in any kind of amusing way (unless you count the M1 that exploded on stage for a jazz band I used to play in....we all cheered...hateful car-advert generating cack-pile)
EDIT::::
AND ANOTHER THING.....
anyone else remember the luddite stickers on metal albums through the late 80's and 90's?
"No synthesizers or samplers of ANY KIND (this is important...ANY kind) used on this recording,"
And track one opens with swathes of digital reverb on the guitars and snares, and a pre-verb and whacking great digital delay over the vocals.
Digital Delay=Automatic, user talent unrequired sampler.
Digital reverb=Sampler AND often synth
Morons.
[1]In my personal way of doing things these problems never affected our sequenced stuff....but we did have a FOH engineer at a multiband night who played us in at about -40dB and treated us like programme music....that bit.
