Building a Techno Set Day 11 (1st Performance) HD
Here’s some excerpts from my experimental Techno Set at The World Beyond. I was questioning whether to post this as several unexpected things went wrong, however that is part of the game and I believe it would be interesting to anyone following the series. I worked my hardest to improv some techno with about 20% of the tools I prepared available, and people seemed to like it! Thanks so much to the World Beyond crew for their help and assistance while helping me madly trying to get things working, I don’t think I could have actually played if it wasn’t for your awesome help. If you’re interested in what went wrong: a) My Macbook died a few days before the set, meaning I had to spend a day purchasing a new computer and migrating. This left me a day short so I was unable to get to the venue early to setup. This might not sound so bad, but I had quite a complicated setup (including all the stuff to try and stream) and setting up while the party is in full motion makes things made things much more difficult. b) My special custom Max for Live patch (the centerpiece of this whole thing) became completely corrupted a few hours before I had to leave (for the geeks, something glitched and it threw a random bunch of characters in my AMXD file, totally corrupting the json), so I had to roll back and try to recreate a lot of the features in a very short amount of time, unfortunately it didn’t work as planned and I was basically unable to use it during the set. c) At the event, there were some very strange conflicting issues happening with my controllers, resulting in me not able to use the Push 2 properly until the very end. Not being able to trigger clips or change the synthesizer parameters with the Push meant I had to do everything via the Trackpad, which was extremely hard in a hot sweaty pumping club. I suspect that my USB3 hub was not getting enough power. I did test this at home, but for some reason at the event they just kept conflicting. Sometimes I could use the Push, sometimes the Launchcontrols, sometimes just one… this made me unable to do the epic buildups and drops how I wanted, but I managed in other ways (thanks reverb and cuttoff!) d) Streaming! We did 3 separate speed tests the days leading up to the event, all showing 9/10 Mbps upload, totally enough to stream - however on the night this snapped down to the decimal places. I tried to stream a few times (if anyone caught a few glitchy frames) but in the end gave up and hit record instead. Perhaps a full club affects the signal… perhaps it was just prime time Saturday night internet traffic… I am not sure why this one happened. f) Brainwaves - Unfortunately all of this chaos meant I had to drop the brainwave machine from controlling drones and parameters like it should. I simply didn’t have enough time to get that working. No excuses. Next Time. Anyway, I’ll be doing a live stream video on all this, fixing things, some more improvements, how to prepare for it in the future etc soon…