Earlier this year I collaborated with visualist duo extraordinaire CSTNG-SHDWS and my good friends Angie Donkin (vocalist) and Jay Golden (violinist) of Vibrasol for a blowout show at the LoveTech one year anniversary in San Francisco. CS have edited together a beautiful HD promo video from footage of that night, and I couldn't be happier to share it here.
CSTNG-SHDWS x Nonagon Live Video/Audio from Colin Sebestyen on Vimeo.
After a solid 18 months of fun with mlr, I've been working on building an entirely new performance setup built around the good 'ole Arduinome, my spankin' new APC40, and the behemoth that is Max For Live. Tonight I had my first success: tempo-synced control of the APC40's LED matrix (in three lovely colors), and successful parsing of button presses from within Max. It's a small but significant achievement, and the beginning of what I hope will be a long and fruitful relationship with my new robot friends.
Let there be lights!
This is an excellent rumination on the subject by Robert Henke aka Monolake aka founder of Ableton.
My friends at Socialush put up a little edited video of part of my set from last month's LoveTech. I'm not a big fan of watching myself on screen (gotta solve the modesty problem if I'm ever going to be a real rockstar, I know), but this deserves to be mentioned.
The era of strictly short posts may soon come to an end- new projects 'n things to write about soon!
I guess it's true what they say about rain (and we've had plenty of it this month): I've been booked for the February installment of the new LoveTech monthly! Many thanks to Mr. KC Bradshaw of legendMAG for putting me in touch with the organizers.
From the LoveTech site:
Saturday, February 28th
9pm - 2am
10 Komega (LoveTech)
11 Evan Morris (Lost Science/Hexawe/EMP)
12 Nonagon
01 !INCLUDE (NYC, WarperParty.com)
9pm Workshop:
Visionary Instruments presents: Six-Strings From The Future
Visuals by Sexy Robot and !INCLUDE
Roominant Installation by Komega
Time Machine by Rich DDT
@ The Ranch
1433 Van Dyke Ave
San Francisco, CA 94124
$7, All Ages, BYOB
If you're in the area two weeks from tomorrow, it sounds like an event not to be missed!
The SF gig on Wednesday was a real treat! A whole gaggle of friends came out, and some even brought friends of their own! It all made me feel quite loved indeed. I was a bit nervous about my first local set, but as usual the negative emotions melted away once I got going and I had a positively splendid time. I think the set went about as well as I could have hoped, and since I yet again neglected to record anything, it will live on as such in my memory unimpeded by potential disagreement with reality.
As happy as I am that things went well, ultimately I think the best part of the night was getting to meet and hang out with a really friendly group of fellow electronic musicians. It was wonderful to find myself in the company of others who spend their time exploring the same territory I do, even if (and perhaps particularly because) our music and techniques differ so significantly from one another's. It's nice to feel part of a community, and I'm looking forward to getting more involved in this one.
Jump cut to present day: I'm writing this while auditioning the one-thousandth(ish) version of an old song in preparation for the perpetually-delayed album. I am committed to getting everything on my end finished by this weekend. It will be done. If nothing else, at least I've proven that the last five percent of a project can indeed take practicaly as long as the first ninety-five percent. Here's to the final push!
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.
I suspect that any "anticipation" built from that last post has long since faded- I will return to it at some point, I promise (myself). The unfortunate fact of the matter is that I've been consumed with work this past month. The project I've been managing / lead developing ends tomorrow, which means I've had plenty on my plate, none of it music related. Once again I've been stuck looking forward to a calmer, gentler future filled with buttons, knobs, and the requisite bleepbloops. This is how we pay the bills, I suppose.
Heading into that future, however, I've got another show scheduled for this Friday! Same deal as the others: Unknown Theater (Los Angeles, CA), $5 at the door, 10:30pm start time. If you're in the area please come by! If you're not: I might try to record this one for posterity, though I don't have much time to un-rust myself (sounded better than "lube myself") in the one day between project completion and show. Nevermind that though- it'll be good to jump in and keep pushing the "having fun" approach to performance. Last time I had Barack to celebrate; this time I'll have the freedom to not work weekends for a while! It truly is the season to be merry.
The show this past Friday was a big success! I'll go in-depth in a later post, but for now you can ponder this teaser-diagram of my performance setup. Explanation and elaboration coming soon.
When it comes to this performance shit, I've become a certifiable manic-depressive. And this, unfortunately, has not been one of my better days.
