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The Laptop as an Instrument?
An anonymous reader wonders: "As music production tools, computers are everywhere from recording and mixing to publishing. What about computers as the sole musical instrument? DJing or just playing mp3s aside, we have improvisers and orchestras that treat a laptop as a full-flavored instrument. What's the most interesting laptop-only live act you have seen/heard?"
A well-played Unreal Tournament match.
"HAT TRICK!"
[Gun fire]
"5... 4... 3... 2... 1!"
[Gun fire; Explosions; Crazy]
"FIRST BLOOD!"
"MUILTI-KILL..MEGA-KILL!"
And so on.
I wonder if I use bold in my signature, people will notice my posts.
I'm always performing solos on my upright organ...
Several years ago I read an article on buzzmachines.com about a guy producing music and playing it live, using Buzz among others as tracker.
I'll do the stupid thing first and then you shy people follow...
http://theamazingrolo.blogspot.com/2007/03/wii-loo p-machine.html
Does the windows startup sound count?
What Open source programs are available to create music?, What open source software would you use to achieve what the original poster asked?
I am really interesting in this kind of stuff. I know there is a specific Linux distro for media but I do not know if the open source software available is mature enough for to perform live performances (i.e. not prone to crash in the middle of the show).
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
the guy was so pissed at his laptop, he banged it repeatedly against the asphalt.
Either that, or breakfast didn't agree with me.
My interest in using a computer as a musical instrument went away quickly after my first chance of getting my hands on a PC; it was not hard to realize that there is much more to a computer than a keyboard. This is similar to looking at a computer as something more than a typewriter.
There are two aspects of using computers as tools: one is about *people working* on a computer (we can call it "Windows-style use"), the other is about a *computer doing work* ("Unix").
I have been always fascinated by the possibility of using a computer to synthesize a sound of an entire symphonic orchestra, and, eventually, being able to *record* music played by that virtual orchestra - without spending countless hours, days and months training your own physical self in the art of interacting with a mechanical device in real time.
What's the most interesting laptop-only live act you have seen/heard?"
jerking off in bed with a laptop watching porno
There are literally thousands of laptop-only and laptop-driven acts in the electronica genres. I've actually worked as a live sound engineer for a lot of them, and it's my favorite genre to work in (because it's so easy). You can run an entire show just off of Reason and such, or you can use your laptop as a MIDI sequencer that triggers any number of electronic instruments. Some acts I can think of offhand that I really got in to are Terrorfakt and Cignal to Noise.
http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/
The best laptop performance I've ever seen is a guy called Girl Talk. He makes whole songs out of pieces of pop songs. A lot of work goes into editing the pieces to make them fit, but they are still comprised of almost no original content. If you can find the song "smash your head," it's an excellent introduction. The other killer act I've seen is Dev/Null. His music is completely original, but I wouldn't be surprised if I get a few "this is not music" replies. Check out "bolt thrower in a chinese restaurant" or "nitrous induced skull fracture".
Max/MSP is a pretty cool piece of software that basically gives you free reign over the music-making capabilities of a computer. You have objects that do various things and you hook them up to each other via inputs and outputs. It's kind of like object-oriented music-making. Anyway, you can basically build an instrument out of these objects, and the possibilities are mind-numbingly endless. The Max part does MIDI, and MSP is a set of objects that does things to actual audio data. It's not at all free (quite expensive, in fact,) but you can play with it for a month for free.
As much as I love electronic, industrial, experimental music...
"You and your laptop are not a live act!"
Sure, they are useful tools, but standing behind a laptop looks really stupid on stage. Dance. Sing. Play some other instrument as well. Anything. Just don't stand behind you laptop looking like an idiot. If that's all your music is, press it to CD and give it to a DJ to play. That can be good too... but Live Music requires doing something Live that is visible to the audience!
End Industrial Karaoke now!
Ce n'est pas une signature automatique.
