First, I’m just honestly curious about this topic as I feel things I’ve called/labeled live in the past are questionably “live.” Really, just curious on people’s opinions. When I first got into dance music DJs didn’t usually list themselves as playing live and the term “Live PA” was thrown around a lot, meaning the artist(s) would be using the hardware in some manner on stage that was somehow ore complicated than DJing.
I’m a house addicted, I think back to the times in Chicago (I wasn’t there) when DJs didn’t have new music between the death of Disco and the birth of House music. They were combining drum machines and records. The prep you can do on hardware now is DAW-like in many regards, so this how idea of "dawless’ has become somewhat silly to me. On the other hand, hardware does offer some serious limitations.
I’m just really curious where people stand on all this.
I’ve been interested in recreating this in my own work and I feel like anything less than “practiced improv” isn’t really “live.”
A lot of what I’ve done in the past with hardware is spend a lot of time pre programming machines and then just changing patterns and twisting a filter or delay amount knob here and there.
So, I ask the question–what makes electronic (dance) music “live” for you? I’ve seen people with huge hardware setups do less work than DJs with two CDJs and a basic mixer and vice versa.
As do I, but where is the line between performance and…the alternatives? I know its a massively open ended question. But I’m talking mostly dance music.
I think this idea of ‘live’ only really matters to the performer. It is whatever makes you feel comfortable and gives you a sense of integrity, be that DJing, using a laptop or using drum machines from the 1980s. An audience just wants to hear good music, played in an appropriate order.
I’m not sure what the correct terminology is but unfortunately a lot of times terminology is used interchangeably to help someone’s presentation out…
imo I guess live means getting something from the performance that I couldn’t have gotten from a recording.
I do hear a lot of people talking about going to a show and enjoying the energy from the crowd, I don’t pay money for anything that comes from a crowd, I only pay for what the artist brings to the table that their record doesn’t bring.
you can play other peoples music live and you can play your own original music not live so I think this is a completely different question than one about originality versus un originality
Examples from my own experience:
I‘ve performed 7h impro sets with massive HW setups and I‘ve done the „press play“ on pre-arranged parts, when it suited my artistic intent.
It does not matter to most of the audience.
I think it matters to the audience, I’ve been to many shows where if the artist performing had just pressed play the audience would have had them for lunch…
I think whether the music is good or bad doesn’t depend on whether it’s played live or just instant replay, but again that’s another question.
I think if you told the people before hand that you would not be improvising and that you would be pressing play that it would have made a difference, the only time in my own experience that it didn’t matter was when the audience didn’t know what to expect in the first place or had no expectancy…
it works in the other way too, when people expect to be going to a great party and in the middle of a party some live artist starts playing people get upset, they don’t care if it’s live, they care if it’s what they wanted in the first place, paid for or were lead to believe they should expect.
Big respect for Kentaro, but isn’t practicing sleight-of-hand/dexterity a form of programming too? He’s transferred a large part of his performance into automatism/muscle memory. I might admire an expert juggler or tightrope-walker in the same way. But is he still „feeling“ it?
as much as any accomplished guitarist with the same skills I’d think?
we are certainly still feeling those blues licks that we should be tired of.
also I think the common denominator between kentaro, jugglers, tightrope walkers, and live guitarist is that they all risk making a mistake and that is where the tension comes from… where as instant replay has no tension, no risk of mistake so it’s considered not live
Electronic instruments that allow for improvised creation/structuring of patterns through mutes and total parameter control of the sound means you can be more reactive to the environment you’re performing in.
An audience is the key proponent of live performance and if they’re going wild to someone pressing play then that’s their choice.
completely agree with that, I don’t know if that defines what is live or not though… which is subjective too, I guess I define Live or not more akin to if something is static or not, static being not able to make mistakes
