
Instrumachines and the Evolution of Electronic Music Performance - freshbreakfast
http://bryank.im/instrumachines
======
stevenameyer
There are big EDM artists that have really been pushing the envelop on what
you can do in live performance for a while now. Deadmau5 specifically has a
real obsession about trying to do everything live and it's obvious that this
requires a large amount of musical and technical knowledge and talent.

Here is a video with him talking about his live set set up from 2010 and is a
really interesting watch: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTCqeWu094I>

I remember hearing somewhere that he has switch over to a complete live show
since then, but I can't find a link to confirm this right now. Needless to say
what he does is way more then just play some tracks that he made. Which is one
of the reason he despises the term "DJ" to describe what he does.

Edit: He is also incredibly obsessed with the lights at his live show and
handles the lighting including the rig himself.

~~~
mnicole
I saw him play at Sasquatch in 2010 while walking back from the main stage not
even intending to see his set (totally respect his talent and really enjoy the
pieces he writes musically, but his genre just makes it unlistenable to me),
and it was probably one of the most brilliant/memorable performances I've ever
seen. I'm generally not impressed by random lighting setups because they're
impersonal to the performance. Just set them up, have them go off at certain
points of the music and you're done.

Everything on his stage was choreographed down to a T including his own
movements, and when the crowd coos and freaks over every single detail (some
of us not believing what we were seeing), it just makes it all the more
immersive. Even knowing that he puts such detail into his shows doesn't
prepare you for what you see. None of the videos I've found online even begin
to do it justice.

I didn't get to see ISAM when it came through, but I'd be interested in seeing
how they compare in fidelity.

~~~
stevenameyer
He is uncompromising when it comes to the quality of his live shows. It's
clear he cares a lot about them and is trying to master what he does. And
wether or not you like his style of music I think that people need to respect
that.

~~~
mnicole
Absolutely. I would highly recommend everyone go to one of his performances at
least once in your life, even if you think you'll need to put some earplugs
in. I was way in the back and at 5'2 I can hardly see through a crowd, but
standing on my tip-toes for an extra hour was beyond worth it.

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mnicole
Great topic!

Daedelus (<http://daedelusmusic.com/>) is one of my favorite artists, not only
because of his tunes but because of how much fun he has just rocking on stage
with his Monome/various toys, and how it faces it towards the audience to show
what he's doing, even if that's a personal positioning preference. He's also
in a documentary about circuit bending available on YouTube that's worth
watching called Glitch (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvlYM5Js450>). Your
ears won't thank you, but your geek will.

Other artists that are entertaining to watch fiddle with their digital
instruments are Side Brain (hacks gaming peripherals to make music), No Sir E
and the ever-wonderful Shigeto.

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MaggieL
Here's such music you don't need to ignore.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA>

~~~
freshbreakfast
you know, i remember being obsessed with this vid when it came out. i'm
embarrassed i didn't work this into the essay. i might need to...

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tb303
Wait, this is saying that a genre that was created through instrumachines —
people playing a bunch of old roland x0xes, then later the sp-12s/1200s, then
later MPCs, live — will somehow be revolutionized by the newer forms of the
same instrumachines?

I think essentially the argument is that "laptops are not any fun to play live
with" and really, that was just a short phase of electronic music. We all did
that for a few years, then found our controllers, monomes, modulars, mpcs,
etc. much more fun, and have just returned to what was already there. A laptop
can be an instrumachine for the right artist with the right controllers (e.g.,
Daedelus and his monome <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCzHpQtNduE>) attached
to it, just as an MPC + SP1200 have been the right instrumachine for hiphop
(KRS-One & BDP use one next to the turntables in every concert) for decades.

~~~
freshbreakfast
I'm not saying the earlier gen synths, controllers and laptops are any less
legit than newer gen stuff. I'm thinking strictly from the fan's perspective,
the non-musician's perspective, the concert-goer's perspective. That is, how
visually obvious is your live performance gifts from the floor? To a digital
musician, it might sound reductive. But live performance is it's own beast.

