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?"

Comments

Mashups!

[mathletics]

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".

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Laptop for live instrument

[IV-Swamp]

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

Re:Tim Exile

[soliptic]

Yeah, I was gonna mention Tim Exile too, although I would do, cos I know him :)

I've actually had a play on the system he built (well, I had a play about 3-4 years ago, I dare say he's changed it a lot since then. A constant work in progress as far as I could tell...). It's a lot of fun.

See timexile.com for more info and (I expect) tunes / vids etc. Oh, there's also a mass technical interview / Q&A with him here.

Right, I'm getting back to work before I read the usual surprisingly stone-age slashdot schtick that comes up on music related stories. You know, if it involves any sort of technology it's cheating, it doesn't take any skill whatsoever, it shouldn't even be called music, I could make that crap in five minutes, you'd never get this back when men were men and Zep were Zep..

Re:Labtop as an instrument?

[statusbar]

Back in 1986 I wrote the Pro MIDI Player which was a live performance oriented MIDI sequencer. It allowed you to control the sequence in a live sort of way. I originally wrote it because my band was performing at Expo '86 in Vancouver and we needed some parts sequenced but wanted to be able to repeat parts at our whim during the song. It also controlled lights and flashpots via the parallel port via midi messages in the sequence!

It turned into a product for a while. The old atari-st 'typeset' manual is at: http://www.jdkoftinoff.com/main/Historic_Projects/ The_Pro_MIDI_Player/Documentation and the source code is now GPL'd and available at http://www.jdkoftinoff.com/main/Historic_Projects/ The_Pro_MIDI_Player/Source_Code/

I've always wanted to rewrite this for a newer platform but found the market and the music scenes lacking.

--jeffk++