Apryl - April [live performance, jamuary]
Original track (Apryl - April): • Apryl - April / https://apryl.fanlink.to/april
A live version of my recent track April. Wowza I should've turned more lights on, the recording came out terrible (I'll probably do a more pretty one for the Apryl channel soon).
I've been working on this live setup for a bit over a year now, I think I've finally hit on something that works for me. It's entirely run off the laptop running Ableton Live, with no hardware synths at the moment. Basically in Live, I've got an audio track for the drums, synths, and FX (crashes and risers), and I can process each track through filters and a delay send. The synth track is missing the layer that I play in by hand (though it's sitting there muted, and I can add it if I need to as a backup). Everything is just audio stems other than the played-in track (a soft synth).
The tricky bit that's made it take so long has been trying to find a balance between something I can improvise a lot on and something that sounds very close to the release versions. For a bit, I had a big focus on manually launching each section/element, which on paper sounds cool. However, it just meant I either got it right, and it was identical to the original, or I messed up, in which case it just sounded weird or broke entirely. The way it is now, I launch a scene to start the track, and then it just plays the stems and then loops at bits of the song where I can improvise or just otherwise have a nice pause to do stuff in. Depending on the track, there might be looped sections at the start, end, and/or middle (in this track there are all three).
Things what are in this video
Arturia Minilab Mk2 MIDI keyboard for playing stuff
Novation Launchpad Mini Mk3 for launching clips and other controls (mostly effect send related)
Akai MIDIMIX for controlling levels, filters, delay sends, and delay controls.
The laptop is a Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th Gen
Anyway, it's Jamuary, so I'm gonna try to upload a bunch of jams and similar music content over the month. I might aim for one each weekday or something but no promises.
(update: i only got together one jam lol)