Hi, this marks a new and big step for me as an artist. It´s the 1st solo show I did with prepared songs.
I arranged and practiced these night and day the last weeks (Besides family, work and watching Greys Anatomy). It´s my handshake between complexity, simplicity, improvisation and fun, while performing live.
Having fun, while playing live is my new goal. I learned it thanks to Born in Flamez workshop at ‘Pop-Kultur Nachwuchs Festival’ in Berlin.
As I am neither Martin Kohlstedt nor Nils Frahm, not a trained musician at all, I decided to move away from completely improvised live sets. So I found a way to conserve my songs and make them replayable. A tedious and time eating process…
Sure, there´s still a lot to improve, but I am so proud, that I started. So thanks for your support. Feel free to ask questions and I let me know what you think.
Recorded on the end of summer fest at Arnstadt Kristall. 09.28th 2019. I had to play very calm, that was tough, too.
I really like what you do! Very nice stuff. Do you still keep room for improv in certain parts of the set, or is it 100% prepared, structured songs now? I went from completely pre-programmed, fixed tracks with no room for any mistakes or spontanious sidetracks to a more flexible way to approaching my live set. More room for improvisation while keeping focus on a track-based set. Would love to read more about the choices you made as it seems we’re kind of in the same situation, but coming from different sides of the spectrum.
While I love the song and the sounds (very Icelandic to my ears), these songs with a lot of guitar and vocals would be better performed by playing the guitar parts and looping them. And if that’s your vocals, rather than a sample, do that bit live too. It would make for a more exhilarating performance that way imo
Love the sound.
Although you do great job here, this is mostly “band sound” for me. It sounds like it should be performed by a bunch of musicians playing all the guitars, pianos, keyboards live…
But being on your own makes organization, preparation etc. easier, I know.
btw. much respect that you use the DFAM in this live setting
Thanks Craig! That´s exactly what I do. I play the guitar parts live and loop them. Same goes for the vocals. I sing them live and sample them to the op1 for immediate playback.
I just prepared the piano, bass on the opz and synth leads on the m32. Everything else is played as it comes. The moogs don’t have presets. That´s really tough. So I started making fotos of the settings to recall them later. Then I transcribed these into readable notes for later. When I now play live I have these papers layed out on the iPad and I use these for reference.
So so so true. But yeah. 2 Kids, Work, no time, no band… It would be so great to have a band and a real rehearsal room again. But yes that´s complicated…
Love her so much!
What a beautiful metaphor. Exactly what I did the last years. But that´s ok. A great start, to do at least something. To recall things I recorded everything to camera and took photos of all the machines, that don´t have presets. Then I started to save the patterns on the digitone and on the mother32 & opz. When I realized that the digitone can save the bpm of a pattern I almost cried
The hard part is then to get this all together like in that magic moment during the jam. It takes time and a lot of repetition. I made numerous notes with my iPad during the ‘rejams’ and refined these notes to most needed ones, to clear the clutter. It got from here:
Containing only the most needed infos. When I need to change things I mark them red. Hope that makes sense…
Good point, but I decided to not play keys, because I am too bad. And I want to have some fun on stage, so I needed to simplify things and makes compromises… It´s still not fun - you can see it in my face, but I hope with more practice and muscle memory I will get there…
Thanks so much everyone. Means the world to me, that you care.
Love. Andre.
Quite the progression with your presets, that’s really cool that you have that to look back on.
That’s a great idea of recoding with a camera and using a central instrument to control the patterns. Maybe I’ll try that more (octatrack as the midi brain) although I have been moving that direction anyways as it has a better sequencer than my MD…
I think I am going to try focusing on a genre more as well. I’m a little too open ended atm.
Here is the next iteration of my live setup. I worked especially on the dissolves between the songs. I used movie samples and a guitar drone that keeps running even if I stop the digitone aka master clock. It gives me the much needed time to change the sounds on the mother32 and dfam.
I also exchanged the complete guitar pedalboard to an iOS app on the iPad called tonestack. It has presets that I can change via an umi3 midi pedal. Works great.
Atmosphere and sound was nice and I almost played completely without headphones, which still is pretty challenging to me, but a better connection to the audience.
Still work in progress, but I was pretty proud, happy and exhausted after the show.
