Tema: Max Cooper - Explica su Setup

Les dejo una nota en ingles, de una jugosa entrevista a Max Cooper, productor Britanico que esta en el Vortex del momento como una de las revelaciones del Techno y House Progressivo.





Until very recently Max Cooper juggled a job as a research scientist with being a DJ and producer… in the end, music proved to be more profitable and so, he took it up full-time. Friends of mine who’ve seen the British producer performing his live shows have all told me he’s one of the best they’ve seen this year, unfortunately I have yet to enjoy a Max Cooper live show. But, in anticipation of doing so, I probed him about the whole set up – giving him subject headings as a guide to what I wanted to know. Here’s the lowdown from Max himself…

COMPARISONS WITH DJING:

For my live set I wanted to be able to take the best things from a DJ style of set, which for me are having the musical flexibility to play to the crowd as well as to your own mood. The first thing I needed was a lot of music, I’ve probably got 150 or so of my own tracks in there now, so there’s a fair bit of variation I can play with to make very different styles of sets from ambient to electronica to techno. I also use remixes of my tracks other people have done for me, which aren’t strictly my own tracks, but they give me an extra dimension to the shows which I find really valuable.

In terms of the technicalities of the live sets, I keep things pretty simple – I split each track into sections so I can control the macro-structure of each one, when the breaks and drops occur etc… I don’t bother to split each track into all of it’s component parts so that I control when each new hi-hat or snare drum comes in, because I don’t think the people listening really care about that stuff. Instead I focus on thinking about building the best overall set I can using my music, and doing lots of glitchy details and effects using the same sorts of techniques I use to produce my tracks. All in all it’s really half way between a DJ set and a proper live electronic set (which would be me bringing some analogue synths, which I don’t have anyway, and playing them live on stage Top Of The pops Style. Except, I’d really play them).



PREPARATION:

The main part of my live set preparations is designing new ways in which I can mangle things up more and more. I like to be able to send everything into complete chaos and then straight back to order during my shows, it’s fun to push it all a little bit too far before giving people what they want. I have an ongoing design process whereby I’m constantly bringing in new ideas and refining old ones between each show. Recently I’ve been blessed with the new iPad-based controller coming soon from the guys at Liine, which allows me to design pretty much any control surface I can imagine, and have it implemented on the touch screen to control anything I want in the software I use to perform my shows – Ableton live. This new technique using the Liine Lemur pretty much gives me endless possibilities for how I can control things, which is pretty exciting. Even in the early stages it’s already given me a lot of flexibility to control many parameters at the same time in a manner I couldn’t do before.

STRUCTURE:

I don’t preplan any of my shows, so there’s no firm structure at all, I just play around with the music and see where each night takes me. I probably have a tendency to get a bit over excited though and spend the second half of my sets smashing out noisy glitchy mayhem. I really like it when I can play a DJ set as well, stepping between the two styles of set. Ideally I’ll do a 2 hour live set, but I’ve done a few 3-4 hour live sets recently which are great, as I get to delve into the depths of my music. In terms of musical classification, I guess my sets have a backbone of 4/4, techno and house styles roughly, but I constantly traverse into electronica and dubstep/broken styles and back again. The amount of broken tracks relates quite strongly to which country I’m playing in, there seems to be a strong opinion from place to place as to how the audience responds to non 4/4 tracks.

EQUIPMENT:

I use a Sony Vaio laptop with Ableton live and Max for live, an add on programming language which provides a lot of additional flexibility over how Ableton live can be used. Then I’ve got a small XXX audio interface, and a couple of midi controllers – the Akai APC40, and the iPad with the Liine Lemur I’ve already mentioned. The APC40 is my hardware controller with real buttons and faders for those parts of the set which need tactile control – when I need to do multiple things at the same time for example, and can only look at one at the critical moment.



CROWD RESPONSE:

People seem to like the live sets, when I finish they always come to say nice things about the music, but I never know whether they’re just being polite because they’re something to do with the event or whether they’re just off their heads. I think someone from Underworld (I could be wrong about the exact source) once said they became disillusioned with playing in clubs because they could play a looped up fart and everyone would dance away like it was great. I think there’s an element of truth in that when the hype surrounding an act becomes too big, but in the long term only the people really working hard and providing a quality output keep drawing crowds. Maybe I’ll try a looped up fart world tour next year.

EVOLUTION:

My live show has evolved as a natural extension of my productions. My production technique is mainly just a result of a lot of trial and error though, I’ve never had any formal training. That’s the great thing about modern computational music technology though, it’s got to the stage where you can achieve a reasonably good quality of output from a simple home studio with little expertise apart from the will to work hard. It did take me a few years of hard work to get to a releasable standard though of course, and it was pretty painful, not an easy thing to do by any measure. Even now I find it can be hard to explain to people what they need to do in order to improve pieces of music to a releasable standard. I think it has a lot to do with training your hearing to pick out key properties of music which we all hear, but are unaware of. It just takes a long time, a lot of experimenting with techniques, and a lot of comparison of the sound of successful released music to the music you are making.

The future of my live shows is going to be in bringing a live visual aspect into them, which I’m working on now. I often work with artists to make videos for my releases, I’m hoping to be able to have some sort of live screening shown of their form, but better of course! As I’ve already mentioned, there is also a lot of room for developing the technical sided of my performance too, using the Liine Lemur in particular, and perhaps even bringing in some of my old turntablist techniques – I used to play hip hop and funk and was obsessed with scratching and beat juggling with vinyls for years, I’d love to use those techniques as some form of control for a live show someday – it’s one of many projects I have ready and waiting for when circumstances conspire just right!




Fuente: Techno extraordinaire Max Cooper explains his live setup | Marcus Barnes | Independent Arts - News, notes and quotes on the Arts world - Blogs

Genial esto!
Gracias por compartirlo.

Me encantó esta parte:
" it’s fun to push it all a little bit too far before giving people what they want"