Once upon a time, the pianoforte was the most useful tool any working musician must have. As a working musician, the laptop I have recently acquired (after decades of desktops) has rapidly shown me that things have changed. With me everywhere I go, this little blue-gray tool contains all of my full scores and I can work on my music with ease.. if I am at a gig and want to record, it is at hand to not only record but to burn copies for other people immediately. If I need to make a multi-track recording, I basically have a full music studio at hand. For those people who create electronic music using Reason or Live, the laptop is the perfect device, either sitting in a cafe and composing or high atop a mountain playing music for the nocturnal ravers (that's what they do in my town.) As far as being an instrument in itself, the laptop has every possibility of doing so, especially with a small midi input device which I have seen at school on numerous occasions. My laptop is now my best friend, and I'm sure that many other modern musicians will agree.
I've seen live sets from greg davis and Keith Fullerton Whitman (aka Hrvatski) that were pretty amazing. What made greg davis's performance more dynamic than one might expect out of a laptop musician is that he was also playing found natural instruments (rocks, sand, water, sticks, etc.) and feeding the sound into his Mac, which processed and amplified them back out. Definitely not for everyone, but I found it riveting.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I used to live near a cheap motel that had a bar. I started seeing a sign that said "This Friday: Jack Schitt". So I gathered some friends and we went. It was a total dive, but they actually had some decent beer. Jack was playing guitar but I noticed that all of his accompaniment was a Toshiba laptop. He had drums, bass, rhythm guitar and even backing vocals where necessary. The music wasn't my favorite (basically covers of southern rock and 70s stuff like Styx, ELO, etc...), but he was pretty good and you could tell everyone was having fun since no one (including Jack) could take this guy seriously. No idea what software he used, but the whole performance was pretty polished for what it was.
I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying. - Woody Allen
As opposed to just playback from a laptop with little to no real-time modulation... http://www.nativeinstruments.de/index.php?id=timex ile_us&flash=0
"Tim has spent the last year creating and perfecting a radical tool for live performance. Based entirely around Reaktor 5 and a set of customised faders and controllers, it allows him to manipulate samples and his own voice in real time. The unique Exile setup has been showcased at raves and gigs all over the UK and Europe. Native Instruments talked to Tim about his musical past, present and future, and got some very interesting answers. The interview was held at Fail Headquarters in London.
"
Also, can't get to it right now, but search him on youtube and you can find videos of him performing live.
Also see Scrambledhackz...
http://www.popmodernism.org/scrambledhackz/
Check the videos section...
"Technically my mind music machine was realized in form of a software, which basically consists of three modules: a pre-analyzer, a database and a synthesizer. Using the pre-analyzer it is possible to automatically split up an arbitrary amount of audio material into small musically and rhytmically meaningful snippets. For each of those snippets its sonic properties (sound signatures) are extracted by means of psychoacoustic techniques and saved in a database so that a soundpool of samples referenced by their sound signatures is becoming available.
The synthesizer analyzes an audio input stream and again splits it up into small snippets and calculates their sound signatures. For every input snippet (or actually its sound signature) the best match out of all the snippets in the database is found and each input snippet is continuously replaced by the best matching (most similar-sounding) snippet from the database.
The audio input, which can be other music or as I use it, just human voice, is virtually describing music to be automatically constructed out of samples found in the database."
Also see Merzbow...
Animusic is the only one I've seen/heard that is 100% computer-generated audio and video. Saw it on PBS a couple months ago, told my brother about it and he went and bought the 2 DVDs; I've only borrowed the 2nd DVD from him so far. Pretty cool stuff in there actually. It'd be cool to see someone actually BUILD some of those setups too. (like Resonant Chamber from the 2nd disk)
Karma: NaN
I've seen a number of laptop-only acts and let me tell you, they are BORING AS HELL. I'd rather be tied to a chair watching fifth grade Green Day cover bands than go to another boring laptop gig. At least the fifth graders jump around and try to rock out. Your typical laptop DJ stares at the screen, brow furrowed, attempting to divine the next loop to mix in. His idea of rocking out is leaning back in his chair and smiling. You know, that's great and all, but when you pay $10, $20, even $30 to go to the rock show, you want to be entertained by an artist thoroughly enjoying himself, not bored to tears. (BTW, I'm intentionally using "him" because I've never seen a woman equate moving a mouse with a live act.)
