How many folk here play live sets with (mainly) live drum/synth synthysis

[RDR]

This is something I'm looking at, slowly, as I find time.

Hopefully DVNT will pop up at some point, as he knows loads about this kind of thing.

Oh, and he knows the guy that wrote Milkdrop too.

Nice... it'll probably be an epic fail for me... but ill give it a go, a programmer i am most certainly NOT :lol:

[TechMouse]

Tis better to fail than not to try at all, young RDR.

[tocsin]

Vjing is loads of fun, even with loops, it depends what you do with them as well how you use the effects inside them, arkaos is a horrid program, resolume i love to bits as well, on the fly resampling is cool. Having cameras set up around the club provides interactivity as well. VJing and getting people involved really gives another dimension to the club. I'd prefer loop stuff to no visuals as well.

I've never noticed enough of a difference between Arkaos or Resolume that really makes one better than the other. Only thing that pissed me off about Arkaos was when the event recorder would choke. Don't know if that ever got fixed but don't really care either since I record all my Arkaos events in Sonar. BTW, it is possible to get Milkdrop running in either Arkaos or Resolume with a little driver trickery, so long as your CPU and GPU can handle it.

[acidsaturation]

As for guitars in techno, if you understand production you`ll understand why it is so difficult for it to work.

Guitars take up a HUGE amount of room in the mix.
Listen to how drums and guitars are mixed in rock and nu metal
The drums have very little low end punch, the kicks very rarely thump, the middle areas are all left sparse to allow room for the guitar.
all areas techno uses in it`s own sound for strong percussion.

It is very very diffcult to get it to work, trust me.
I fought with it for years in the 90`s in the various industrial bands I was in, it`s a fecking nightmare.

That's certainly true if you are trying to make guitars sound like a rock guitar. But when it works I think it can sound pretty fun and to be fair, I've always thought techno (for me at least) is about being inventive and using an interesting palate of sounds, which a guitar can be part of. Certainly when I've used guitar samples in my sets people seem to like it.

[judas_beast]

I use Ableton, running 18 channels, being Kick, Snare, Hi Hat, Bass 1, Bass 2, Synth etc. Basically when I've made my track in Cubase I record short (16 usually bars) loops of each ''instrument'' for each part of the song as well as running some parts live from the various VST's. On each channel I have various effects, as well as effects on the master out from Ableton. I control the lot with a KorgMicrokontrol. I think this allows me to do pretty much anything, but also gives me some definite form to my live set, so if I am (to be frank) ****ed I can still pull it off.

Next up I want a Korg Zero 8.

Anyway, here's a screen dump should anyone be interested.

[detfella]

*farts*

[judas_beast]

*farts*

What the **** have you been eating mate? Jesus, smells like something crawled up ya ass, shat it's self then died a horrible, smelly death.

[RDR]

I've never noticed enough of a difference between Arkaos or Resolume that really makes one better than the other. Only thing that pissed me off about Arkaos was when the event recorder would choke. Don't know if that ever got fixed but don't really care either since I record all my Arkaos events in Sonar. BTW, it is possible to get Milkdrop running in either Arkaos or Resolume with a little driver trickery, so long as your CPU and GPU can handle it.

Its the on the fly stuff that really sets resolume apart from arkaos... and stability...

shame there's no resolume on the mac though :( Take your point about CPU and GPU... these programs are seriously intensive.

ill check out milkdrop though ;)

[tocsin]

Its the on the fly stuff that really sets resolume apart from arkaos... and stability...

I never noticed the difference for on the fly stuff. In a performance, I always have the full screen going out to a separate monitor, so I'm free to edit and setup whatever on my main screen with nobody knowing the better. Stability has been an issue here and there, but not generally during playback. More with the event recorder for me than anything else. But, the work around was simple enough. I just record all the events in Sonar, save as a midi file, import into event recorder and then render. No probs. With Resolume, I had some serious choke issues when trying to play back Divx/mpeg4 files. I used to use the Jpeg Motion codec for my videos before, where the quality was great but the file sizes were huge. Switched to Indeo after that where the quality was subpar to JPEG, and the filesizes were still huge. Once Arkaos was able to handle Divx, it made life easier. I get the best quality picture with the smallest filesizes. They end up looking just as good as JPEG and better than Indeo, while coming out to about a 3rd of the filesize. The only issue with it is that it's a bit more CPU intensive than JPEG or Indeo. But, now that I have a dualcore laptop, it hasn't resulted in any spikes.

As for Milkdrop, it really is pointless to use standalone for a "VJ" purpose, or even a creative visual one. The machine does pretty much all of the work for you. You can tweak it by adding an image and changing up the math formula on the fly. But, for the most part it's a guessing game by the human where the machine is pretty much in control. It could run fine throughout an entire night with absolutely no human interaction. It also looks great which is why so many VJs hate it. ;)

However, with some trickery, you can pull it into VJ software an add a really cool layer. If you find a better way then my system, let me know, as I'd like to find a possible way that isn't quite as CPU intensive and involves a program to program direct pipeline (like with a virtual display driver or something). At the moment, I use a program called Camtasia Studio to pull Milkdrop into Arkaos (and the same method should work for Resolume). There's a feature in the program where you can set a live "capture" area on your desktop. I simply move the Milkdrop window into that capture area. Then, you can pull the input from the capture area into Arkaos or Resolume by using the virtual "Web Camera" that the software creates. I've had it running at a 30FPS capture with no issues as of yet. But, given all that's going on in my machine, I come pretty close to spiking the CPU. It happens every now and then, but only for a fraction of a second.

[davethedrummer]

i'm gonna do a liveset with just a sinclair spectrum and a collection of silly hats

[RDR]

i'm gonna do a liveset with just a sinclair spectrum and a collection of silly hats

Im gonna do a liveset with dave the drummer being forced to operate a small collection of electronic circuit bent push-a-long childrens toys.


and a 303.

[TechMouse]

i'm gonna do a liveset with just a sinclair spectrum and a collection of silly hats

Hate to burst your bubble, but I think Neil Landstrumm beat you to it.