Hippotron wrote:. Are you working with a VJ or do you guys control the visuals yourselves? Let us know if you ever head south with it.
No VJ man, we control all the visuals ourselves with the same pads that the noises are coming out of. Sometimes some pads on the MPC have no sounds on them too, so we can just trigger visuals with those pads too. We got one mad visual of an old school cartoon transformer pushing buttons that look exactly like MPC buttons. It's rad.
Your band sounds cool too, pretty hectic. I used to actually be in a ten piece band at one stage...Politics! Will definitely get you on the pm's if we ever head down south, either on holiday or gigging, would like to see your band. What's the name?
And to Monk, due to the fact i'm kept pretty busy on the pads with everything live, i have to set up things differently every time depending on what the song demands, but i do have a few little tricks.
1. auditory illusion, an idea i borrowed from Rahzel, which he uses extensively in "if your mother only knew." Since alot of tracks i do are upwards of 170 BPM, keeping hats going continuously is hard work. but, if you're trying to play 8th note hats, and you skip playing those hats on the snares, people still construct in their heads 8th note hats, because of the frequencies snares share. That'll save 2 button pushes a bar.
2. Stacking. Gotta keep those hats running. So layer a hat on the pad your kick drum sits on and you'll save yourself some more button pushing. That's 5 or 6 button pushes every bar knocked out by those two examples.
So for a typical drum and bass track, my pads look something
Pad 1 - Hat
Pad 2 - Kick + hat
Pad 3 - Kick
Pad 4 - Snare
Pad 5 - Crash or ride
Pad 6 - Open hat
Pad 7 - incidental bleeps squeaks whatever
Pad 8 - Ghost snare
If you're interested i'll post up a loop so you can hear what's possible doing things that way.
its proving to be alot of work...
