PATRICK OGLE: This is Austin, driving towards the state capital. I was at a light so it wasn't illegal or anything.

ROB HOULE: I'm Rob Houle on the band that's Before Dawn.

KATE HOULE: I'm Kate Houle, and I'm in Before Dawn.

PATRICK OGLE: What's the difference between the show laptop and this laptop.

ROB HOULE: The show laptop is smaller and has less stuff running on it. Well this is the bigger laptop which has a bigger screen so I do all my work on it, and all of the -- it's just easier to see everything, and I don't care if I do updates or add programs or take programs off of it because it's not a critical machine. I can pound on it. I can even blow away the operating system, but my show laptop really is a 12" PowerBook and it's really lean. The operating system, I don’t mess with it, I don't update it, I just put Digital Performer on it, and all it does is play back the music live because I had a disaster once.

PATRICK OGLE: Tell me the disaster.

ROB HOULE: Well, I updated it to Leopard, and it's a PowerBook and if you know, the Leopard is really designed for the Intel-based Macintoshes, and that was a PowerPC, and we were onstage. It was a party. People were ready to jam out and we're sitting there, and I hit the pedal to start the song, and the laptop just croaked three times in a row...,

KATE HOULE: There were like three like --

ROB HOULE: ..played about five seconds of the song.

KATE HOULE: Five seconds of the song and then just stopped.

ROB HOULE: Crickets!

PATRICK OGLE: [LAUGHS]

ROB HOULE: Crickets! Angry Crickets!

PATRICK OGLE: So basically what you're saying is you keep it -- you keep the laptop in a live situation simple as it can be.

ROB HOULE: As much RAM as it can handle, simple as it can be. Exactly. And the way that I'm starting songs here is through, actually inside of this suitcase which I made for this.

KATE HOULE: Oh yeah. Go get the suitcase.

ROB HOULE: Yeah, because our whole idea was to be really a portable band, to not -- to basically get an airplane and fly somewhere, maybe hire amplifiers, so we put everything into a suitcase. Underneath here, there's an O2 M-Audio keyboard because it's just the solution I had, so it's a USB connection, and here -- let me see this pedal. The way you go to the next song is normally this is sitting on my pedalboard. You hit that and it goes right to the next song. So --

PATRICK OGLE: We can't see that from where you're pressing the foot pedal button, and --

ROB HOULE: Right. So that's a foot pedal, and it advances to the nect track, and on the Digital Performer, I've got the bass drum and the snare drum separated from the rest of they synth mix, so that if I needed to adjust the loudness of the bass and the snare, I can do that independently of the main tracks.

Right there's the Tascam which I bought, which is brand new, they just came out with these. It's kind of like the PC version of the old Tascam tape track machines.

PATRICK OGLE: Right, right. The 424's which I still have [OVERLAPPING].

ROB HOULE: Right. Good for brain, and this is like the not PC but the computer version -- the digital version of it. Well the computer version of it for lack of a better tone.

PATRICK OGLE: Now so you guy, whatever -- what you do is that you'r enot just playing. You're not just like setting up loops and playing them. Your playing it long, like you play so when you play along.

KATE HOULE: And all of our loops are totally generated by us. We don't use any pre-programmed loops that are in any of the programs.

PATRICK OGLE: So there's no like [PATRICK HUMMING QUEEN'S UNDER PRESSURE BASS LINE]

.

ROB HOULE: No. There's no samples. No Vanilla Ice.

KATE HOULE: No samples. I mean we have considered using a sample if it was something cool and weird wavelength.

ROB HOULE: We do have a sample from an old French carousel that we want to use, which is really creepy.

KATE HOULE: Right, yeah. We don't use any of the built in programmed loops. Programing like it is a whole other musical art, like it's the whole art up to itself.

PATRICK OGLE: Right, it's an instrument?

KATE HOULE: Right. It's an instrument so like a lot of people think, "Oh, they play with a laptop. They think it's like karaoke but it's nothing like that. It's just that we're merging two different arts which is programming and live performance.

PATRICK OGLE: Well, on the other thing I point out to people who just say, "You have a live drummer or live [INAUDIBLE], and you screw up and you're playing guitar or bass, the live drummer will compensate.

KATE HOULE: Yeah.

PATRICK OGLE: The laptop is totally unforgiving.

ROB HOULE: Now, that's completely unforgiving.

KATE HOULE: Completely. Obviously you're going to make mistakes sometimes and we've just been doing it for long enough now that we figured out our own ways of correcting with the with the machine. I would say that -- I mean, the fact that I can feel the drums that really helps. If I -- The thing that's positive about playing with the laptop versus the live drummer, if you do screw up --

PATRICK OGLE: Well there's a lot of positive much about that but --

KATE HOULE: Right, bu the live drummer, in course correcting can throw you off more because he's course correcting and you're course correcting, and you know sometimes you're both not on the same page. You know exactly where that laptop's going to pick back up again I mean because it doesn't change.

ROB HOULE: There's all kinds of like sonic landmarks in them.

KATE HOULE: Yeah. There [OVERLAPPING]

PATRICK OGLE: When the drummer tries to compensate, and you pick up right where you were supposed to be, and then he's compensating or she is compensating, and you're like, then it's all over.

KATE HOULE: Exactly. It's -- with this, if you mess up, I don't know if its more obvious or not but I think like if you say lose your place in a song, you start playing the wrong verse or something like that, you know right away pretty much and so [OVERLAPPING]

ROB HOULE: How everything sounds wrong.

KATE HOULE: Yeah. So you can go to where you're supposed to be.