Some people are asking me what was my setup for the live act I did last saturday. Here it is.

The core of my setup is an Apple Powerbook running Ableton Live with a M-Audio FW410 sound card. I’ve got a TC Electronic Konnekt 24D but the driver doesn’t work well as of now. This time I also brought my Mackie 1202 mixer.

For the noisy part at the beginning of my set, I used a Playstation-like USB game pad for controlling Live. The software I use for mapping the USB data to midi is Steim Junxion. So this game pad works as a midi controller and lets me mute tracks, launch samples, play with effects, etc.

Then comes the second part with the guitar. Here I use a small magnet motor that I put on the guitar’s strings and that makes them vibrate. This is a good way to get harmonics too. The sound from the guitar first goes to a distortion pedal RAT II (I love distortion pedals!), then goes through a multi-effects Adrenalinn II and through a Loop Station Boss RC-2 for loop recording. The signal eventually goes to the mixer.
There’s also a short jack plugged into an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff (the russian one) going to the sound card and hereby to Live. The signal is completely saturated (on purpose) and I use a granulator VST effect on it. On top of that I run a synthesizer and some samples within Live.

The final part (electronica/abstract hip-hop) is fully computer-based. One track for the beats: I use Battery from Native Instruments with a bunch of VST effects (LiveCut and Frohmage for instance). 2 more tracks: one for a synthesizer and one more for the lyrics. I control all of that with a small Doepfer midi controller.

That’s it!

For the visuals, I developed a Processing patch. I already wrote about this in a previous post.

P.S. I posted this screenshot on my Flickr page and I saw yesterday that Joshua Davis added it as a favorite. Cool!