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doot doot doot
Went back to derby on Tuesday. It was fun to see folks again and meet some of the new girls. It's amazing how quickly one falls out of shape. When I'm skating consistently, I can tell the difference when I've missed one or two practices, and I hadn't skated in over a month, I think. So, yesterday my leggies were rubbery and today they're sore. And a couple blisters came back.
I've been spending a lot of time learning my gear and tweaking my music setup. One of the things that bothered me a lot about my set at CON, and my sets in general, is the time it takes me to change songs. There are a lot of little things under my old/current setup that I have to do between songs that, together, take an annoyingly long chunk of time. it's not *that* long, but dead air in a performance *feels* really long. I'm busy twisting knobs and getting things ready for the next thing, which also means I don't interact with my audience at all because I don't feel like I have time, and by the time I get everything ready, my thought is start making sound. now. and not hey, how's everybody doin'? This, I think, makes me a far less engaging performer than I know that I could be. Part of that is a confidence thing, too, but I think if my sets were more seamless it would help on both fronts.
There's also a culture of live electronic performance that performers tend to "get away" with not being engaging, which is an interesting discussion to me. It's kind of annoyingly accepted that electronic (especially laptop-based) performance is just going to be boring. It doesn't have to be, and, in my opinion, it *shouldn't* be. (I really fear that I'm a really boring act to watch, so I'm trying to improve that.) I have a few theories about why this is the case - the main one is that a lot of live electronic/laptop music performance is seen as close enough to DJing that it doesn't have to be considered a live performance, as a DJ often sits out of sight of anyone she's playing music for, up in a booth, left to her own devices. And, while I definitely appreciate the role of the DJ and the things that make a good dj set and the fact that the line between DJ and performer is ever more a gray one, DJ's are more exempt from needing to perform in the same way a live band does. Often, though, laptop musicians are playing their own music, on a stage. If you are *on a stage* I think it's a crime to not interact with the people watching you, to plunk along on a laptop that's ostensibly doing something related to the music when as far as your audience is concerned you may as well be surfing porn or checking your email. For example, I really love Cepia's music. It's creative and beautiful and I know he's doing interesting stuff and manipulating things live, but he should not be on a stage. He is boring to watch, because no one but him knows what he's doing with his software. I've also long thought that it would be really interesting to have the computer screen projected behind a laptop performer, but I don't know if that would only be interesting to me as an electronic music person. Another theory is that a lot of electronic music is created and performed by antisocial geek boys who are really *happier* in their basements with their bleepy toys than they are on stage, and it just comes through when they perform in front of people.
Well, anyway. That got longer than I anticipated.
Yesterday I unlocked the mystery of how to make Live send program changes to my synth *for* me to avoid a bunch of unnecessary knob twiddling. (WOO!) Now I'm experimenting with putting an entire set into one Live session file, and trying to learn to program my knob box to accomodate different sections of that one session. The way I do it now is to open a separate live file for every song, which takes time when I'm performing (No! I don't want to save, just open the next one! Go! Go!) Doing it that way also makes me pay attention to the laptop when I'm changing songs, which is another thing that causes death to the performance aspect of anything live and electronic. Doing anything tricky with MIDI tends to be a Herculean task, though, at least for me. This is mostly because of manuals that shove a complicated MIDI implementation chart at you without much explanation along with it and call it a day. I've been strangely in the mood to tackle this kind of thing, so I'm trying to take advantage of it while it lasts.
And, um, that's why I'm not further along on my album. Or my film score.
I've been spending a lot of time learning my gear and tweaking my music setup. One of the things that bothered me a lot about my set at CON, and my sets in general, is the time it takes me to change songs. There are a lot of little things under my old/current setup that I have to do between songs that, together, take an annoyingly long chunk of time. it's not *that* long, but dead air in a performance *feels* really long. I'm busy twisting knobs and getting things ready for the next thing, which also means I don't interact with my audience at all because I don't feel like I have time, and by the time I get everything ready, my thought is start making sound. now. and not hey, how's everybody doin'? This, I think, makes me a far less engaging performer than I know that I could be. Part of that is a confidence thing, too, but I think if my sets were more seamless it would help on both fronts.
There's also a culture of live electronic performance that performers tend to "get away" with not being engaging, which is an interesting discussion to me. It's kind of annoyingly accepted that electronic (especially laptop-based) performance is just going to be boring. It doesn't have to be, and, in my opinion, it *shouldn't* be. (I really fear that I'm a really boring act to watch, so I'm trying to improve that.) I have a few theories about why this is the case - the main one is that a lot of live electronic/laptop music performance is seen as close enough to DJing that it doesn't have to be considered a live performance, as a DJ often sits out of sight of anyone she's playing music for, up in a booth, left to her own devices. And, while I definitely appreciate the role of the DJ and the things that make a good dj set and the fact that the line between DJ and performer is ever more a gray one, DJ's are more exempt from needing to perform in the same way a live band does. Often, though, laptop musicians are playing their own music, on a stage. If you are *on a stage* I think it's a crime to not interact with the people watching you, to plunk along on a laptop that's ostensibly doing something related to the music when as far as your audience is concerned you may as well be surfing porn or checking your email. For example, I really love Cepia's music. It's creative and beautiful and I know he's doing interesting stuff and manipulating things live, but he should not be on a stage. He is boring to watch, because no one but him knows what he's doing with his software. I've also long thought that it would be really interesting to have the computer screen projected behind a laptop performer, but I don't know if that would only be interesting to me as an electronic music person. Another theory is that a lot of electronic music is created and performed by antisocial geek boys who are really *happier* in their basements with their bleepy toys than they are on stage, and it just comes through when they perform in front of people.
Well, anyway. That got longer than I anticipated.
Yesterday I unlocked the mystery of how to make Live send program changes to my synth *for* me to avoid a bunch of unnecessary knob twiddling. (WOO!) Now I'm experimenting with putting an entire set into one Live session file, and trying to learn to program my knob box to accomodate different sections of that one session. The way I do it now is to open a separate live file for every song, which takes time when I'm performing (No! I don't want to save, just open the next one! Go! Go!) Doing it that way also makes me pay attention to the laptop when I'm changing songs, which is another thing that causes death to the performance aspect of anything live and electronic. Doing anything tricky with MIDI tends to be a Herculean task, though, at least for me. This is mostly because of manuals that shove a complicated MIDI implementation chart at you without much explanation along with it and call it a day. I've been strangely in the mood to tackle this kind of thing, so I'm trying to take advantage of it while it lasts.
And, um, that's why I'm not further along on my album. Or my film score.
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