A real DJ, laptop or not, rocks out, dances, enjoys the beats, rocks the crowd. My advice to budding artists: keep the laptop, but if you're going to do a live show, be prepared to use your whole body to entertain. Otherwise, your show is no better than a Muzak CD rocking the elevator at work.
IMNSHO,
-l
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Well, this past weekend my band played a private party, and post performance, a 'DJ' started playing music off his laptop with a 50in Plasma screen hooked up for CG effects. He was running XP, and using a few differenct audio/jukebox programs. Nothing really impressed me about that set up.....
On another note, back in the mid 90's(showing my age here), several DJ's at a 'Warehouse Party' i went to, had 2 PC's and a laptop set up, mixing the music and the lights LIVE. I thought that was pretty impressive at the time, considering what was pumping out of the speakers, and how many lasers and beam splitters they were controlling. There was also a rediculous amount of fullsize cardboard cutout STORM-TROOPERS everywhere, which was both amusing and surreal. It was one of those 'you had to be there' moments. I can thank the *chemicals* for that...
: )
...of torture.
Supporting certain sales laptops seems like that anyway!
I've not gone to a lot of concerts in my life, but one of my favorite bands, Meat Beat Manifesto, came to a local venue last year so I went to see this band I've been listening to for years. If you're not familiar with it, it's triphop/jungle/drum 'n' bass/whatever genre cliche you want to call it, electronica basically, but a very underrated band I've always thought. Jack Dangers, the frontman, is apparently a hoarder of old/obscure media and samples a lot of bizarre stuff like old television and movies and old live performances from all kinds of random places. Anyway in his show he had a guy playing electric drums and he and 2 other guys with like 4+ Apple laptops performing the music but the cool thing was the video accompaniment. Basically every strange little noise in these songs I had been listening to for years had come from some video recording and when they came up in the song the clip of video, sometimes only a fraction of a second, would play on the screen. It could have all be pre-sequenced, but I'm pretty sure they were actually playing these video clips like instruments. I remember thinking they had to have some decent specs on those laptops to be shifting around all that high quality video like that. One song has a high-pitched squeak that I figured was some kind of synthesizer but it turned out it was like a 1/4 second clip of Mariah Carey doing her outrageous soprano thing. I would have never guessed it was a human voice in the song. It was a pretty great show, even my friends who never heard the band enjoyed themselves. This could be pretty tame fair, but like I said I don't go to many shows.
I have been composing and performing with midi for about 15 years and using computers live for about 10 years. I usually use a rack mounted standard PC for all of my VST instruments via V-Stack. I may start using Kore but I just started messing with it.
The main problem with laptops is most come with less than stellar sound devices. Some come with 24-bit spdif outs but still suffer from noticeable latency which makes live performance difficult at best. There are a good number of external sound devices available for laptops out now but I have yet to see one that has made me confident enough to move away from my road case rack. Plus it looks cool to show up at a gig with a road case full of esoteric lights and whistles.
Now if someone would just write a VST interpreter that will run in Gentoo I will be pooping with joy.
My keyboard rig:
Old ass Kawai K-4 as controller (Per note aftertouch)
P4 3GHz with Delta 1010 for sound device
Tascam TMD-1000 mixer for external effects
Science is the great antidote to the poison of enthusiasm and superstition. - Adam Smith (1723-90)
The Princeton Sound Lab has created a bunch of tools for just this. You can "bow" the touchpad, for instance. There's a Mac-laptop exclusive utility that generates sounds based on the motion of the laptop (using the internal gyros or accelerometers or whatever).
and practically every other ebm/synth/industrial band. i just saw vnv nation and they had ibooks onstage.