~~~
tb303
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqXayqIrAYE>

=D

this goes back way before "the earlier gen synths, controllers, and laptops"

see my other comment. it's awesome you have come to this realization, but what
i am trying to help you understand is that this is cyclical. it is not a
revolution, it is how instruments evolve and has been for ages.

~~~
freshbreakfast
gotcha. yeah this vid is pretty crazy, down to the "Playing it by ear" bit.

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daviddaviddavid
The concept reminds me of the "synthe-axe drumitar" played by Future Man from
Bela Fleck and the Flecktones.

<http://flecktones.com/page/Futuremans-Synthaxe-Drumitar>

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pfraze
Two cool things to see on this topic: anything by beardyman (who uses a mic
and processors to emulate just about any genre you want) and imogen heap's
magical music gloves (<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6btFObRRD9k>)

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bane
I guess I'm getting old, but the demo both looks and sounds like a man
virtuoustically playing a pair of typewriters.

More seriously, I think this is cool, but a little overblown in someways,
we've technically been able to do this kind of performance (using sliced up
digital samples) for a very very long time -- decades. Digital sample
machines, of many kinds of forms have been used in live shows for a long time.
Think of your favorite 80's new wave band and they probably had live shows
with digital synth triggering samples off of a keyboard.

I think this is more of a cultural shift than any kind of technological shift,
but interesting nonetheless. The methods of playing these things is much more
akin to being a drummer or an old school DJ scratchoff than anything else. But
just like complaints about all modern music being overcompressed, these guys
have to work off of only two performance vectors: sick beats and cool samples.
There's no dynamics in the performance or playing with tonality. Glissando,
spicatto, breath control, tonguing, etc. are all right out the window.

Music has been reduced to learning and playback a la guitar hero. A generation
of musicians, messing around with samples from music they themselves could
never perform.

We talk a lot about technology we no longer have the means to make and
knowledge lost in fires and wars and natural decay, and toy with that idea in
sci-fi and real life. However, today we certainly have a much greater pantheon
of fantastic accomplishments in these areas.

But I wonder if we should consider a similar phenomenon with culture and
cultural skills? We may be entering a time were previous cultural knowledge,
like how to play piano virtuostically is lost, exchanged with how to play a
sampler at similar high levels of skill. We may have lost the means to
transmit that culture forward to future generations, but outside of a vague
sense of loss, nobody really cares because what we have now is also vast and
complex and has its own set of interesting skills that need to transmit
forward.

Is this the cultural equivalent of cleaning out the memetic closet to make
room for new stuff?

~~~
randy909
Totally with you up until the lost culture thing. More people know how to play
the piano virtuostically than ever. Culture is expanding and being recorded
permanently in the digital world. How are we losing it?

It reminds me of what the blue-man-group does. It's novel, a few people make a
lot of money doing it, but it's not the next electric guitar by any stretch.

I think one of the core attributes of EDM is that it is performed by machines.
The MPC-live thing seems like an effort to step backwards just to have
something to do on stage. I'd rather listen to someone mix a 808/909/303 live.
The subtle timing and tuning shifts they make are a thing of beauty (and
laptops don't do this). But that's probably just my preference for techno over
hip-hop/dubstep coming through.

Anyway, good article regardless.

~~~
bane
Yeah the 303 is a really interesting example, it offered several entirely
interesting performance vectors, almost none of which were tied to actually
playing the notes. Lots of people I know who used to do great 303 stuff barely
even knew what the letter notes along the keyboard were. But the little knobs
at the top gave them tons of ways to express the music that really aren't
typical in traditional musical performance. (I'd have killed to have a freq
cutoff and resonance cut off when I was studying classical violin).

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whiddershins
The grandfather of this exploration is Moldover and for the purposes of this
discussion ignore his current tendecy to involve an electric guitar in his
sets ... a recent development.

<http://moldover.com/>

<http://vimeo.com/moldover/live-at-future-everything-excerpts>

He ended up designing and building his own controllers using arcade buttons.

Since this is hacker news I'll point out the whole investigation is largely a
technology issue. Many studies have shown that expressiveness of great
instrumentalists rests on incredibly small timing variations, which ARE NOT
random. Because of latency and more especially jitter in the hardware/software
interface true virtuosity is either very hard or impossible to develop using
most currently available tools. What the actual acceptable level of machine
induced random variations are is a much debated point. This is why I pushed
Lippold Haken so hard to increase the sampling rate of the continuum
fingerboard to its current sub-millisecond levels. The underlying technology
of the madrona soundplane can be implemented at audio rate, which, by
definition, should be fast enough to obviate this need.

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mercuryrising
I'm always mystified when I see people's fingers move that quickly. I can see
myself typing on the keyboard, but it's a simple letter that comes out when I
press it. It might just be that it's so normal that I don't think it's cool
anymore, but people who can mix music like they type is just awesome to me.

Here's two more videos of people mixing/making cool music on the 'fly'

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baWlIzwksHs>

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTx3G6h2xyA>

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egypturnash
I am not a musician and I don't keep up with production methods too closely,
but this method of "load a bunch of loops into your devices, trigger them in
interesting manners" sounds almost EXACTLY like what I've read about the way
Orbital has been working since somewhere in the early 2000s.

I think the only difference is that the price of these kinds of looping tools
has dropped precipitously, so there's more people fooling with them.

(And I am not trying to disrespect the musicianship of people doing this. I'm
just questioning it being a NEW THING.)

