By Andy_R
Thu Mar 16, 2023 1:13 pm
Hello everyone
I've been making odd electronic music in my spare time for about 35 years. A couple of weeks ago I finally put an album out and to my surprise and delight, people are now asking me to do gigs. I have no live gear at all, but I want to give my audience more than watching me press play on a laptop. I'm pretty sure that answer is to get an Akai Force, cut my music into stems, move them across to the Force, master the art of arranging live ( a 13 minute glitch/noise IDM track might be fine on as album but I want to be able to keep an eye on the crowd and wrap it up neatly before they start throwing bottles) and then see how much I can move over to playing live with pads / internal synths / etc. so it looks to the crowd like I'm actually doing something useful.
I've watched a lot of YouTube videos and read a lot of forum threads, and I think the Force is the right way to go, but I still have a few obscure questions that will help me understand how difficult things will be and how much other outboard stuff I'll have to budget for. I suspect that some of the things I'm worried about might have been fixed by updates already?
1) Are the CV/Gate outs hardwired as a two pairs of CV and Gate, or can I do things like configure all 4 as gate triggers or 3 as CVs and 1 one as a gate?
2) I understand that adding a class compliant USB mixer disables the built in ins/outs. Does this include the cv/gate outs? How about the midi in/out?
3) I'll want to play bits of music with different BPMs, and I'd like to fill the gaps with some ambient stuff I have as wav files. I can think of 2 possible 'in the box' work rounds, but would they actually work? Firstly, launch the ambient sound with the last row in a project, then load another project while it's playing - would the audio cut out, and would I have any way of fading out the ambient stuff in the new project? Secondly I could put everything in one big project and when the first piece of music is done, launch this the ambient sample, manually adjust the bpm, launch the other piece of music and fade out the ambient stuff. Is this the right way to do things? I know I could fall back to an external sample playback device, but I already plan to have 2 external mono sound sources when gigging, adding something else would push me over into needing to buy, carry around, learn etc. a mixer, which is something I'd like to avoid.
4) Do looped audio stems clips have something like loop points and decay settings so that some of it plays before it loops, and a tail portion will play when the clip stops? I'll try to explain what I mean by that: Imagine a vocal saying "one two three". Can I set things up so that when I launch it, it says "one two", then it loops "two two two two" etc. until I'm ready to stop it, and when I stop it, it says "three"? I want this because a lot of my stems have very complex 'baked in' effect chains with reverb and delay, and I'll want them to end by playing the decay part of the stem, not cutting awkwardly to silence I'm worried that I might have to do a messy work-round by cutting each of these tails into it's own clip and always remembering to launch the right one immediately after this sort of riff, but never launch them unless it's after the right riff, which I'd likely mess up a lot.... or is there a simpler way?
5) Possibly wishful thinking, but are input 1 and 2 just mono? If they were stereo and I could I route them to 4 independent channels then a couple of y-cables going to monosynths would let me do loads of extra cool stuff (well, as much as a middle aged bloke doing undanceable IDM noodling can ever be cool).
Thanks in advance and sorry for being such a newbie!
- Andy
I've been making odd electronic music in my spare time for about 35 years. A couple of weeks ago I finally put an album out and to my surprise and delight, people are now asking me to do gigs. I have no live gear at all, but I want to give my audience more than watching me press play on a laptop. I'm pretty sure that answer is to get an Akai Force, cut my music into stems, move them across to the Force, master the art of arranging live ( a 13 minute glitch/noise IDM track might be fine on as album but I want to be able to keep an eye on the crowd and wrap it up neatly before they start throwing bottles) and then see how much I can move over to playing live with pads / internal synths / etc. so it looks to the crowd like I'm actually doing something useful.
I've watched a lot of YouTube videos and read a lot of forum threads, and I think the Force is the right way to go, but I still have a few obscure questions that will help me understand how difficult things will be and how much other outboard stuff I'll have to budget for. I suspect that some of the things I'm worried about might have been fixed by updates already?
1) Are the CV/Gate outs hardwired as a two pairs of CV and Gate, or can I do things like configure all 4 as gate triggers or 3 as CVs and 1 one as a gate?
2) I understand that adding a class compliant USB mixer disables the built in ins/outs. Does this include the cv/gate outs? How about the midi in/out?
3) I'll want to play bits of music with different BPMs, and I'd like to fill the gaps with some ambient stuff I have as wav files. I can think of 2 possible 'in the box' work rounds, but would they actually work? Firstly, launch the ambient sound with the last row in a project, then load another project while it's playing - would the audio cut out, and would I have any way of fading out the ambient stuff in the new project? Secondly I could put everything in one big project and when the first piece of music is done, launch this the ambient sample, manually adjust the bpm, launch the other piece of music and fade out the ambient stuff. Is this the right way to do things? I know I could fall back to an external sample playback device, but I already plan to have 2 external mono sound sources when gigging, adding something else would push me over into needing to buy, carry around, learn etc. a mixer, which is something I'd like to avoid.
4) Do looped audio stems clips have something like loop points and decay settings so that some of it plays before it loops, and a tail portion will play when the clip stops? I'll try to explain what I mean by that: Imagine a vocal saying "one two three". Can I set things up so that when I launch it, it says "one two", then it loops "two two two two" etc. until I'm ready to stop it, and when I stop it, it says "three"? I want this because a lot of my stems have very complex 'baked in' effect chains with reverb and delay, and I'll want them to end by playing the decay part of the stem, not cutting awkwardly to silence I'm worried that I might have to do a messy work-round by cutting each of these tails into it's own clip and always remembering to launch the right one immediately after this sort of riff, but never launch them unless it's after the right riff, which I'd likely mess up a lot.... or is there a simpler way?
5) Possibly wishful thinking, but are input 1 and 2 just mono? If they were stereo and I could I route them to 4 independent channels then a couple of y-cables going to monosynths would let me do loads of extra cool stuff (well, as much as a middle aged bloke doing undanceable IDM noodling can ever be cool).
Thanks in advance and sorry for being such a newbie!
- Andy