Alex Callier of the Belgian band Hooverphonic uses a guitar with built-in laptop. It's a Fender Telecaster with a laptop built in, and allows for more flexibility in sound effects and between concerts he can use it to surf the web.
e ng/248418.htm
There are many results on Google, but almost all of them in Dutch apparently. Here's the only English result I found: http://www.newsenginepr.com/documents/intel.xml (see section 'Hooverphonic on tour with one of a kind Intel Guitar'). Ah, Intel has a page about it too, but without reference to Hooverphonic: http://www.intel.com/cd/corporate/pressroom/emea/
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http://www.dontstayin.com/uk/bristol/the-croft/200 6/nov/30/gallery-174998/home/photok-5006698
That was a pretty cool night - some of the acts really got into the feel of it.
Using a laptop as a source of one or more virtual synths = OK
Using the laptop itself to play the music live? Well, if I want to actually *play*, I would at least get an external MIDI controller (knobs and keyboards) as it is much easier to handle than a qwerty keyboard - most decent music apps can accept midi inputs and playing notes via a device made for performing is a bit more intuitive than trying to set your keyboard up to do it (IMNSHO, that is, i imagine *some* people are perhaps completely comfortable with using a computer keyboard to play music live). Mixing live is a whole other paradigm, just need good setup on the keyboard and mouse (but I don't necessarily consider that playing).
Morton Subotnick played on an electronic music concert at the university I attend. They literally wheeled out a laptop (some variety of Mac) on a cart, and he sat down at the laptop as though he was sitting at a piano. I don't recall what he played, but he is considered a pioneer in electronic music.
From an article about it:
The concert was pretty much all ambient sounds from what I remember and not very impressive (sounding), but it was pretty neat seeing him up there with no instruments besides these "toys".
--Ajay
Those of you around Quebec should check out C.O.M.A. http://www.comanoise.net/, Montreal's yearly electro-noise festival. Last month was 4th edition. 35 live acts spread over 3 days. All music done live with laptops, midi controllers (kaospads, trigger fingers) and a few electronic drums and vintage analog equipment. Big names of the genre are currently Mlada Fronta, Scrap:edx, Liar's Rosebush, Memmaker, Iszoloscope, Ah Cama-Sotz, Vromb, Enduser, Hocico and many others. Relatively small scene but quite alive and well.
Autechre do occasional sets with nothing but a pair of laptops. And are very good.
- Frans.
The Cruxshadows use a pair of Mac laptops for sequencing and sampling (I think) on stage. Operation: Reinformation use computers extensively in their act (the last time I saw them, they used a Commodore-64 as their MIDI sequencer, and a second C-64 with a joystick as one of their synthesizers instead of a keyboard). There is also a horror-pop act out of Pittsburgh called Nyarlathotep who jam in realtime on laptops during their shows.
Proteus' Child
Doko ni datte; hito wa, tsunagette iru.
Todd Rundgren did a tour back in 1990ish in which he used a Mac (li'l desktop, not a laptop of course) as a musical instrument. I distinctly remember him grooving on-stage playing the, um, keyboard.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
I have yet to see a good live act of someone just using a laptop.
Sorry, but watching someone read their email is not a performance.
It's not laptop-only, but a local Denver band, Mr. Pacman, uses a Commodore SX-64 on stage. It's a portable version of the Commodore 64 (a "laptop", for sufficiently large values of "lap", I suppose.) Talk about old-school! :)
laptops? too easy!
http://www.myspace.com/zxspectrumorchestra
"ZX Spectrum Orchestra have been locked away in the lab writing code. They use no midi, no samplers, in fact, no instruments other than Sinclair hardware and peripheral devices. For instance, vocals on tracks are supplied by the Currah Speech. An early speech synthesizer built for the ZX Spectrum, it explores the found poetry of basic keyboard commands."
