Bringing technology to the stage...

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andyg666
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Bringing technology to the stage...

Post by andyg666 » Mon Nov 20, 2006 9:01 am

So I am in a live hip-hop band. We just lost a keyboard player and now there are only 3 instrumentalists (bass, drums, guitar). we're looking to expand the range of sounds we can create in the live setting. Our drummer plays a hybrid acoustic-VDrum kit. My thought was to link his VDrums to a laptop via MIDI and use Battery2 to set up a bunch of drum kits and assign some other samples to his pads, and use Ableton Live or Cubase to run a click track to the drummer and have sequences of samples and extra layers. This would basically allow him to be able to play any sound we could find via a laptop using the v-drums to control it...

Does anyone have any advice on particular hardware/software to consider or any other thoughts and/or advice about using technology in a live setting?

One specific concern: I'm trying to figure out the best way to get a click track to the drummer only and not to the mains... presumably we would need an audio interface with more than 2 outputs or we would need to run the drums and anything else that came out of the computer in mono and pan the click hard one way and the drums/samples the other?

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andyg666
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Post by andyg666 » Wed Nov 22, 2006 8:16 am

is it even possible in Cubase (or Ableton Live) to route the click track to an specific individual audio output?

bradfromtampa
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Post by bradfromtampa » Wed Nov 22, 2006 10:16 am

yes you can route a click track in cubase.

i used to play in band with just two people we used a laptop to control the other instruments or backing tracks. i used a motu 828 and then gave each instrument its own output, including the click. this allowed us to run a click in our own monitor.

to go on even further cause i'm bored and love to ramble... i ran each instrument out of the motu then into di boxes. i had two rackmounts. which made things very convenient and made sound people happy since it was less for them to deal with. from the di boxes i ran a signal to our own mixer that we kept on stage. i wouldn't send the click out to soundman. what was nice is if we needed to hear more of something on stage we could take care of it ourselves. we also brought along two mackie powered speakers and a powered jbl monitor. there were times were we played venues that just had a vocal pa. our pa definitely came in handy. even if we used our pa, i kept the click signal just in the monitor in front of us. i also liked having the different instruments sent out individually so they could be properly (or improperly) mixed by the soundman. that way if the bass was too loud or whatever, it could be taken care of as opposed to having to turn down the whole backing track....

hope this made sense. i love to ramble and sometimes don't get the point across....

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Post by syrupcore » Wed Nov 22, 2006 2:18 pm

andyg666 wrote:is it even possible in Cubase (or Ableton Live) to route the click track to an specific individual audio output?
yes you can do it with live as well. try to stay away from usb devices. not all but most have too much latency. yeah, unless you hear otherwise from some one...

a midi footpedal like the behringer thing will help considerably for changing setups remotely or whatevers. for that matter, you can trigger samples from one of those pedals too so you don't need to dump all the work on the drummer. :)

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Post by andyg666 » Thu Nov 30, 2006 10:42 am

so just to get the drummer hooked up to a laptop with the click running to his headphone mix and low enough latency, we're talking about a firewire audio interface with more than 2 outputs... good to know.

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