i think i know more people in two bands than just one these days and i am no exception. neither is morgan from boys climbing ropes – when he’s not playing/destroying his bass in BCR, he can be found twiddling knobs and triggering samples as one quarter of resist resist, a relatively new electro band on the shanghai scene.
i caught them at not me last saturday night, supported by comic popster, ben houge. the four piece is completed by natalee on synthesizer, lucy on vocals and mortal fools‘ tim on drums. unfortunately tim was absent from this gig but i think they pulled it off anyway.
what on earth is morgan doing over there? let’s take a closer look…
the piece of gear that he has his hands on in this shot is the awesome Novation Remote 37SL. this is one example of a growing trend in music technology – the midi controller. midi has been around a long time and midi controllers are not a new concept. but these days (the last four or five years) they are getting much more complex and involved. basically a midi controller is a box with controls – knobs, buttons, pads and faders – but no native sounds of its own. instead these contollers manipulate any parameter you can think of (filter frequency/resonance, panning of individual sounds, amount of delay applied to a sound, ADSR envelopes etc…) in whatever piece of software you have. the novation remote SL and boxes like it simply send control messages that can be interpreted by the computer in any way you wish. velocity sensitive pads are great for “playing” live sampled drums whereas the buttons are good for simply turning something on or off. knobs are useful for controlling parameters that can be varied across a range of values and the faders do a good job of imitating the faders on a traditional mixer that control the volume of an individual sound (or group of sounds). the manufacturer of this and similar controllers have recognised the need of modern musicians to have as many control options as possible in a small space. as well as this 37 key model, there are 25 and 61 key versions, and novation also make a stripped down model called the Remote Zero SL, with no keys at all, just pure control.
they have recently released the Zero SL MKII, but honestly it looks like a down-grade to me. half the screen size, and fewer buttons… the addition of a crossfader has not won me over. but if they want to send me one for testing and evaluation i won’t complain.
so apparently morgan is using the controllers on his remote 37SL to manipulate Ableton Live 8 which is running on the computer on the right of the photo. this software is amazing. so amazing that i think it deserves its own blog post. in short, it can… no, there’s no “in short” with Live. check the above link, read wikipedia, or wait for me to post about it…
morgan tells me that he is using the keyboard part of the remote 37SL to play the microKORG that is next to it on the table. why do this when the korg has its own keyboard? i guess the fewer pieces of gear you actually need to manipulate on stage, the easier it is. and there doesn’t appear to be a whole lot of room there. essentially he is using the korg as the opposite of the novation – a box with sounds in it but no control options. well, it has control options but he is not using them, instead controlling it remotely through midi. we saw another of these boxes at yuyintang a few weeks ago with the handsome furs.
on the left of the pic we can see a Behringer Eurorack MX802A mixer. this little beastie has eight inputs, four with mic preamps, and two auxilliary effects sends. this makes it a step up from my little Behringer Xenyx 802 with only two mic preamps, six inputs and one auxilliary effects send. this is being used to mix all the on-stage sound sources (the computer running Ableton Live, the microKORG, natalee’s Korg X50 and lucy’s vocals) into a single stereo image that is sent to the venue’s speakers.
geek on.
what are the people saying?