Stick & Garrote live performance (my first)
Did a live gig at the LI5K0 festival in Helsinki on Valentine's Day. I didn't use NS for the performance but most of the tracks were composed in either NS1 or NS2. For performing, I used Ampify's Launchpad app, a Launchpad Pro, an Arturia Microbrute and a Zoom G1x Four effects pedal. I ran these through a cheap Behringer mixer. I am seriously impressed with the variety and effectiveness of the Microbrute – Zoom combo. Little boxes with a ton of kick! I would have loved to use NS as well but switching apps causes the sound to pop badly, so that wasn't an option.
Comments
Wow! That's so cool. The performance sounds fantastic and it's awesome that you got the video and audio recording.
@Stiksi yes wow! Amazing show you put out boy! Enjoyed it very much hope we will see some more soon;) nice variety of tunes as well and good idea with synth overlays
big ups!;)
Thank you, much appreciated! Haha, yeah those overlays are a lifesaver! 😀
Thanks 😀 I’m glad I eventually remembered to turn on the audio recording (at around 0:50).
WOW!!! So damn good! I especially loved the groovy one in the middle with the high piched voice. I totally loved how you used different sound bites and vocoder together with the music. Plus I loved the guy you saw as a shadow on the last song, who went toally mental over your music - I felt the exact same way!!!
BTW, through the years you´ve always described yourself as a middle aged father. You LIAR!! You´re a teenager
Cheers, mate, I really appreciate it! But 😂 nah, I’m still over 40. That guy is one of my best friends, I had a bunch of them there so at least they were dancing but they wouldn’t come to the front of the stage!
That was so cool! Great set, and all played so well!
There's nothing like playing live
I'll be watching this video again.
Great performance!
So smooth and nice.
Thank you guys @Trigger_the_Monkey @frioventus 😄 definitely feeling the itch to do it again!
You should play live again @Stiksi! The more you do, the better you will get. You've got the musical skills, and you've obviously thought about how to make it more entertaining than just "press play", now just polish those skills
And let me know when you tour New Zealand so I can buy tickets!
By the way, if you have time, I'd love to know how you built your live set from your songs. To me it looks like you loaded the stems into Launchpad, then played over the top? With a few samples added so you can play these as a kit, and of course that Microbrute?
I've been trying all sorts of different combinations of options to try to build a "system" I can both create and play live on, which would be reliable enough, and which allows control by buttons and knobs and touch as much as possible, rather than mice and keyboards.... So far all I've really learnt is that I'm easily annoyed and that the more complex my midi routing is, the more that will go wrong.
Oh man, would I love to go back to NZ! One of the only countries I could consider living in besides Finland.
Exactly, I wanted to keep it so simple that if I fainted on stage, the music would continue until the end of the song. It was basically about finding the balance between how much playback I can get a way with and still have meaningful and expressive stuff to do during. On a few songs I also had a kind of plateau-loop, that I triggered and then ad-libbed on top until it felt like it was maybe past time to end it. And of course that’s the one transition I messed up on the most popular track 😂 but I’d done that during practise, so I knew how to get out of it without appearing to crap myself.
I did cut one song from the set because I couldn’t learn the guitar parts well enough, and for such a short set, it was kind of slow.
Yes, absolutely, and the more cables you have, the more possibilities for a ground loop you create. I had to do a lot of gear shuffling to get rid of unwanted noise. Simple was better. My previous version of a live rig was with Ableton and a desktop computer, controlled by Push and I had drum pads and the launchpad and two different keyboards and a mic. It wasn’t very reliable. I’m sure it could have been made to work but it would have been a lot more work.
Thanks @Stiksi! I like the balance you achieved. You might be able to add a few more plateau-loops or short builds between sections (especially before a chorus or drop) to give you a little more time to interact with the audience, especially giving you a chance to make eye contact and share the fun with them
And maybe one day we will meet, I'd love to get to Finland! I have family in Stockholm, but that's the closest I've got to Finland, and I've only been to Sweden once. Ah dreams....
These are very good suggestions, I’ll keep that in mind! For this first gig, I tried to eliminate all contact 😂
You know, we’re pretty much exactly on the opposite sides of the globe. I think the antipodal point for Helsinki is slightly East of the South Island. We’re on the 60th parallel. But if you do make it to Finland at some point, there’s an easy rule of thumb: South in the Summer, North in the Winter. The Southern coast is miserable in the Winter and while Lapland is gorgeous in the Summer, it’s filled with bloodthirsty mosquitoes and gnats. They’re probably the same in Sweden, but more polite.
Edit: Nope, I was wrong: the actual antipodal point is a couple thousand kilometres away, which is not much, relatively speaking, but Spain and Portugal are further away from you 🙂 I keep forgetting that even the southernmost tip of NZ is in the fourties and fifteen parallels is a lot of distance.
Means we're not that far away after all