Here’s a unique chance to step onstage with electronic duo Justice – well, through photos, at least – on tour in Brazil. Behind a stack of Marshall Amps and other gear that looks ready to push back an invading horde of Barbarians with a battering ram, these two have some very lovely goodies for live laptop performance. No plain-vanilla DJ sets here.

Our friend Fabio “FZero” writes:

I came across some pictures of the gear Justice used to play in Rio. They were taken by a guy which works on Circo Voador (the place were they played) and uploaded to orkut. I’ve downloaded and zipped them to make things easier.

The name of the photographer is Henrique Kurtz and his orkut profile is at http://www.orkut.com.br/Main#Profile.aspx?uid=3218703684024828269

3 x Jazzmutant Lemur (THREE LEMURS. It’s good to be rich, I guess.)
2 x MacBook Pro (one is probably backup)
1 x Korg MicroKorg
1 x Korg ZERO8 Live Control
1 x Pioneer DJM800
Software: Ableton Live

Get up close and personal with the laptop rig itself. Okay, you may not be able to afford three Lemurs, but this wouldn’t be hard to scale to other setups. And there’s plenty here to make a “live PA” performance really a performance.

Spinal Tap has nothing on this. Via RW70, aka Rob Warmowski:

So what happens when you’re Van Halen, the last song in your set list is the million-seller “Jump” with its synthesizer-keyboard opening…and the recording you’re using to play back the synth is accidentally run at 48K instead of 44.1K?

What happens is exactly this (recorded in Greensboro, NC four days ago)

Yes, just as disturbing as the possibility that your backing tracks could spontaneously introduce a new tuning system in front of thousands of fans, hundreds of thousands more may know about it within days on YouTube. Techs everywhere just felt a chill go up their spine. Erm, once they stopped crying they were laughing so hard.

If you enjoyed this musical performance, get ready for Guitar Hero IV: Quartertone! Charles Ives Expansion Pack!

And Van Halen, the American Festival of Microtonal Music here in New York may be able to welcome you soon.

Who said computer performance has to be a dude sitting behind a screen tweaking arcane software setups? As we saw Friday, you can hide your computer in a rig and play guitars and keyboards. David Levy reports for Apple.com that keyboardist Vince Jones totes a PowerBook onstage for playing keyboard soft synths, courtesy the sampler in Apple Logic Pro. I don’t think Vince is using the fancy, 60-hour time-investment Environments setup in Logic to switch between sounds that we saw last week (more on that soon), but having great software sounds has some appeal.

So, who else? Obviously, there are a lot of people running pre-sequenced tracks onstage via computers or playing soft synths in the studio. But who have you seen running soft synths onstage, on the road? I want names — hit comments or contact me directly.