My feature story for Keyboard Magazine on recording live laptop performance is now available online at keyboardmag.com (as well as in the July print issue). When I got the assignment, I think my editor imagined futuristic, sci-fi like network recording, in which audio was streamed entirely virtually from players to a recording server and musicians connected to one another over the ether. Instead, we got just the opposite: quick and dirty solutions for capturing improvisatory computer performance, and intentional efforts to make laptop performances sound more like conventional instrumental ensembles. The case studies:

• The Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra hosts laptop jam sessions at the conservatory that bears Leon Theremin’s name. Individual speakers, stereo mic — plus groovy visuals in the background.
• Princeton University’s PLOrk plays with hemispherical speakers so that sound radiates from near the laptop the way it would from a real instrument. Their recording configuration is a little more sophisticated, with not only a stereo pair for the audience but three mics above the stage.
• Share in New York has the toughest challenge of all: a club environment in which anyone can show up with any gear and play. They combine the tried-and-true (old-fashioned analog snakes on the floor) with software tools for standardization (a template in the open source Linux and Mac DAW Ardour).

Check out the full story for details:

Electronica Unplugged

One thing we didn’t broach was what to actually play (these ensembles all experiment with everything from alternative controllers to live coding). But the recording question alone turned out to reveal a lot about laptop performance, and how it’s gradually evolving into just music performance.

Also of interest, Craig Anderton talks about the basics of recording your sets live in Ableton Live. The basic idea: record not only the arrangement, but external audio, as well.

This story also turned out to be an interesting demonstration of what can happen when new online sites (like CDM) interface with a traditional outlet (Keyboard, bringing you music making information since 1976). That’s my ultimate hope: that these outlets will make each other better, and each will expand the knowledge of techniques and what (and who) is out there. Less lofty translation: if Keyboard hadn’t asked me to write this up, I might never have gotten around to it, and conversely, if I didn’t have CDM, I would never have hooked up with folks like the Moscow Laptop Cyber Orchestra.

Speaking of which, let us know how you record your sets and even laptop ensembles, and if I missed anything!

Previously:
Laptop Orchestras Proliferate, from Princeton to Moscow

At the 1985 Grammies, Thomas Dolby played alongside Stevie Wonder, Herbie Hancock, and Howard Jones. It was the golden age of synths and keyboard-driven pop. (Yeah, I know, some of us kinda miss those days.) But Thomas Dolby is significant, as well, as one of the pioneers of the computer-driven one-man band. Almost a decade into the age of soft synths, at a time when Logic Pro’s most punishing physical-modeling synths and convolution reverbs run just fine on a $1000 laptop and Ableton Live is becoming commonplace, musicians still struggle with some of the technical details of how to actually make the one-man band work onstage.

Here’s the comforting news: it’s not easy for Thomas Dolby, either. Normally when you write a print interview, invariably there’s a point where you get way off talking about technicalities and they don’t all fit. But because this is online, I’ve decided to reprint most of what Thomas had to say about making the tech work in its original form. These are just the technical details — gear stuff rather than art — but the important thing is that they have to support his performance. Part of why he’s able to bring such great presence to the stage is the gear in back is largely working — and he’s the one in control, rather than backstage techs. Here are all the gritty details:

We’re pleased to announce a new series on CDM, in which we get the chance to talk — and learn from — some of the people who inspire us. CDM Gurus features artists who push the envelope of technology and expression.

Song writer. Synth builder. Amateur meteorologist? Thomas Dolby’s uncanny ability to reinvent technology and predict the direction of the music business makes this equally talented songwriter one to watch, as much in 2007 as 1996 and 1982.

Want a glimpse at how the business of being a creative musician is evolving? Ask Thomas Dolby. He’s the master of Music Industry 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 … you name it. He certainly danced with the pre-Internet industry hitmaking machine. The cheeky, warm-hearted “She Blinded Me With Science” exploded to mega-popularity — and could easily blind the uninitiated to a string of other terrific songs that somehow failed to make it on MTV’s hit parade. In the early days of the dot-com boom, Dolby’s surprise second act was shaping the cellphone as a market for music. His start-up Beatnik introduced technologies for polyphonic MIDI ringtones, and odds are, each time you hear a modern ringtone, you’re either hearing Beatnik tech or technology impacted by it.

