My introduction to the laptop live performance format was at a tight little techno party in Toronto in 2001. Robert Henke of Monolake and San Francisco’s Joshua ‘Kit’ Clayton headlining along with several other live PA artists and DJs. I was helping set up for the event so I got into the venue early, one of the lucky few to be privy to Mr. Henke’s sound-check. At first, I was disappointed. His setup seemed to consist of a run of the mill laptop and a MIDI controller, nothing more. For an avowed gearhead like myself, it was nothing to sneeze at.

As time went by, I remember being intrigued by the little fader box he had connected to his laptop – it looked like something you would build from a kit at Radio Shack – and as he warmed up, he turned to Clayton and said, ‘Listen to this.’ With his index finger he spun a dial on the box and the glitchy tech-house track pounding out of the sound system suddenly skipped and stuttered like a scratched-up CD. Everybody present nodded in clinical appreciation.

It was an effect that could only exist in the digital world, the tactile manipulation of a sound, and for me, it represented a definite new era for live electronic music performance. If you could do that with one spin of a dial, what else was going on inside that laptop?

This is the third article in a series uncovering the various methods to the madness of the live performance of electronic music. Previous entries in this series have dealt with analog hardware and repeater setups, as well as sequencer-based and software/hardware hybrid setups. As the different techniques for live performance are examined, a common theme has been explored, the idea of control – control of sound, and control of technology. The series now concludes with an examination of what is quickly becoming the most recognizable format for live electronic music – the laptop. With the advent of Max/MSP, Ableton Live and tabletop fader boxes has come the next revolution in live electronic performance.

A Paradigm Shifted

On the face of it, one can see how the use of laptops could gain widespread popularity. The appeal of the laptop’s portability, where an entire studio can now fit inside a backpack, and the processing power of today’s computers, is a potent combination. But who could have predicted the proliferation of Laptop Battles, which are like DMC competitions for laptop lovers, where producers enter themselves in 3-minute man vs. machine battles against one another, with no external controllers allowed? Laptops have moved from being a means to an end (live performance) to being an end in itself, and it’s been a long, hard road towards ubiquity.

To put it mildly, laptop users have faced an uphill battle for acceptance in the electronic music world. From ‘point and click’ naysayers to analogue gear lovers finding themselves supplanted by the New, the laptop setup took some time to entrench itself as a platform for electronic music’s leading edge.

One of the turning points for the electronic music world was Aphex Twin’s infamous 1997 live tour, which saw Mr. James catching flack for his laid-back (literally on a couch) performances with a notebook computer. This seemingly lackadaisical approach to live performance ruffled more than a few feathers, and accusations of “press play and walk away” were flying.

The conflict cut to the heart of the quandary surrounding the performance of electronic music – what does it mean to be live? Muting and un-muting pre-recorded tracks on a sequencer, choosing between loops on a variety of drum machines wired together, or doing the same with virtual instruments on a computer? The arrival of this new form caused many producers to reflect on their own setups and reevaluate their methodology in the face of the new paradigm and honestly, some found their technique wanting.

Graham Miller, who performs hardware live PA’s as Intrepid Traveller as well as produces glitchy micro-house on a notebook, argues, “ Laptop music sounds like laptop music. That's not a bad thing necessarily, it's just that software and midi controllers have their own sonic aesthetic, a digital aesthetic.” J. Hunsberger, who has released records on Cynosure, Revolver, Blank, Tuning Spork, and Textone, disagrees. “I think the technology has advanced to a level where the sound is being modified so little by what the computer’s processing it that it is unnoticeable to the human ear. I don’t believe you can tell it’s a laptop.”

Maxed Out

Cycling ’74, a California-based niche software firm, is the current purveyor of the Holy Grail of live performance software – Max/MSP. Max/MSP is a ‘graphical programming environment’ that has been around in one way, shape or form since the 1980s when it was born at a French music research institute. It’s an application that’s not for the faint of heart; its designers tout it as a way to “control anything with anything.” Heady stuff. Max is a platform for the creation of programs built by connecting graphical objects together. These objects, or ‘patches,’ can be used as applications programmed by the user to do pretty much anything, and are then connected to each other via virtual patch cords. MSP, which stands for “Max Signal Processing” (or “Miller S. Puckette” after the name of the software’s creator, if you like,) is a network of objects that facilitates the flow of audio signals from one patch to the next, allowing the producer to perform real-time audio manipulation using the Max platform, with features such as MIDI implementation, hard disk recording, waveform display and editing, and space for VST plug-ins. Its open-ended nature is attractive to those looking for something other than 16-bar loops.

