Most nay-sayers of electronic music tend to ignore the vast range of what constitutes electronic music. You may often hear these same people refer to all dance music as "techno", although now the buzzword seems to be "electro" [whatever that means anymore]. Regardless, I listened to these critics and decided that the best way to counteract this would be to form a band around the project I co-produce with a close friend of mine.

Of course, there were several roadblocks in my way. I had never used Ableton to play back tracks for a band. My past live PAs had used loops dragged into the Session mode, and brought in where I needed them. Our drummer also pointed out that I would need to send him a click track from all of this. I knew how to set up a headphone cue, but had never really needed to do it before. The final dilemma was going to be how to balance all of the audio tracks against the live VSTs I would be using.

Initially, I thought it would be a good idea to bounce an .omf from Sonar, where all of our tracks were stored. What I did not realize, however, was that my copy of Ableton was set to automatically set Warp points on every clip. So, after getting them into the arrangement window, I had to turn off the warp for each one. After importing the tracks into Live, I set a start point, and selected the option for Ableton to read this as zero when the track started. That way, there would be no embarrassing silence on stage. Unfortunately, we had several moments where Ableton just decided to stop playing the clips midway. I eventually rectified this by increasing the RAM allocation for the program.

The interface we used was a Focusrite Saffire, which provides two mic inputs, so I was able to have a live signal sent to Vokator for performance. We did find, however, that there was a latency problem, so I had to open Vokator and lower the frequency of the audio output from the VST. Then, we had to use Ableton's delay compensation to nudge the live mic where we needed it to be so I was in sync with my lead singer.

For the click track, we assigned the headphone cue in Ableton to send to line 4 on the Saffire, which then went out to a headphone amp so my drummer could plug his headphones in at the kit. Then, we walked through the individual tracks and clicked the cue send icon on the tracks that he wanted in his mix. We then set the cue level and tested out the click track. For the click, we just used a hi-hat dragged into Impulse, since my drummer was not feeling the cowbell I dropped in the first time.

One thing that we noticed that proved to be a big problem was that my live synths and mic were not mixing well with the rest of my audio. Unfortunately, we did not determine this until we arrived at the venue. After talking with the house engineer and my sound operator, we came to the conclusion that it would be best to send the bass, breakbeats, synths, fx, and vocoder all as separate mono line outs. Initially, we had everything in stereo, but found out pretty quickly that it didn't really matter and we were better off using our eight outputs as eight separate tracks going out to the board [minus the send we had set up for the drummer].

It was entertaining that someone who had both played in a band before, and who had run sound for live performances, would not think to send separate tracks for mixing to the sound board. On that note, however, it is interesting to see how many electronic bands perform out of the headphone out on a laptop. While I had used the interface before in live PA's , it had never occurred to me that I should send my sound engineer that many separate outs. Being an electronic producer, however, it is usually the case that you only get one or two 1/4" or RCA inputs in a club venue off the DJ mixer. For those situations, it would most likely be beneficial to bring your own small mixing board, which is what I plan on doing for our next performance.

In the end, however, crisis was averted for a night's performance. It managed to prove again, however, that even a sound engineer can take missteps when it comes to producing a personal project. In this case, I was saved by a fellow sound engineer who noticed the issues before they caused a problem. Of course, mistakes are often what help us learn and grow in our craft.