electronic music performance

[mbc113]

so one of my big spiels is on the lack of performance and real-time control in electronic music... i'm always searching for devices that can give me more and more dimensions of control (right now i'm at 11 dimensions of control...bad ass, eh?)... but then there's the whole debate of cognitive overload... and how there's only so much our brains can keep track of at once... and that the real key to it all is in how you map your performance data to actually control of synthesis paramters, etc. ... and I sort of buy that, but there are a ton of parameters that go into playing an acoustic instrument like a violin, right? you have the bow pressure, the position of the bow on the string, the angle of the bow, the speed of the bow, your finger positions, finger pressure... you get the idea. and people learn how to do this and can create awesome music... it just takes time... i think that people want instant gratification when it comes to electronic music performance. they're more content on producing sounds on their computer and then just hitting play at a show, than they are on performance. they don't want to put in the time it takes to become proficient at an instrument to really play it... why should they spend time on performance when they can make it all so easily in the studio, right? well... it seems to me that the studio can only take you so far... its such a detached way of creating music... you don't have the physical interaction with it that you have with an acoustic instrument. sequence controlled soft-synths or algorithmic synthesis or even digital isntruments controlled by a keyboard controller... they often don't have any haptic feedback. they don't resonate against your body when you play them. they don't have physical components that project frequences in all different directions in an acoustic space. there is research in all of these areas, but it seems that it never goes beyond the lab and the academic concert hall. it seems to me that if one was able to control more aspects of a sound to perform them that the actually sounds themselves would probalby be richer and more expressive... an algorithm can only take you so far, it's the way the sound is controlled that makes it interesting.

anyways, anyone have tips for electronic music performance? interesting new alternative yet affordable controllers?

[Chaorta]

Stop using a laptop. Back a basic backing track and wing the rest.

[dolivas]

i think you can find a way to incorporate a laptop into your stage presence... however you must find a way to remove it as the main focal point. I myself have gotten to a point where when Im doing some sort of personal recording I use something like a sheet music holder that clamps on to the mic stand as a way to have the laptop near eyelevel but out of your eyes straight ahead vision. This make you only focus on the laptop whenever you really need to but mostly focus on playing and singing with the instrument in front of you which would be your guitar, mouth or whatever the hell.

Im working on adding a midi foot pedal board like this Roland PK5:

to either trigger samples or backing tracks... or to play it like some sort of old Moog Taurus pedal thing as I play acoustic psych songs. What's important in my mind is that your audience knows you're interacting physically with the music being created and not just some automaton following cues from presets.

I guess the short version of what I want to say is, that no matter what you're performing you gotta have some sort of mystique or entertaining value that makes you more than just a guy playing back a song. You gotta put on a show dammit of some sort.