Jbox Prod. Sessions 01: Taking your music Live

One of my biggest focuses this year is developing a new live set, and starting to really think about how I'm writing my new music based around the idea of performance. From a songwriting point of view, this will force me to approach composing with 'less-is-more' in mind, and allow me to focus more on the music and expression itself. My biggest challenge as of late is confusing the technical side of production with the creative/artistic side; and it's stopping me from finishing tracks and making the best I can. I believe jamming live and turning those sessions into final arrangements is going to re-introduce the fun back into it - which is what the Jbox project is all about anyway.

Today I'm going to discuss some different ways you can take your music into the live environment (focussing on doing this with Ableton Live), mixing & technical considerations and some general advice from my first adventure into live performance.

Identifying your focus

If you're going solo like me, one of the first things you should consider is what is the main thing/s you'll be doing on stage.

If you love playing keys and your music has a lot of melodic elements in there, grab a MIDI keyboard or a synth and make that your thing! If you've got some huge drum rolls and percussive elements, and you're quite rhythmically coordinated - grab a drum/samplepad or even an electronic drum kit and hit it live!

Even if you want to do a bit of everything, consider creating a balance between not trying to overload yourself with too many things to trigger on stage, and leaving yourself enough breathing room to freestyle and most importantly have fun with it. Leave it simple enough that you would be able to perform an acceptable set regardless of any distractions that may be around you.

After you've decided what your main focus is, here's what I do and what Kuren recently gave me some advice on:

I'll open up my final session-file of the track I want to prepare; and simply remove any sounds I want to play live. I'll make sure that those sounds (whether they're a MIDI instrument or samples) are ready to be mapped to an instrument in your Live-session. I'll then export the new track (which essentially becomes a backing-track) and import it into my Live-session and have it ready to play in Session View.

Here you can see some of the different instrument/sounds I set up for my first live gig last year at Arcadia. I only had one 49-Key MIDI keyboard with a pretty limited set of mappable buttons back then (which were set to my FX rack) so I mostly had to arm each instrument manually from my laptop (as shown by the arm-selected channel in red).

Here's what I sounded like playing 'Horizon' live, with a new melody I jammed out over the chords, vocal samples & drums:

That was at Arcadia, which was a boutique electronic music event held in Goomburra Valley last year. Below is the aftermovie which features my song 'I Can':

In a lot of my music, I've got a heavy focus on catchy, rhythmic melody-lines. So I give myself the space to be able perform them live, and in some cases make up something completely brand-new on the spot like I did in that instance. (And now I really wish I put that in the actual song lol).

On the same topic of exporting tracks specifically for playing them out live. If a lot of your music lies around a similar tempo range, you could consider making an intro & outro for them that will allow you to beatmatch and mix into the next track. A MIDI controller like an AKAI APC40 is perfect for this as the design is set-up specifically for Ableton's session view; it has faders for each channel and a crossfader for extra control with transitions. You also have the ability to download templates for the controller specifically for mixing in mind, and then customise and build that template as the base for your live performance.

Mixing considerations

With being an electronic music producer, you've got the luxury of being your own sound engineer. Because most of time, and especially in the early stages - you're most likely not really going to have one. Plus, other than having someone there at the venue making sure the levels are correct for the space and turning up your foldback or booth when required; the frequencies will already be mixed and your audio summed to L/R via your interface before it reaches the sound-desk and PA. This is not taking into account any guest instrumentalists you may have on stage (or basically anything that needs to be mic'd or DI'd externally to whatever is playing from your laptop).

My track 'Dunes' is a very melody-heavy song yet is fairly lacking in any actual bass instruments. I've worked this into my set by playing one on the keys and mixing it accordingly to the other frequencies present in the track. Above-left you can see a compressor which is sidechaining the bass instrument to the audio from Dunes. There's an EQ on the sidechain which tells the compressor to only pick up audio from frequencies under 200Hz; this way my bass is only really being ducked by the drum elements - which is the desired effect.

There's some EQing going on with the EQ Eight plugin which basically has sculpted out the frequencies of where the kick's fundamentals lie, and some light boosting around 100Hz up to 200Hz to give it some presence and body.

Other than something like a bass element which requires a little bit more attention, most sounds that don't require a lot of lows can just be high-passed and you'll be good to go.

If you're going with the route above where you're performing sounds which are in the original music, I would copy the settings you had on those tracks originally and implement them into the Live-session.

However, if you're playing a lot of separate sounds live which is more of a live jam with room for unpredictability rather than being focussed on particular songs, here's some tips for that:

Don't put any kind of mastering plugins on the master channel, just a limiter (and maybe a compressor if the venue's system doesn't use one) will do. This is because you don't know for sure what sounds you will be playing when and how they will all integrate when they're being slammed into a ceiling. Mix & EQ all your instruments accordingly to what roles they play (eg. kick, bass, synths, percussion elements, vox), and then leave enough headroom on all your tracks so that you have that space to be able to creatively mash and loop sounds together. The sound engineer/guy that controls the desk should and will be able to bring your music to an optimal level for the venue.

For my master-chain, I had an effects rack and a limiter. Because since the base audio I was playing out were already mastered tracks, I had no need to add any extra processing. This would fully depend on how you set-up your live performance. Here's what mine looked like:

From top to bottom is a low & high pass filter, a filter delay, a short & long reverb and a limiter with a lookahead of 6ms & ceiling of -0.10dB.

I had everything mapped to separate encoders on my MIDI keyboard so I could turn any effects on & off, and filter sweep when I wanted to. I've set minimum and maximum values for my filters and white noise sweeps so that I can keep them from going into too many harsh frequencies and amplifying them.

General stuff I've picked up

- Make sure your session isn't too CPU heavy. You want to be running as low-latency as possible in order to make triggering any sounds more precise

- Fool-proof your controllers. If you have something like an APC40 which has stop-clip and stop all clips button then consider remapping them to something else. There's nothing worse than accidentally stopping a track or sample in the middle of your performance.

- Practice! It might seem like an obvious one, however it's easy to know what you're going to do; but until you've run through everything several times - you'll be thinking about everything I've mentioned above, the mechanics of playing rather than the music itself. I'm one of those guys who spends a lot of time in the studio but only plays occasional gigs, so I've got to practice a lot in my room to make sure I'm on top of everything.

- You can't depend on the club/venue to have everything you need. Bring your own extension cords and multi-outlets, interface/DI box, TRS/XLR cables etc. Basically plan for stuff to go wrong, because it all may go out the window when you're in a loud venue and you're in front of a crowd.

For some more tips, check out this amazing discussion on live setups.

I'm still a developing artist in the realms of live performance, however I hope this article will shed some insight and benefit you in some way. I'm playing my next gig in 5 weeks on the Sunshine Coast, stay tuned on my socials for details and I'll let you know how it all goes on the blog.

Cheers!

Lachy :)