quoted 8 lines A friend of mine and I went to> A friend of mine and I went to
> the Chemical Brothers show this past weekend, and upon seeing that
> the music was being generated by two 'mad professor' types bobbing
> their heads to the beats and twiddling knobs and pushing buttons on
> stacks of black boxes, she asked me 'What exactly are they doing?'. And
> I must admit, I didn't really know. So I put it to someone out
> there, when a techno act perform 'live', what are they really
> doing? Assume I know very little about the current technology.
i was at that show and i think they weren't doing much of anything except
bobbing their heads to the beats. i think most of it was being played back
off of a tape. the only time i saw anything that remotely resembled live
performance was when one of them tapped on a sampler that triggered the "uh!"
sound in "chemical beats".
techno acts vary in their approach... some use mostly taped material. some
bring all the gear but have the computer play it back. some actually make it
up live on the spot. single cell orchestra has a good system - he has a few
drum machines and a synth or two. he starts patterns running on the various
pieces and mixes between them, rather like a DJ mixing between two records.
so although all the pieces of the show are recorded ahead of time, how he
mixes them and manipulates them is tailored according to the crowd reaction.
-j-