I want to know how I should be doing this. I'm tired of re-rendering, re-interpreting, re-arranging, and re-starting everything a hundred times. I'm tired of re-inventing the wheel. I'm tired of these songs. And more than anything I'm tired of feeling overwhelmed.
When things click I feel natural and connected and inspired. I want to feel that on stage, but there are so many options and so few guidelines. And so much preparation.
Note to self: some people have real problems.
If you're not a regular reader, "P^3" is the brilliant acronym for my "Perpetual Peformance Problem."
Work continues in preparation for next month's performance. I vaguely stated a post or two ago that I'd be presenting a "complete deconstruction" of my tracks, and while that particular choice of words is a little overblown, the basic concept has so far survived. This will be my fourth re-architecting of the electronic music performance concept; prior iterations were:
The Four Track (Plus): each song rendered out to four audio streams (rhythm, bass, pads, and melody) with key elements like fundamental beats and melodies on their own tracks for real-time manipulation. All tracks routed to global effects sends (mapped to fixed-function knobs), allowing me to manipulate any of the four independently of the others. Song-specific effects (e.g. the global saturation effect in the second half of "Forever And Never Again") routed to physical knobs that changed function per-song.
As a performer, this technique allowed me to present the full instrumentation for every song, but forced me to stick to the existing overall structure and didn't offer many opportunities for real improvisation outside of effects and the few "key elements" that got their own tracks. Overall a fairly low-stress (by design) configuration, but with limited expressive depth.
The Four Track (Monome Edition): a similar approach to the above, but with two to three of the global tracks mapped to rows on my then-recently-completed monome, and key remaining elements mapped to their own rows (and sometimes half- or even quarter-rows). Effects setup similar to the above, but with everything routed to two effects busses (one for beats and one for everything else) instead of using global sends.
As a performer, this technique opened up the possibilities for real-time improvisation (to an extent determined by the number of song elements mapped to the monome), but still relied on song-length "macro" tracks to collect most of the remaining instrumentation. A fundamental difference from the Four Track approach, however, was my ability to jump around within these macro tracks using the monome, though in practice this didn't end up being very useful, as the time-jumps at that scale were pretty large (basically eight cue points per song, evenly spaced) and consequently difficult to utilize in a musical way.
Performance-wise, things were complicated by my attempts to map as many song elements to the monome as possible, leading to a confusing and unpredictable layout that changed completely from one song to the next. I also had to remember to explicitly enter tempo changes between songs (using a tempo change row in Live's Session view), whereas in the above those changes could be automated in the Arrangement view. Oh, and it took absolutely forever to set up all the follow actions in Ableton Live. That was a pain. Overall, not a very successful configuration, though that was largely due to the complexity of my monome mappings coupled with zero practice before the performance.
MLR Deconstruction: For this upcoming show (Nov. 7th), I'm throwing the Four Track technique out the window; instead, I'll be using MLR (rewired into Ableton Live) exclusively, and largely (if not completely) reinterpreting the content and structure of my music in real-time. This sounds very fancy, but in many ways it's really a simplification of my prior attempts based on a fundamental paradigm shift: instead of struggling to recreate the recorded versions of my songs in a live context, I'm going to try to create something spontaneous using key features of those songs as building blocks. For this show, I'm going back to the original project files for each song and rendering fairly short loops of the elements that are most fundamental (or most interesting) to the spirit of that song. I'm then creating collections of these elements in MLR (using a strict mapping that I'll describe in a later post) that I can mix, mash, and chop live. And I'm rethinking my effects setup, which I'll describe once it's been finalized a little more.
More than anything, I'm trying to let myself have fun with performing these songs instead of stressing about getting them "right." MLR is an inspiring application due largely to its simplicity, and that's something I can really appreciate having worked my way through the more complex setups described above.
I know that most of this won't make a whole lot of sense to people not familiar with music production, but I'm hoping to update this post a little later with diagrams that'll help make things more clear. Or maybe just satiate the music nerds further. Either way, it'll be interesting to see how this new approach works out. I dream of a day when having a show doesn't mean dozens of hours spent reinventing the wheel...
Maybe someday.
I really want that title to be a blogging pun, but unfortunately I think it's too accurate to qualify.
Another sleepless night, another post. "They" say you shouldn't work in bed if you can't sleep, but "they" didn't seem to consider that just about every place that's not bed is colder and requires a great deal more clothing. Once the in-apartment jacuzzi arrives I'll likely be singing a different tune, but for now bed it is.
