What does an electronic artist do when playing live?

kopiikat · 3 months

There is a wide spectrum of ways to perform electronic music. At one end is "press 'play' and jump around." At the other end, there's "play your instruments like any other musician." I'd say most electronic acts fall somewhere in the middle.

Here are a number of options (with some overlap):

DJ the traditional way with vinyl and turntables
DJ with digital vinyl
DJ with CDJs
DJ with a DJ controller
Use Ableton Live and a midi controller to trigger loops or samples live
play with digital or analog synthesizers
play with a dynamic phrase looping synthesizer
combine a bunch of those things
improv on top of a bunch of those other things and use equipment to mess with your voice
combine a bunch of synths and traditional instruments and play them live, but filter them all so they sound like your pre-produced music
make up some weird synths of your own and combine them with the above
press "play" in iTunes

There are a lot of options.

kazagistar · 3 months

Depends on the artist. Sometimes he just ooks cool. Presses meaningless buttons.

mr_bighead · 3 months

Well if you're Steve Aoki you do everything but DJ, like ride in rafts, spit champagne into peoples faces or just climb on shit. Guys got it figured out.

Isaac_deGrasse_Sagan · 3 months

There's basically three things you can do:

Play the music with live instruments. Trigger stems and loops. Beatmatch whole tracks together.

You can of course combine different techniques- look at the guys who record something to a loop and construct their music on-the-fly.

5lickWill3 · 3 months

Yeah I have asked that same question but it seems that it depends. This is most likely because there are endless, it seems, ways to create and control music on these programs. However I am no expert, I have been working with ableton for about a year now. I like to launch different clips and scenes creating all the melodies and rhythms in advance. I like to think of it as more like conducting than anything else.

knobwrangler · 3 months

Press play. Light cigarette. Wrangle non functioning knobs.

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