The question here is, how do you define a live performance?
Recently I have seen(and have been part of) a recent trend of “performing” live, where the artists just plays a couple of carefully ordered and programmed loops in a tight specific planned order with almost no freedom.
Where do you draw the line? I personally ditched this kind of performance as I feel I can be more expressive with the music with regular DJing?
For me the only thin live really means an artist playing only his productions / remixes. Apart from that I’ve seen ‘liveacts’ from artists who simply used CDJs to DJ their songs, over ableton button pushers to people who perform on the fly on tables full of crazy machines, instruments, etc. Apart from the guy playing ‘live’ with CDJs (which just somewhat crossed the line for me) I enjoyed most of them and didn’t care how much live it really was.
well if you were to ask Steve Aoki, he’d say “jumping off speakers, crowd surfing in a blow up raft, spraying the crowd with champagne and throwing cake in their faces” and “play a song or two in-between all of that”.
Whatever the foundation of that, there is certainly an approach to the technical risks that one is willing to take on stage. I have nothing to lose and nothing to prove - I can take pretty much whatever risks I want and know that my “day job” will continue to pay the mortgage.
The “big name” touring acts are much more risk averse (and also much more skilled and practiced) than I am. They can not afford to make a huge glaring mistake in their sets. So, they tend to tweak or accent largely “set” sets. So, they practice and experiment and push boundaries…at home. When they perform, they tend to stay inside their comfort zones.
And I don’t blame them a bit. I “pad” schedules at work, and round expectations down. Then I deliver what I deliver…most of the time it is more than I advertised at the beginning.
For me (Live) definitely means the artist is exclusively playing his own productions. How he does it is none of my business really. Live sets tend to be 60-90 minutes while DJ sets are more like 3-8 hours. That’s the way it’s defined in most clubs I go to at least.
I dont think DJing is a live performance anyway, in the traditional sense of the word.
And newer DJs are even further from performance. I approach it in the same way as playing guitar.
IF you are going to claim that you are doing a performance then you cannot use sync, quantise, snap, FLIP, or anything else that takes your movements and quantises them to a predetermined grid. You simply cant do that with guitar, so you shouldnt do it with anything else while claiming to be live.
If a DJ literally cant make a mistake, because of sync and quantise then its something other than live.
I dont actually care about any of this, if a DJ selects good music then thats all I need. But once they start claiming things about ‘performance’ and ‘live’ is when I start feeling weird about it.
so much of modern DJing is pretending to do more than you actually are.
Playing live is when you create something new. A-B mixing in my view is not Live, it’s more of a presentation. For DJ’s it’s more of a statement of what they like at the moment and what they think the crowd will like. For live playing you have to go beyond that.
You need to be creating something new, moulding the sounds, the intensity the builds. Any time there is only one track playing you have stopped playing live. The clearest version of live playing would be Harmonic mixing where virtually no track is played through but parts of the tracks are queued and fitted in with other tracks through the use of EQ’s filters effects etc. there can be a lot of prep done on this but it’s no different to a band practising before a gig. (You could extend the subject here to include bands, is playing s tightly defined set of chords really live or do you only consider free form Jazz live?).
You can use sync and all the tech tools available to you provided that each time you play the set you bring something new, no two sets should sound the same even if you play the same pieces in the same order.
The remix decks would count more for live performance when it comes to using them in Traktor sets, particularly if the DJ is using something like a Midifighter Twister for step-sequencing. Syncing up a Maschine with it would be branching out even further into a live set compared to a standard DJ set (Jamie Stevens uses Maschine in his DJ sets).
Most of my DJ sets (A → B) are my podcasts. I do it to show people music i love, to present my sound. back in the day when i was using a launchpad on stage or even when i was playing in a band, that was live performance … In the end i just wanna play awesome music
The reality is that in most situations 98% of the audience doesn’t care if it’s a DJ set, a preprogrammed ‘live’ set in ableton or a couple of guys performing on drum machines and synths on stage. They are there for a good time with friends to have fun. It’s only the 2% music snobs like us (me) who will appreciate the way the artist is performing. How many times have you been to a festival or club where the DJ absolutely sucks in terms of DJ’ing skills and track selections, and still nobody’s care?
A couple of weeks ago I was at a festival where Moodyman was playing a 3hr set. I was absolutely stoked to go there, but his mixing was so f*cking bad (still good tracks though) that at every transition everbody just stopped dancing thinking what the hell was happening. But after 20 seconds they just started dancing again. I couldn’t take it and went to another stage after 20 mins..
For me, if an artist performs their tracks more than just playing a couple of loops in ableton it’s live. And if it’s just loops in ableton and I’m enjoying myself I don’t really mind. It’s just a little bit less cool.
A couple of suggestions for cool live performances:
I agree that most people couldn’t care les, and part of the problem of doing a full up live set where you are creating new music through creative mixing is that virtually no one will know apart from yourself, but that’s enough because you are still setting the atmosphere, the vibe whatever you want to call it, and that is far more rewarding than simple a
-b. And if people notice that your working your a** off, all the better.
But to echo a previous comment you can extend the problem creative DJ’s have to live bands, how much are live bands actually playing live, the sound quality has gotten so good that it can often be hard to tell a sequenced sample from a played riff.
Much of modern multi deck mixing is something that often only the DJ understands, be it a podcast, life show, whatever the listeners will often not know that something new, never to be repeated is being played, but the DJ does, and just maybe they will go home and say that was a great set, which they might not have done if it was A-B. (Nothing wrong withA-B by the way, some of my favourite DJ’s do A-B)
im not sure about this… what i do these days combining loops/maschine/sequences+full tracks using sync/quantize is closer to a live performance than i used to be back in the day spinning vinyl just mixing 2 tracks - so dont think the use of sync/quantize has much to do with it. its still not performing live but has some elements of it in…
Well what you are also having to contend with is the old chestnut that your not a real DJ unless you can beatmatch, a very overstated skill and virtually the only one that most DJ’s have but I guarantee that a lot of people rate that much higher than someone who uses whatever is available to try and create something new rather than have two tracks ‘manually’ be in time with each other. I also believe that many of the beat marchers are merely phase matching these days but very few people seem to have an issue with this, all it seems to need to be considered a true DJ by many people is to have one of your headphones jammed between your ear and shoulder and to be making a few adjustment to the jog wheel, and then spend the rest of the playing track making minute and inconsequential adjustments to the mixer knobs. The emperors new clothes indeed.
As I said in an earlier post most modern DJ sets are more of a presentation than a display of creativity and skill, (and I have no issue with this at all, my favourite DJ’s do this) for it to be considered a live performance you need to be able to do more than pick the next track and be able to cue the track in time.
they make autotune for guitar
… In the end i just wanna play awesome music
)