So the show on Saturday went alright. I decided to go way out on a limb and control the whole thing with the monome. The initial plan was to play the first couple of tracks freeform with MLR, then crank out the rest of the set in Live using MonoGrid (can't find a link right now, sorry), but due to last minute technical cold feet (Max/MSP and MiniAudicle wouldn't play nice in my dry run 10 minutes before heading to the venue) I nixed the MLR component at the last minute in favor of an all-Live set (pun not intended, for once). I'd spent pretty much every evening of the week leading up to the show preparing my big Live set for use with the monome: deciding which elements of each track were important enough to warrant dedicated buttons, setting up clips and follow actions, defining about 100k MIDI mappings (alright not quite that many) configuring effects, etc, etc. The end result of all this work was a set of seven tracks each haphazardly and inconsitently mapped to a monome "page." It turns out that when your songs average 30-50 tracks each in their "full" versions, it's a bit of work to cram it all into four-to-eight button groups on an 8x7 grid (eighth row dedicated to selecting pages for those keeping score).
In order to compensate for absolutely zero practice with my new configuration, I scribbled up a little map of each song indicating which sonic elements were mapped to which buttons. Unfortunately, come actual performance time (queue the atmospheric lighting) my map became completely invisible, and so I just had to wing it. This coupled with a whole new (and equally bizarre) glitch in which my "pads" track kept randomly starting and stopping led to a fairly stressful but ultimately not terrible (I hope) performance. It was a great learning experience though- a couple of things I'll certainly make time for in the next go around are:
Michael was kind enough to bring his camera (though there weren't any good places to put it and it was hot in there and I was unattractively sweating like a dog) but there should at least be a solid audio recording of the set that I may or may not post depending on how bad it ends up being =). As always, though, it was a good experience, and I think I'm growing with each show, though my ambitiousness might be outstripping my experience at this point. You know, back when live performance was but an abstract possibility I figured I'd come out of the gates fully-formed and guns blazing, ready to amaze the world with my prowess and stunning professionalism; the reality has been much more humbling. But it's a good fight, and I'm slowly inching towards more compelling ideas and greater skill- it just might be a while.
Until then...
Here's a sneak-peak at one of the many monome-centric performance setups I've been experimenting with recently. There's still a lot to learn, but I'm excited about the possibilities of this new toy.
... has got to be a big part of the solution to a compelling electronic music performance. This has been hashed and re-hashed a thousand times, but the back of a laptop screen does not give the audience sufficient insight into what's happening onstage, no matter how many glowing pomaceous fruits it's adorned with. A willingness to be open and honest about one's performance is just one of the reasons I'm so impressed by the setup DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist had on their most recent tour:
True, they're laptop-free, but I think the idea would still translate pretty well into the digital domain. Next step: more physical interfaces.
My apologies for the silence 'round these parts lately. Somehow all of my time seems to have disappeared. I'd like to write more, but it's already late and I've got to get SOME sleep one of these nights. It's generally been a good busy, though, so no need to worry =).
I will mention that I've got another show coming up, once again opening for (and then playing with) Vibrasol down in LA. Mark your calendars: July 5th, 10pm, The Unknown Theatre in Hollywood. Michael and I are going to try to get a higher fidelity capture of the performance this time around (with a direct audio feed!), so stay tuned if you can't make it to the show.
More as soon as I can manage!
Thanks Mr. Mau Mau Starter for blowing my super-secret cover up in comments on the last post- now I'm forced to announce that I have a live show coming up this Saturday. At least it's only a few days away, which is such short notice that anyone reading this will already have plans and be entirely unable to make it to the Unknown Theatre in Hollywood, located at 1110 Seward St.
C'est la vie. (Thanks Eric)
Seriously though, this is big news! I'm opening for the band Vibrasol, who are planning quite an extravaganza of light, sound, and free booze. I'm on from as soon as I can set up once the doors open (seriously) until Vibrasol is ready to go, which, considering they have eleven people to account for, should be at least forty-five minutes. And as if that wasn't enough, they've asked me to stay on stage for their set to contribute some live weirdo electronics to their tracks. I don't know about you, but that seems like some serious hospitality to me.
