Preparing for a gig, part 3 


8 days to go and things firm up and technology causes some problems 

I've created a new group of textures for the show using Live, Reaktor, Absynth and FM7, and I'm starting to feel a bit more prepared. I'd been trying to figure out how to integrate everything for this show. I had a bunch of scary crashes using Live 4 and Reaktor 4 which made me very nervous. I hadn't ever considered gigging with a laptop until I could go for hours without crashing. The crashes mostly seem to happen with Reaktor as a VSTi in Live which I'm not planning to do live anyway. Also, I was worried about using Live 4 as the main program since it'd crashed. I came up with the idea of using one of my matrix mixer ensemblies as the main control surface and then using Live through Soundflower to feed and be fed by it. Unfortunately, Soundflower doesn't seem to like my FA-101, so I had to scrap it. I was worried for a minute, but then I realized how much easier Ableton had made it in Live 4 to use it as a mixer for external devices. I may skip using reaktor for this show to make crashes less likely. Luckily, even with a bunch of tracks playing and bussing out 4 stereo submixes and 2 stereo returns, Live didn't crack 20% on my powerbook. I may end up using some VSTs to augment the outboard processors. I'm still going to use the outboard mixer for the cello just in case the laptop goes out.

This weekend, I'll spend some time woodshedding with the final setup and ironing things out and I've got to get on the video too.

More updates later. 

Posted: Fri - December 3, 2004 at 06:54 PM          


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