Now, the test for Thomas Dolby is what can happen to a gifted songwriter and music technologist when he guides his own destiny, without the mechanisms of the industry behind his back. The new Dolby plan started about a year ago, with a tour co-headlining with dance music idol BT. “I could play these gigs and fill it with die-hard fans and I could sort of sneeze and they would be happy,” Dolby says. “I felt the need to expand.” The new tour and album reintroduce the best of Dolby’s songwriting to a new audience — and yes, audiences cheer for “Science” just as passionately as ever. (The difference: many weren’t born in 1982, and they shout along with the enthusiasm of a generation originally deprived of this kind of music.) But as the crowd is equally rapt from tune to tune, it’s clear something new is happening. “It definitely doesn’t feel like a sort of eighties nostalgia trip,” says Dolby. “If anything, the frame of reference is more late 70s underground electronic, which is where I started out.” And Dolby himself is still a one-man band, but he’s got the tools of the Web behind him: forums, blogs, YouTube, MySpace. Unlike many successful artists, who talk about the empowering effect of these tools for other, less-fortunate artists, Dolby is actually re-making his own career using the new technology.

But enough about 2007. What’s really remarkable is the promo bio from The Golden Age of Wireless In May 1982, it reads like a manifesto for where live performance with computers could go today:

DOLBY’S ONE-MAN STAGESHOW IS A BIZARRE HYBRID OF COMPUTER-GENERATED MUSIC. VIDEO MONTAGE AND SLIDE AND FILM PROJECTIONS, BORDERING ON PERFORMANCE ART THEATER. WILL TOUR MAJOR CITIES AROUND THE WORLD. CONCENTRATING ON ALTERNATIVE VENUES AND PUBLIC PLACES.

When I met up with Thomas Dolby on Christmas Eve of last year, I was struck by how elegantly this vision of technologically-aided performance was coming to fruition. The promise glimpsed in 1982 — the digital one-man band — seemed to just now be having its real moment.

Now comes the interesting part. Next week, Thomas will release a new EP, backed by brass (and, if we’re really lucky, heralding a new renaissance of computers-with-live-brass combos). Thomas Dolby and the Jazz Mafia Horns Live is the latest of a string of releases converting the vibrant stage shows into commercial products, from albums to EPs to DVDs to blog entries and videos. It’s also intended to be the end of an era. Thomas writes on his blog:

I expect these to be the last ‘legacy’ releases before I transition into my new musical era. With them out of the way I’ll be focusing 100% on new material. I’m very excited about several songs I’m working on already, and I’ll be going to England this summer to start recording them. One day they may show up in the form of an all-new studio album. When will that be ready you ask? WHEN IT’S READY!

This is not your father’s Thomas Dolby. We got to chat about the technology of music performance, the technology of music business, and how to make sure all of that disappears and the songs re-emerge.

Being an international music superstar means you can tour with whatever fun toys you like. In the case of Bjork’s new Volta tour, that means the JazzMutant Lemur multi-touch interface and, even more fun, the fantastic reacTable, a research project involving projection and multiple objects for a tangible interactive table experience! CDM reader Mike Cohen smuggled this video out of a recent Bjork performance:

It really does work nicely in action, in terms of expressing to the audience what the performer is doing, and making nice eye candy, to boot.

More details on Bjork’s futuristic touring rig:
multitouched bjork [Byron Scullin blog]

And, of course, a big report from Boing Boing celebrity Xeni Jardin, which I’m way behind on linking as it posted 4/28:
Coachella: Björk’s wild sound machines, and report from the turf [Boing Boing]

It’s funny, but despite endless blog coverage of devices like the reacTable, some dating back before the creation of CDM, it sometimes takes a celebrity like Bjork for other people to notice the instrument. Then again, many electronic instruments have been popularized over the years by big names (Moog gear by Keith Emerson and Wendy Carlos, Fairlight CMI by Peter Gabriel, etc., etc., in a list too long to recount). So, perhaps this is something big for tangible interfaces. I noticed blocks were big at ITP last night. I think these devices just have a long way to go in terms of general accessibility and expressiveness, at least for mass music making; most importantly, they have to work on those two points in ways that can be reproduced by lots of people, if not in a commercial product, in a DIY implementation. But it’ll be interesting to watch, as always. And Bjork certainly demonstrates how to rock the instrument.

Cassette-tape DJ battles are just one of TradeMark G.’s retro, regressive, subversive musical creations. He also likes to put on glasses, a white lab coat, and interactive sewing thimble gloves, in order to produce illegal, copyright-crushing musical performances.