Since these plans were only solidified a week and a half ago, this development has obviously forced the question of how I'm going to perform my stuff. I've been spending pretty much every free minute (that I'm not at "real" work) working on solving this. After a number of quashed attempts and a healthy dose of futile exercises, I finally hit on a methodology that should at least carry me through this show. In brief, I'm rendering each of the tracks I'll be playing down to between four and six audio files, not counting the FX return (which is rendered to another file), and one or two instruments that I'm keeping around as Audio Units. In general, the files map to the beats, bass, pads, and melodic elements in the track, and the AUs (obviously) map to the instruments they represent.
Though I've been building each "performance" track in it's own separate file, I'm ultimately going to arrange everything into a single huge project in Live that will represent my show from beginning to end. Now, if this was all I was going to do I might as well buy a Lay-Z-Boy and call myself the Chemical Brothers, 'cause all I'd be doing is hitting play and having a beer. Instead, I've given myself a few different options to make each song as "live" as possible: first, I can choose to actually play any instruments I have in AU form live on keyboard. This scares the hell out of me as I'm not a keyboard player, but hopefully I'll manage. Second, I have a series of effects hardwired to the four master busses of the project (the beats, bass, pads and melodies I mentioned earlier) which will allow me to effect each buss separately. I'm controlling those with a 16-knob midi controller (8 for beats, 4 for pads, 4 for melody) which is dedicated to this function, so hopefully muscle memory will be my friend here. Finally (and most fun...ly), I've cut out snippets of each track (usually the beats) and arranged them in Live's Clip View, which will allow me to cut-up beats in real time. The really cool thing about this is that as soon as I start pushing buttons, my changes immediately override the recorded track I'm editing thanks to the way Live is set up. I can slice and dice all day long, and as soon as I'm done (or need to get ready to play a different part), I can hit the midi button I have assigned to the "back to arrangement" button, and immediately be back to the recorded track.
How all of this is going to work in real life, under pressure, is a big unknown. Good or bad, I'll write a little summary for posterity once the show's over. Really though, I'm just excited to have the opportunity to attempt something a little different than the traditional DJ set or knob-twiddle-email-check that I see a lot of in live electronic music performance. Wish me luck (and come out this Saturday night if you can)!
...at least if you're Tehn. Here he is performing live on an early prototype of the monome:
I've become obsessed with this controller (dare I say instrument?) recently, and I think this video is a perfect example of why. Even though I've known about it for more than a year and a half, the brilliance didn't really hit me until I started thinking hard about live performance. It obviously won't work for everything, but the simplicity and power of this simple button grid is truly astounding. Now if only you could still buy one =). I'm waiting for the kit to become available again, at which point I'm planning on building my own. Stay tuned.
Despite the lack of recent exposition on the blog, things actually are happening with Nonagon out there in the real world! (And FYI, no: I haven't turned into that guy that refers to himself in the third person by the name of his band. I mean that things have been happening for me musically. Non-music stuff has also been happening to me in the real world, but I'll save that for the tabloids).
I've been spending a portion of my music time recently going through old tracks and starting to prep them for live performance. Figuring out how to do this was something that was long overdue for me, so I'm glad to have finally bitten the bullet and gotten started. So far I've discovered that, as far as creating a compelling live performance, I'd be much more effective if there were two or more of me. Perhaps this is one of the reasons people form "bands." While I might be able to handle all of the instrumentation and production alone thanks to my friend the computer, when it comes to interpreting what I've created in a live context, things get a lot more complicated. For this first foray, I've decided to just do what I can: for each song, I'm choosing a few melodic parts that I think could be played live on keyboards, keeping them around as AU instruments with midi data, and then rendering the rest to a limited number of audio tracks (e.g. beats, bass, pads, etc) that I slice up into sections and arrange in Live's Session View. I'm also experimenting with setting aside a few chopped drum breaks for live rhythmic improvisation (monome, I yearn for you!). The idea is that I can choose at any moment to control either the flow and structure of the song on a macro level by manipulating the audio and midi clips, or I can control a single instrument by taking over from the pre-recorded midi clips and literally playing it live.
This all sounds great in theory, but how well it's going to work in practice- particularly under performance pressure- has yet to be seen. I'm trying to make the setup as foolproof as I can, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there are a lot of lessons out there that are going to have to be learned the hard way. Then again, if things go to shit I can always say I was just playing jazz! (No offense to jazz.)
On the familiar composition front, I'm working on a kind of unique idea that I think I'll be ready to reveal soon. Sorry for the vagueness- you'll see what I'm talking about before too long.
That's all I have the energy to write for now, but big things are looming on the horizon! Actually they're probably small things, but when it's as flat as it is here in Nonagonia, 'lil things sometimes look real big. Until then...
