Performance Configuration, Pt. 2

After many weeks of distraction, it's really about time that I finish up the description of the performance setup I used for the last couple of shows. And by "finish up" of course I mean "describe at all." The diagram I posted previously is fairly descriptive, actually, but here's the rundown in good old fashion verbiage.

MLR (AES edit) was used as the sound source for the entire performance. Briefly: MLR is a real-time sample manipulation application designed for the monome. Much has been written about it elsewhere. The AES edit adds a few features that I find really useful, in particular the ability to address six "groups" instead of the four available in the standard version- to make a long story short, this means that I can have six discrete audio parts playing back simultaneously instead of four. In the diagram, the numbers to the right of the monome grid show how I mapped these six groups to rows on the device. Note that group six gets two rows- this is an example of a choke group. Each of the bottom two rows can have a separate sample mapped to it, but only one of the two rows can play back at a time. If one of these rows is playing and I trigger the other (by pressing a button in the other row on the monome), the sample associated with the playing row will be stopped and the other row's sample will start. This opens up interesting possibilities for "gating" samples against one another, but is also a technical limitation of the six-group limit.

The top row (labeled "Control" in the diagram) is not associated with a sample; instead, it provides (you guessed it) controls for turning off individual groups and controlling other aspects of the program like pattern recorders. I won't go into it apart from saying that the top row lets me stop sample playback in any group by pressing the associated button (labeled 1-6 in the diagram), and provides access to four pattern recorders for "recording" button presses for a set period of time.

MLR lets the user save an unlimited number of "presets," which in this case refer to specific configurations for the seven rows on the monome. A preset stores which samples are mapped to which rows, the playback characteristics for each sample (e.g. forward, reverse, playback speed) and the global tempo at which those samples should be played back. By saving a number of presets, I can change swap all the samples mapped to the monome's buttons with a single key press.

So far this has mostly been MLR 101. In my personal use of the application, one of the most important decisions I made was to be as consistent as possible between presets. Thus I set things up so that the bottom three rows always controlled beats (two beats in a choke group and one independent), the fourth row from the bottom always controlled bass, and the first sample row (second from the top after the control row) was always a part that could stand on its own, e.g. as the first thing brought in to a new song. The other two rows were open. By making things consistent in this way, I was able to let muscle memory start to come into play when moving quickly between song elements. Speaking of- for these past two performances, almost every "song" has been limited to a single preset, meaning seven samples. This made setup fairly difficult in that I was forced to distill each track into a relatively small number of sounds, but provided a great platform for improvisation on themes once the presets were constructed. I also used a set tempo of 127bpm for every preset (lots of my songs fall into the 110 - 130bpm range as it turns out) to avoid having to futz with that.

OK, so that's MLR. The rest of the setup (and the diagram) relates to how the audio was affected once it was playing back. I used Soundflower to route each group (i.e. six stereo channels) into an individual audio track in Ableton Live. I then had the X-Session and O2 knobs and buttons assigned in a mixer-type configuration for each of these channels. Thus, for each group I was able to individually set volume, reverb-send and delay-send, as well as momentarily solo the group by pressing the corresponding button (in other words, mute all other groups until the button is released).

This left six knobs and two buttons "free," which were mapped to global effects parameters and triggers. In Live I clustered the six MLR channels into two busses- one for beats (groups 5 and 6) and one for "everything else." I then had individually controllable Beat Repeat effects on each of these channels (with a shared grid-size knob to determine the subdivision size for the effect) triggered by the two remaining buttons on the O2, as well as individual filter controls (low-pass on the beats buss and high-pass on the everything-else buss) and a volume gate with controllable threshold on the beats buss. From there the two busses were mixed down to the main stereo out, and off they went to the speakers.

Almost-finally (I know this is getting tedious!), I had a few "hard wired" in-line effects on the beats buss controlled by the actual piano keys on the O2. From middle-C on up (so the upper-half of the two-octave keyboard), each key would engage a specific effect, e.g. a fixed band-pass filter, bit crusher, distortion, flanger, reverb on full-wet (yes that's a technical term), etc. Middle-C was "dry," so pressing that would always bring the channel back to clean, un-effected sound. And last but not least, I had the lowest C# key mapped to Live's tap-tempo; since I didn't have any tempo-sync set up between MLR and Live, this was designed to let me get the Live effects close enough to a tempo match if I decided to change things up in MLR.

And that was it. Like all things technical this would all make a lot more sense if I could just show you- maybe I'll try to find time to make a little video or something. The important thing, though, is that with a little practice this all became quite natural, and I found myself able to "just play." And that's what I've been going for all along. I'm already starting to develop some new ideas to complement this setup, but I'm proud to have finally hit upon a configuration that let's me be creative (at least within the confines of a few samples) and spontaneous, but most of all lets me have fun instead of freaking out all the time. I guess if 2007 was the Year of Production for me, 2008 will have been the Year of Performance. Now onward to 2009: Year of Exposure.

And all that that implies.