~~~
tb303
Not a new thing at all, you're right.

Sidenote, totally trivial, but in case you care: Orbital only recently (past 5
years) moved to Ableton as a control hub, but still use a ton of outboard
gear. Before that they were running the rig off Alesis MMT-8s, and famous for
doing so. Those would trigger loops, yes, but they would trigger those loops
in samplers, which is why most orbital tracks loops are limited to starting,
stopping, looping, and getting cut up a tiny bit, not much more. The MMT-8s
are essentially step sequence loopers and arrangers, kind of the most
frustrating form of what the MPC-style offers. But since they were masters of
them, there was no reason to switch until something better (Ableton) came
along.

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adamnemecek
I've actually had a very similar thought recently. I also feel like it is
somewhat easier to master electronic music production (I know that it's still
hard but compare how much one knows after playing piano for 6 months with
learning Ableton for 6 months). I think that this is awesome since people will
be able to concentrate on making interesting music as opposed to learning the
instrument.

~~~
jetti
"I also feel like it is somewhat easier to master electronic music production
(I know that it's still hard but compare how much one knows after playing
piano for 6 months with learning Ableton for 6 months). I think that this is
awesome since people will be able to concentrate on making interesting music
as opposed to learning the instrument."

The thing is that Ableton isn't your instrument, it is just a way to arrange
what music you've already created. If you're going software based you would
have your synth(s) and then other plugins (VSTs) to modify your sound, each
with their own learning curve. Then you would have to learn Ableton or
whatever Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) you choose. Plus, since sounds are
being created from scratch there is a lot to learn about the theory of sound
so that you don't get frequencies overlapping. I know that I thought it would
be really easy going into it, but I have found that it is much harder than it
seems and I have a new found respect for those releasing their music.

~~~
adamnemecek
Correct, but Ableton includes a bunch of instruments out of the box so when I
said learning Ableton, I meant those as well. Furthermore, all the VSTs are
not that conceptually different. Like yeah Massive and Sylenth1 are different
but they still have an oscillator, envelope, LFO, filter and effects. And if
you understand how synthesis works and know one well picking up the other is
not that hard compared with say if you know how to play piano and want to
learn to play the guitar.

For me, not having frequencies overlap falls under mastering which I consider
to be kind of separate but related issue. If you wanted to be in a traditional
(as in, a band with 'real' instruments), you'd still have to learn that to
make your music sound good in addition to learning the instrument. And I still
think that learning Ableton (+VSTs) is easier than learning to play a 'real'
instrument. Minus maybe the bass guitar :-). It's definitely more fun which is
why I might think that it's easier. But it is true that in electronic music,
mastering is probably more important.

For anyone who's interested in this I can recommend this free book
[http://noisesculpture.com/how-to-make-a-noise-a-
comprehensiv...](http://noisesculpture.com/how-to-make-a-noise-a-
comprehensive-guide-to-synthesizer-programming) (they ask for your email).

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lignuist
Also revolutionized (seen that long before) the street music:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a1dHCmcJzg>

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dylanhassinger
Controllerism has been around for awhile. I discovered it via Moldover -

<http://www.youtube.com/user/moldover>

Before him, it was called "live pa"

~~~
aphexpusher
thanks for clearing that up. Controllerism does not seem to be all that new to
me.