Some people you should really check out if you're at all interested in live electronica:
m exile_us&ftu=a753afc697500c1&flash=9
Jamie Lidell...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Lidell
One half of Super_Collider (with Christian Vogel), does loads of cool stuff with Max/MSP.
Tim Exile...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exile_(artist)
http://www.native-instruments.com/index.php?id=ti
Does live improvised D&B using his own Reaktor patch. Check out the video in the second link.
Monolake...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolake
One of the key drivers of Ableton Live.
Cursor Miner...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursor_miner
One of the best live shows I've ever seen. Pure energy and more creativity in his little finger than most people can muster at all.
This is a really exciting time for live electronic music. The creative tools are finally getting to a standard where you don't have to be a programmer to do interesting stuff.
Now we just need the open source stuff to catch up with commercial software.
Chevron, Milanese, Shitmat, I could have sworn i saw Plaid do a laptop set, Kid606, and loads of other people go to any evening of 'underground' electronica and you'll see tonnes of it. Tim Exile is the god of performing live with a laptop though, he's not quite a laptop only chap mind, the last time I saw him he had a luminous green/yellow leotard on and a joystick that he wiggled to control all his noises attached where his todger should have been.
Back when AOTS was still watchable, they had on a beatboxer/live mixer called Kid Beyond. I was quite impressed, but I've never seen him live or really do much else outside that quick set. There's some videos of him over at Youtube if you're WMV-Impared and cant's check out his website.
Does anyone have good recs for free (or low cost) sheet music editors?
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
http://www.capturedbyrobots.com/
Oh my.
The best band I have seen doing this. They actually have written their own custom software and mashup samples of audio and video creating their music and performing. Just two guys, two laptops and a ton of projectors! http://www.coldcut.net/
Those people who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
Richard D James famously had a concert where he pressed play on a DAT tape and then proceeded to play Sonic the Hedgehog for the remainder of the show.
Does that count?
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Luke Vibert - holy shit. Saw him at RX in SF, at first I didn't realize he wasn't using any controllers.
:)
:)
:\
If you know the original tracks that he's dropping, you will be flabbergasted. He fucks up, too
the videos kinda suck, but that's the difference between live and youtube
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qVosBt3L8A
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUL5VuQBz74
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRYdnXIr_VI
kid606 uses controllers, but it's closer to the "instrument" that you're talking about, but not using normal midi keyboards
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_tstjIePcA
the kid606 vids on youtube really tend to not show off the laptoppery
and there are a ton of traditional musicians using the computer as the synth for the keyboard
jeremy ellis demoing how he does it (you need to see this)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MZl7pHF1NQ
That's just off the top of my head. There are a LOT of acts doing this, almost all electronic acts at this point. Nobody wants to lug around irreplaceable hardware anymore unless they're REALLY into it.
This post should be up at the top.
Ableton has been allowing musicians to use their laptops as instruments for years now. If you google around, you'll find whole bands of 4 or 5 people on stage jamming with Live.
It's a great product, there's a free demo, so check it out.
I saw Nickel Creek in Santa Rosa last spring. They usually throw a few songs from the greater pop/rock genre into their sets to mix things up a little (I've seen them do Dylan, Radiohead, Beck, and Randy Newman), and on that tour they were covering Britney Spears' "Toxic". They were playing the cover using their regular (acoustic) instruments and hamming it up, and in the middle of the song, someone from their crew ran onto the stage, flipped open a laptop that was sitting there, played a three second break, closed the laptop, and ran right off stage again. Best. Use of a laptop for music. Ever.
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
Caught them almost a year ago in Gateshead, UK. Wasn't certain what to expect but it turned out to be a cracking night. VJamming wins HARD.
There's plenty of clips out there on YouTube of their performances
F_T
Interestingly Ableton and Cycling '74 (who publish MAX/MSP) are now working together. "Ableton and Cycling '74 have entered into a strategic partnership, forging a "unique alliance between these dynamic and innovative audio/video software companies". The two will join forces to create new software products for the creative community, leveraging their skills, technologies and combined thirty years of experience."