|
Over the weekend, I was having a conversation with Kevin McHugh aka Ambivalent about the different quality of sound in laptop or hardware-based live shows. ...
He mentioned his belief that hardware live shows sound inherently better, though you can still tweak a laptop's audio files to sound good as well. I had to think about this because it's difficult for me to imagine the 10 year old converters on my E-Mu or MPC sounding better than on the Echo Audiofire4 I bought last year. Maybe you can make the distinction of "pro" vs. "prosumer", but there aren't even that many companies manufacturing component D->A converters. I guess my point is that a laptop works pretty much the same way as a sampler in this application, and if the converters are equal, then the sound should be too. I should point out however that I only set my Warp mode in Ableton Live to Re-Pitch, because I can't stand any timestretch artifacts.
On the other hand, I'm remembering how much work is involved in pre-mastering individual audio tracks (kick, hihat, synth, etc). Mastering full mixes is easier because the goal is perfection of EQ and soundfield placement, and the interrelationships between sounds are static and predictable. When trying to pre-master sounds for the live show, I can't get too caught up in perfect sound relationships because what sounds good at home won't translate into the live show without live mix adjustments. I usually have to account for room resonances or bad monitors, or overloading channels on the DJ mixer. So I try to aim for each sound to be loud enough to stand out clearly in the mix. When I make an error, it's usually on the side of too quiet.
For my new live show, I'm trying to add a bunch of new material from the minimal loops DVD I created for Future Loops. Everything on that disc is completely unmastered. I felt I didn't want to steal headroom from the producers and mastering engineers who use my material in their own compositions. But for use in my show, the sounds must be polished. To get this material up to useful levels, I've decided to dust off my Focusrite Liquid Mix. I bought it about a year ago, and I was super-excited to have 32 available channels of Neve, Fairchild, and vintage blah blah EQ/compression. I had to stop its daily use in the studio because it gets lost when I put the computer to sleep, and it was always fighting with my finicky Firewire-hogging Apogee Rosetta.
But for this kind of sample/loop preparation, it's genius. It sounds fantastic for moderate eq and dynamics sculpting, and once I've sweetened the sounds I can take the plugin out and not worry about future compatibility. So, I've got my 7 tracks running through 7 instances of Fairchild compression and Pultec EQs to cut some digital sharpness and boost the overall levels.
|
All the best from Minneapolis.