The Solution's Live Rig

I'm going to start by talking about our live setup.  We haven't played a lot of gigs recently so we are trying to change things up a bit and get ready for a couple gigs we have scheduled.

There have been several incarnations of The Solution's live setup.  We used to use Cakewalk Sonar and then switched to Ableton Live, which we still use now.  Most of our sequencing used to be done on the Roland XP-50 and/or the computer triggering hardware rack modules.  We would bring that with us live and run the sequences live with the modules.  This setup required us to bring a lot of stuff with us, including a rack-mount computer and monitor.  There have been various lighting and video setups as well, as you can see in some of these photos.

More recently we have been trying to bring less equipment and have the ability to do small gigs with just iPads, etc.  We have programmed a few songs on the various Korg iOS apps and performed them live along with guitar and a keyboard controller.  Those are fun to do, but it's time to revamp our larger setup a bit and prep all the songs.

Steve and I analyzed what we want to do and not do in performances and what would make it the most fun for us and the audience.  In general, playing more parts live and less fuss with software were two of the main points that came up.  Here's what we came up with for each of our rigs:

Steve will be playing the Roland XP-50 for his keyboard.  We are just using internal sounds, mostly for piano, strings, etc.  He is also going to have his iPad running the Akai iMPC app.  We are loading in samples for him to play directly from the recordings.  So far these have included percussion samples, vocal samples, and synth parts.  The iMPC app is a really great sample player and makes it pretty easy to load in samples.  It also comes with a lot of great sounds.  One thing we discovered is that the files you load in have to be 44.1 kHz, not 48 like we usually deal with.

I will be playing my Roland A-70 controller for my keyboard.  I'll have 3 synths with me to trigger: a Moog Slim Phatty, Moog Minitaur, and the Korg Triton Rack.  The Phatty and Minitaur with be used for monophonic sounds and bass and the Triton rack with cover all the polyphonic sounds.  I've got it set up so each of them has their own MIDI output from the A-70 and each song will have its own patch on the A-70.  When I switch to the song, the synths changes to the correct patch as well.  I'll probably have Ableton Live switch my patches for me on the A-70.

That brings me to the computer.  We use my MacBook with Ableton Live 9 for the audio and MIDI playback.  We separate each recording into 8 tracks that run together to make the song.  These include  drums, percussion, bass, synth 1-3, and vocals 1 & 2.  When we mix down the songs to these 8 tracks, that is when we choose what part we are going to play live and make sure that part gets a track all on its own.  In the master Live file, we have those parts deactivated.  Having the parts separated make it so we can remix and add effects live to the individual parts.  We also sometimes loop sections to make them longer.

For Live control I use the Novation Launchpad, and Remote Zero SL controllers.  The Launchpad is for triggering clips and samples and the Remote Zero I have programmed for filters, effects, volumes, and lot of other fun things.  I can write an entire post on our controller programming someday giving all the details.  Between the synths, controllers, and singing that gives me plenty to do when we play.

Our audio is all run through our Presonus StudioLive 16.0.2, which also functions as the audio interface for the computer.  Each synth and vocal has its own channel and we use the mixer's effects for the vocals.  I'll possibly incorporate another effects processor for the Minitaur and Slim Phatty since they don't have internal effects, but we'll see.

So that's the rundown.  Other projects that are in progress include incorporating and programming lighting, which we haven't done in a while  I'm using the Enttec DMXIS controller which can be inserted as a VST plugin in Live.  The details of that is also for another post.

You may be wondering, why all the hardware synths and no soft synths?  We have used software synths live quite a bit.  Ableton Live does not make it easy to use their synths in the live setting because there is no good way to switch patches, and having a dozen plugins running in the background all the time isn't ideal.  Most recently I used the Liine Kapture app and the Kapture Max for Live plug in.  What those do is capture all the selected settings for your Live set and then recalls them with the press of a button or clip.  It worked fine, but it was quite cumbersome to set up and every time we wanted to change some settings, we would have to recapture the scene.  This is mostly why we are going the hardware route.  I also like playing hardware synths live a lot better.  The latency is there with software synths no matter how good the settings are.  I have nothing against software synths; we use them in our recordings all the time.

Hope you found this informative and as always, if you have questions or comments, just let me know.  Thanks for reading!