Well, I did it. I got my live setup over to Metronome Coffee for open mic. It may not seem like much, but it was a challenge to get the wiring to a state where I can break down and setup within a minimal amount of time and effort. The setup consists of two MIDI keyboards, a MIDI controller, a USB mixer, and a computer with an external hard drive. All of the pieces have to be connected in the correct way along with headphones to do a sound check and a headset mic. I managed to get all the pieces into two keyboard cases, plus the stand.
I got there 45 minutes early and got the first position, so I could setup prior to the start and just move my setup into position when needed. Setup when almost without incident. After plugging in all the parts, and listening on the headphones, I was able to get sound from the mic, controller and one of the keyboards. The other keyboard was being resistant, but simply unplugging the USB cable and plugging it back in fixed that issue. The weak point in all this was the computer, you can never tell when they're going to decide not to work or update themselves, especially windows computers.
If I could afford another laptop, it would definitely be a Mac. Although I'm afraid switching from windows to Mac would simply switch the error messages from some technical gibberish to Mac's irritatingly patronizing error messages. But Macs do seem to be more reliable, and certainly my biggest worry about this setup was that the computer wouldn't start up, or the audio wouldn't route itself correctly to the USB mixer as it has in the past. I finally had to disable the on board sound to ensure that it always routed the sound correctly. That wasn't a hard decision, since early on in my use of this laptop for music production, one of the synth sounds blew out one of the built-in speakers, so the laptop sound never really worked even if I wanted it to.
So my time finally arrived, and I spoke to the audience telling them that this was more of an experiment in getting a live setup to work, and I was just going to do two easy cover songs. That was a conscience choice, since the hardest part of working with this setup was controlling my own desire to add more and more sounds, since it was almost limitless what I could do with this setup. I decided early on to focus on two Beatles songs that sort of lent themselves to this sort of setup and provided a basic idea of what the sound would be. So "It's all too much" and "Tomorrow never knows" became my point of focus. Plus they were both well within my easy singing range, never going above high F or middle G. For It's all too much, I set the lower keyboard to a highly distorted electric guitar that I could do a drone sound with, and the upper keyboard was a synth bass sound. The controller had two drum samples one simpler one for during the vocals, and a more complex one to lead into the improv section. For Tomorrow never knows, I used the lower keyboard for a polyphonic ambient sound, the upper keyboard for a simpler ambient sound that I could improvise with, one drum sample and a drone bass on the controller along with other ambient sounds that could be used between verses. It's all two much used a ping-pong echo on the vocals and a stereo chorus effect on the synth guitar. Tomorrow never knows simply used a beat echo. The controller also was setup to do several ambient sounds that I could use at will. Unfortunately using Ableton 9 lite edition didn't give me as many choices as I had with the Studio One software I normally use, but Studio one didn't do live well, and Ableton was built to do live sound.
After starting up the music and doing a little improvising on the keyboard, I discovered the first issue, was that I had trouble hearing my singing, so that was a little off for the two songs, especially hitting the Bb on Tomorrow never knows, which wants to be a B natural. Focusing on listening to the singing meant not focusing on the playing so I simplified some of the controller changes, and interspersed more keyboard improvisation between vocal parts.
All-in-all it went pretty smoothly, my voice never fully cooperated, but sort of found itself. I never missed an important beat on the controller, and had some fun with the keys. I got what sounded like a pretty good round of applause, which was encouraging. And when I was done, it was a pretty simple matter of moving the whole setup to the side of the stage where I was sitting, and unobtrusively tearing it down between other sets. One fan (who later played a pretty cool set himself) came up to me afterwards and complimented me on 'living the dream' with the whole setup. I wasn't exactly sure what that meant and was too stage struck at that point to really respond besides a quick thank you.
I doubt this will be my normally routine for open mics, it is a lot of effort. I think most open mic venues still balk at the idea of anything but a simple guitar/singer or at most one keyboard with a traditional electronic keyboard sound. Metronome Coffee has a pretty cool bunch of kids running the open mic and are open for most anything as long as it doesn't take hours to setup. The lady that calls herself 'Sonic Obsession' and uses a drum machine and electric guitar with her own amp certainly was the inspiration for a more elaborate setup. Other regulars there use non-traditional setups that also encouraged me to see if this thing could work. I proved I could do it, but what's next for me? Tomorrow never knows.
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