Many of the techno-gimmicks seen here on CDM are one-offs and prototypes. The Evolution Control Committee, by contrast, has been producing “illegal art”, often with the aid of technology, for some 20 years. They’ve been “culture jamming”, dropping Napster bombs (remember Napster?), infamously attracting the ire of CBS, and dressing up as giant pairs of trousers and cans of Parmesan cheese ever since. (I’m especially fond of the giant pants costumes.)

For the last few years, they’ve been perfecting the Thimbletron, a glove with sewing thimbles attached to a hacked M-Audio Oxygen8. (I always knew those Oxygen keyboards would be good for something.) The interface gives them newly-expanded powers of sample triggering. Happily, unlike Wired Magazine, they don’t overuse the term “mash-ups” to describe what they’re doing. Try, instead, “plagiarhythm” or “plunderphonics”: “In the world of The ECC’s music, Public Enemy duke it out with Herb Alpert while TV news anchor Dan Rather is the new frontman for AC/DC.”

Thimbletronic Energy Technology Page (video link at the top)

TradeMark will be performing with the Thimbletron at the Maker Faire, as well as running the cassette tape DJ battle we saw earlier:

Call for Cassette Jockeys @ Maker Faire, Cassette Tech Roundup

CDM (meaning me) will be at Maker Faire all week, sending as much coverage and causing as much havoc as possible. I’m hoping Dan Rather shows up.

More glove music controllers:

Controlling Music with DIY Interactive Gloves

Whether you’re an avid Live user or wonder how it works from a performance perspective, CDM reader Fabio FZero has managed to express in simple terms a basic binary split (originally in comments):

Ableton Live: Draggers vs. Set-freaks

… between those who drag-and-drop on the fly in their sets, and those who configure everything in advance in a superset. To that, I’d add a third category, though I don’t necessarily advise it: the Multiple Setters, who switch between set files for each song. (It’s dangerous because of load times, particularly with samplers. I’ve recently become a Set-freak instead. Though I suppose you could argue a Multiple Setter is really a subset of Set-freaks. Okay, now I’ve complicated things again.)

Dragger or freak? Choose your side. (Yes, some of you code live in ChucK — I’m sticking with Live, thanks.)

Previously: CDM Asks: How Do You Set Up Your Ableton Live Sets for Performance / DJing?

Getting good gigs is a challenge for all genres, and it touches even more issues when computers are involved. So, as we’d hoped, Liz’s tips for getting booked has generated a lot of discussion. In addition to comments here on CDM:

The wonderful community at EM411 has some discussion, including a great tip: bring VHS tapes or books to prop your computer atop the booth turntable.

LivePA, a great blog dedicated to these topics, takes issue with the “no dead air” advice. I’ll defend it, though: “dead air” might not mean the same thing if you’re not doing dance music, but it’s still essential to keep some connection with the audience. (And silence, I think, is not the same thing as dead air. I’ve had performances where I created each. Greatly prefer the former to the latter.)

I somehow missed it in the chaos of my RSS reader, but LivePA also has a beginner guide of its own. Whereas Liz focused on the practical, LivePA covers some of the questions to ask yourself about what music you’re making. It’s an ideal complement to Liz’s take:
My personal “Getting Started” for LivePA

There’s far too much for one comment thread or article, so I’ve also set up a new sticky discussion in the Create Digital Noise “Share Your Work” thread:

Getting good music/visual gigs — let’s share advice

Take the poll to let us know how you’re feeling, and let’s start sharing tips on (and challenges with) breaking into the scene, from Canberra to Arkansas City.

Ableton Live isn’t a perfect program for performance (hint: there’s never perfect software for anything), but maybe that’s not the point. As opposed to something entirely open-ended like Max/MSP or Reaktor (both of which I use regularly), what’s nice about Live for performance is that you have a basic grid, a fixed interface on which you can build what you need. Part of the reason Ableton keeps coming up is that there really isn’t anything else that does what it does: Cakewalk’s Project5, for instance, is interesting and even has rudimentary clips, but even Cakewalk admits it isn’t intended to replace the sophisticated clip management, scene management, and follow actions in Live’s Session View.

Against that fixed background, people have come up with fantastic custom solutions and hacks the likes of which I’ve never seen in any other software, ever.