There are big EDM artists that have really been pushing the envelop on what you can do in live performance for a while now. Deadmau5 specifically has a real obsession about trying to do everything live and it's obvious that this requires a large amount of musical and technical knowledge and talent.<p>Here is a video with him talking about his live set set up from 2010 and is a really interesting watch:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTCqeWu094I" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTCqeWu094I</a><p>I remember hearing somewhere that he has switch over to a complete live show since then, but I can't find a link to confirm this right now. Needless to say what he does is way more then just play some tracks that he made. Which is one of the reason he despises the term "DJ" to describe what he does.<p>Edit: He is also incredibly obsessed with the lights at his live show and handles the lighting including the rig himself.
Great topic!<p>Daedelus (<a href="http://daedelusmusic.com/" rel="nofollow">http://daedelusmusic.com/</a>) is one of my favorite artists, not only because of his tunes but because of how much fun he has just rocking on stage with his Monome/various toys, and how it faces it towards the audience to show what he's doing, even if that's a personal positioning preference. He's also in a documentary about circuit bending available on YouTube that's worth watching called Glitch (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvlYM5Js450" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvlYM5Js450</a>). Your ears won't thank you, but your geek will.<p>Other artists that are entertaining to watch fiddle with their digital instruments are Side Brain (hacks gaming peripherals to make music), No Sir E and the ever-wonderful Shigeto.
Here's such music you don't need to ignore.<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA</a>
Wait, this is saying that a genre that was created through instrumachines — people playing a bunch of old roland x0xes, then later the sp-12s/1200s, then later MPCs, live — will somehow be revolutionized by the newer forms of the same instrumachines?<p>I think essentially the argument is that "laptops are not any fun to play live with" and really, that was just a short phase of electronic music. We all did that for a few years, then found our controllers, monomes, modulars, mpcs, etc. much more fun, and have just returned to what was already there. A laptop can be an instrumachine for the right artist with the right controllers (e.g., Daedelus and his monome <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCzHpQtNduE" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCzHpQtNduE</a>) attached to it, just as an MPC + SP1200 have been the right instrumachine for hiphop (KRS-One & BDP use one next to the turntables in every concert) for decades.
The concept reminds me of the "synthe-axe drumitar" played by Future Man from Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.<p><a href="http://flecktones.com/page/Futuremans-Synthaxe-Drumitar" rel="nofollow">http://flecktones.com/page/Futuremans-Synthaxe-Drumitar</a>
Two cool things to see on this topic: anything by beardyman (who uses a mic and processors to emulate just about any genre you want) and imogen heap's magical music gloves (<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6btFObRRD9k" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6btFObRRD9k</a>)
I guess I'm getting old, but the demo both looks and sounds like a man virtuoustically playing a pair of typewriters.<p>More seriously, I think this is cool, but a little overblown in someways, we've technically been able to do this kind of performance (using sliced up digital samples) for a very very long time -- decades. Digital sample machines, of many kinds of forms have been used in live shows for a long time. Think of your favorite 80's new wave band and they probably had live shows with digital synth triggering samples off of a keyboard.<p>I think this is more of a cultural shift than any kind of technological shift, but interesting nonetheless. The methods of playing these things is much more akin to being a drummer or an old school DJ scratchoff than anything else. But just like complaints about all modern music being overcompressed, these guys have to work off of only two performance vectors: sick beats and cool samples. There's no dynamics in the performance or playing with tonality. Glissando, spicatto, breath control, tonguing, etc. are all right out the window.<p>Music has been reduced to learning and playback a la guitar hero. A generation of musicians, messing around with samples from music they themselves could never perform.<p>We talk a lot about technology we no longer have the means to make and knowledge lost in fires and wars and natural decay, and toy with that idea in sci-fi and real life. However, today we certainly have a much greater pantheon of fantastic accomplishments in these areas.<p>But I wonder if we should consider a similar phenomenon with culture and cultural skills? We may be entering a time were previous cultural knowledge, like how to play piano virtuostically is lost, exchanged with how to play a sampler at similar high levels of skill. We may have lost the means to transmit that culture forward to future generations, but outside of a vague sense of loss, nobody really cares because what we have now is also vast and complex and has its own set of interesting skills that need to transmit forward.<p>Is this the cultural equivalent of cleaning out the memetic closet to make room for new stuff?
The grandfather of this exploration is Moldover and for the purposes of this discussion ignore his current tendecy to involve an electric guitar in his sets ... a recent development.<p><a href="http://moldover.com/" rel="nofollow">http://moldover.com/</a><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/moldover/live-at-future-everything-excerpts" rel="nofollow">http://vimeo.com/moldover/live-at-future-everything-excerpts</a><p>He ended up designing and building his own controllers using arcade buttons.<p>Since this is hacker news I'll point out the whole investigation is largely a technology issue. Many studies have shown that expressiveness of great instrumentalists rests on incredibly small timing variations, which ARE NOT random. Because of latency and more especially jitter in the hardware/software interface true virtuosity is either very hard or impossible to develop using most currently available tools. What the actual acceptable level of machine induced random variations are is a much debated point. This is why I pushed Lippold Haken so hard to increase the sampling rate of the continuum fingerboard to its current sub-millisecond levels. The underlying technology of the madrona soundplane can be implemented at audio rate, which, by definition, should be fast enough to obviate this need.
I'm always mystified when I see people's fingers move that quickly. I can see myself typing on the keyboard, but it's a simple letter that comes out when I press it. It might just be that it's so normal that I don't think it's cool anymore, but people who can mix music like they type is just awesome to me.<p>Here's two more videos of people mixing/making cool music on the 'fly'<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baWlIzwksHs" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baWlIzwksHs</a><p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA</a>
I am not a musician and I don't keep up with production methods too closely, but this method of "load a bunch of loops into your devices, trigger them in interesting manners" sounds almost EXACTLY like what I've read about the way Orbital has been working since somewhere in the early 2000s.<p>I think the only difference is that the price of these kinds of looping tools has dropped precipitously, so there's more people fooling with them.<p>(And I am not trying to disrespect the musicianship of people doing this. I'm just questioning it being a NEW THING.)
I've actually had a very similar thought recently. I also feel like it is somewhat easier to master electronic music production (I know that it's still hard but compare how much one knows after playing piano for 6 months with learning Ableton for 6 months). I think that this is awesome since people will be able to concentrate on making interesting music as opposed to learning the instrument.
Also revolutionized (seen that long before) the street music:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a1dHCmcJzg" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a1dHCmcJzg</a>
Controllerism has been around for awhile. I discovered it via Moldover -<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/moldover" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/user/moldover</a><p>Before him, it was called "live pa"