Working on our next live setup

Yeah, we know, we’ve been silent for a while… again. Sorry. It’s just that there’s so much to do and so little time, and writing about what we’re doing kind of slide down the priority list the more we’re actually doing. So if we don’t post it’s a good thing, for us anyways.
Right now Sol’s in Zagreb working for ISCM and I’m in the studio building a sequencer for our next live setup.
We started to build our own tools because we never find tools that are aimed for live use. For example you might think Ableton Push would be a good live tool but when you actually start to work with it you realize that its shite for actual stage work (really handy in production though). The only reason people are using it live is because they never experienced a real working live setup for electronic music and have nothing to compare it with. To find an electronic live act that is really playing live is hard since most people tend to use different (and more or less fancy) play buttons, but they do exist. Some famous examples of real electronic live acts are Beardyman and Tim Excile but there’s plenty more when you start to dig in to it. You’ll probably not find them on the Billboard top 100 list though.

So what is live music? If you imagine a guitar, it’s already built with strings and all. You’ve probably prepared it before you play, you seen to that it is tuned and you have connected it to one or a series of effect pedals before it’s plugged into the amplifier. All that is done beforehand, what’s not done is the actual sound. You’ll have to touch the strings before it makes any sound and you have to touch it with skill and precision to make it sound right. That is live.
So how do you translate that into electronic music which sometimes don’t use in pitch tones or chords at all. Yes, there’s a big difference between playing one note or a chord on a guitar than playing for instance techno live. If you’re a solo artist you’ll play everything from the drums, ambient pads, fx to bass-lines and you won’t be able to do all in real time and that’s fine, you don’t have to start with a Tim Excile setup but you should aim for doing as much as you can handle. If you find that you have time for checking your Facebook account while playing, your setup sucks and you haven’t put in enough of an effort. If you walk of stage sweaty and your brain feel like a Goldfish in a bowl on its third round on the Kingda Ka roller coaster and you haven’t had to stare at your computer screen one single time you probably just played an interesting live set.

And this is why we’re building a new step sequencer (as if it’s really needed among those millions already out there?). So what do all sequencers lack that make it so important for us to spend three weeks hammering code and patching cables in Synthedit?

Lets do a list:

1. We work with all kinds of measurements, not just 4/4… Most sequencers don’t handle that at all and those who does doesn’t do it that well.

2. We want to be able to store a fat sequence with just a push of a button so that when we mess everything up we can just recall the fat thing with another push of a button. And we want to be able to switch between different patterns without the use of PrgCh or use the mouse to go into a file meny.

3. We want a pad that just plays the darn drum… We might want to actually play a note for real now and then.

4. We need to use sequences with different lengths (isorythmic)

5. We want the ability to change the timing on every individual step

That’s the main things we need to make it usable on stage. It would be awesome to have this as hardware but a VST will do for now.

And before y’all start to bash us up for not using the new Lemur sequencer engine, try the timing when you use it over wifi, it’s terrible (otherwise it’s great).

We will make the beta available as soon as this thing is stable (could be a while, e-mail us if you want to try it out before that).