Live shows, nerd stuff, etc.

So, we've just ordered 300 physical copies of our debut album to be produced. Woot! Artwork was done by Mr. Jake Knapp, a laborious process for which we owe him a great debt of gratitude, not just for making a great looking product, but also for not throttling the life out of us at the end of it. The CDs will hopefully be arriving in a few weeks so for all you people holding out for a physical copy, mark your calendars!

As far as live shows are concerned, we have a few new recruits, a bassist and a drummer to be precise. They are working diligently to master this new set, as are Matt and I, and we expect to have shows lined up pretty soon. For all you fellow musicians and audio nerds out there, you might be interested in some risky logistical maneuvers we're going to be trying out.

Most notable of these choices is using Pro Tools 10 as a live sequencer. I know what you're thinking. And no, Pro Tools is not an ideal program for live performance, and yes, there is a chance it could crash mid-song or mid-set. The reasoning behind this choice is that much of the album was recorded in Pro Tools and many of the sounds came from the AIR virtual instruments that are native to Pro Tools, which as you may know cannot be used in other (more traditional) live sequencing programs such as Ableton Live. We have tried to replicate the sounds by writing patches from scratch in our Kurzweil K2000 and M-Audio Venom keyboards, and I must say, we got very close, but in the end they just didn't sound quite right. So, we have pretty much decided to use Pro Tools as basically a synth module, in order to get the same sounds and effects from the album in our live performance and it's been working out great so far.

For these first few shows, we'll be playing songs that don't require any playback of backing tracks, so Pro Tools should be pretty stable, since we won't be pressing the play button, just sending MIDI to the VI's. However, soon enough we'll be including songs on our set list that do require some backing tracks, so I'll be interested to see how Pro Tools holds up once we have to rely on it for playback and as a synth module. The real hiccup in the plan is that we also made a few of the songs on the album in Logic and those songs will definitely require some playback of backing tracks... So, I guess we'll be testing the stability of Logic in a live setting as well! Finally, there's one song that will be performed in Ableton Live on an APC40. Most likely we'll rewire Ableton into PT so that, again, we can use the same PT VI's from the album. The tricky part here is that when you rewire Ableton to PT, Ableton no longer likes to recognize the APC40. So, to get around this obvious flaw in the program, you have to use a little program called Soundflower. It's basically just a way to route audio from one program to another within your Mac. It's made by the same people who created Max/MSP, which, if you haven't heard of it, you should really check out if you're interested in being able to write any patch you could possibly dream of. Using Soundflower also has the benefit of not forcing PT and Ableton to sync up, so you don't have to worry about things like conflicting tempo changes and such.

Anyway, that's about enough audio-speak for one day. If I haven't bored you into a slumber by now, please keep checking out our website for show dates and info on how to get a physical copy of our CD.