~~~
koshatnik
'electronic dance music' does not seem to be all that new to me. I'm amused by
the idea that something popular in Europe for decades which originated in US
alternative cultures is only now catching on in US mainstream culture.

~~~
tb303
What's even more amusing is that sentiment ("electronic music is now catching
on") finds its way up every decade.

    
    
      80s -> Disco & House -> Pop, New Wave    
      90s -> House -> Pop    
      00s -> Electro & DnB -> Pop, Hiphop    
      10s -> Dubstep -> Pop, Hiphop
    

That's just a crappy sketch but i'm sure someone could flesh it out further.
The reality is that it's a continuum, things go in and out of style, what's
popular changes, the audience changes, but the music never really goes away,
we/you/i just don't know about it. Dubstep is simply the hair metal (80s),
grunge (90s) of the times, not a statement about electronic music's popularity
or unpopularity.

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freshbreakfast
Hey guys, I wrote this thing. And I know there must be disagreements with the
arguments here. Bring it on!

~~~
crucialfelix
Sure. Its actually going backwards. Back to a focus on the performer as a
simple human who does feats, macho virtuosity and does crowd conscious
manipulations.

What electronic music opened up is much larger. Music is internal, electric
(like our central nervous systems) and cosmic. The focus is in the body and
mind of the people experiencing it. Its in the speakers and on the dance
floor. The composer disappears, the audience disappears, the technique
disappears (and all that thinking about "is the performance technically
accurate/innovative ?")

As soon as you put some clown on the stage all the beauty evaporates and
people stand around yelling "woot" and generally not dancing. Or if they do it
involves fist pumping and making rock faces.

As soon as you put a live musician in the track then you start thinking about
technical execution and about what the musician is feeling and thinking. It
limits it. I love live musicians (I majored in Saxophone, I have a piano in my
room here), but I just want to point out that the revolution of electronic
music is that we took music past the limits of performance.

Its pure sound, pure feeling.

Also you should realize that even jungle, juke, IDM, breakcore are often
written with furious fingers and lots of live tweaking. And AraabMuzik is
using the auto rolls all the time and he has breaks that set the pace. And he
has the dynamics turned way down so its actually pretty hard to make a
mistake. Turntablists like Q-bert are a thousands times more impressive.
Listen to Sabar drumming and forget about the simple boom bap and cheap rolls
that AraabMuzik is doing here. Jungle at its peak twisted the mind with
intricate rhythms that really blew minds.

And people have been doing crazy live electronic performance for ooooh.... 60
years now. We used keyboards and drum pads and MPC/SP type machines.

~~~
TylerE
> Jungle at its peak twisted the mind with intricate rhythms that really blew
> minds.

You can't just throw something like that out there and not make
recommendations ;)

I gotta admit, I can't stand about 98% of EDM, but some small amount of it
actually is really good.

~~~
tb303
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TT9wUifJ-hQ>

> You can't just throw something like that out there and not make
> recommendations ;)

here's a podcast full of hive, tech itch, etc.

<http://www.mixcloud.com/lars-mion/unashamedly-nostalgic/>

This stuff was all done with intricate editing before izotope, audio damage,
etc. had one-button tricks to stutter and mangle.

Noisia, Phace, Rockwell, etc. are leading the new charge on d&b. Amazing shit.

~~~
TylerE
Ok, I have to admit that didn't really do much for me. I need a little bit of
melody... think more along the lines of like Massive Attack or vintage
Jamaican Dub.

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gnosis
Wow. That music is incredibly annoying.

~~~
geuis
To each their own. However, it helps if you define _which_ music you find
annoying. There are 3 distinct styles of music being mixed in those videos.
Araab's was one I enjoy. #2 was ok, #3 sounded bad and the guy looked like a 3
year old hitting blocks into a Fisher Price toy. Had no sense of the skill
level executed by Araab and #2.

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rasur
Aww, it's so sweet! Whatever next? DJ's learning to play an instrument?

~~~
stevenameyer
A lot of EDM artist do play instruments. A lot of them grew up with classical
training in the piano and to a fairly high level.