Those who rely on Max/MSP for their live performances are worshipped as programming wizards on the one hand, and derided as nerds on the other.

Live™ and Direct

If Max/MSP is the cult favourite among live performers and the electronic avant-garde, then Ableton Live is the blockbuster hit, with producers of all stripes and genres turning on to its interface. This piece of software has sent many gearheads packing and rules the roost, bar none. A live sequencing tool rather than a sound source, Live has won a loyal group of fanatical followers the world over, hungrily waiting the next software updates.

Ableton was founded by German producer Gerhard Behles, who along with Robert Henke, made music as Monolake. Live debuted in 2001 and quickly made waves in the computer-based music-making community. For many producers who wished to put their growing software and VST collection to work in a live format but who didn’t want to put their musical career on hold while learning C++, Ableton Live was the right software package in the right place at the right time.

Like Max/MSP, Ableton is a platform for the manipulation of audio signals. Loops of audio can be stretched or shrunk to fit the tempo of a track just by dropping it into the sequencer. Its interface is intuitive and designed with live performance in mind, while retaining many top of the line DAW features to make it a studio in its own right. Virtual instruments and effects are only a mouse click away. Live takes the best elements of pattern-based hardware sequencers and amplifies them with the dedicated power of software, bringing in degrees of automation not possible with standard hardware setups.

“Live has changed the way I write music,” says J. Hunsberger, who is quickly making a name for himself as a live performer as well as a producer. “It’s a full on production centre. You don’t need to bounce it to anything else to finish your tracks. It’s the majority of what I use for sequencing and creating live shows. I love it and the consensus across the board is that it’s sweeping the electronica industry.”

Hunsberger has reconciled the hardware/software debate by using Ableton Live as a sequencing and performance platform while relying on outboard gear for his sound sources. He also believes that even if a program like Live gets widespread acceptance and levels the playing field for producers and performers, there is little danger of a homogenization of musical output. “Until they introduced the drum machine in Live 4, Live was not a sound source in any way. So we’re not at a great risk of having everyone assimilate to the same sound, because it’s still all about what you put into it,” says Hunsberger. “That said, I think some of the manipulation tools are recognizable, and can certainly be picked out as ‘Live’ functions like the time stretch feature.”

Revenge of the Nerds

In the world of production and live performance it almost seems like you need a computer science degree to understand the ever-shifting software frontier, and venues exist for the exchange of musical and technical ideas for the laptop set. Montreal’s annual Mutek Festival, for example, is as much an interdisciplinary academic conference as it is a musical showcase. Featuring some of the leading edge electronic music artists both behind their laptops and behind symposium panel lecterns, Mutek is a study of state of the art sound science. Known to draw out chin-stroking hipsters rather than glowstick-twirling hedonists, Mutek feels like a Power Point presentation set to the sound stylings of such laptop luminaries as Akufen, the Mole, Mike Shannon, Egg, and Ricardo Villalobos. Hunsberger himself was a featured performer at the 2004 installment.

The question is, at what point does it become less about the music and more about the technology or the software? Hunsberger thinks it’s just different strokes for different folks. “Lots of people are really into the technology side of it. At Mutek you’ve got a lot of software people sharing ideas, but those people still appreciate the music that’s being made with the software.”

Computer music guru Kim Cascone has argued that the medium is no longer the message; instead the tool has become the message. Cascone says that thanks to the importance given to digital audio tools in the production of electronic music, musicians are as apt to trainspot a particular plug-in as they are to single out the type of synth used in a track. In this fashion, plug-ins are the new white labels, with some performers trading choice patches back and forth with one another, while others keep their signal processing cards close to their chest, so as not to give away the secrets to their individual sound. With the almost limitless selection of plug-ins, creating your own method of affecting the sound is vital.

Many top live performers mix business with pleasure by designing applications by day and using those applications to rip apart dance floors by night. Cycling ’74 counts micro-glitch maverick Kit Clayton as one of its premier software developers, and Monolake’s Robert Henke is deeply involved in the ongoing development of Ableton Live.

Software Shoegazers

The burgeoning laptop scene, if not the technology itself, has its detractors. Miller is unconvinced that laptop live performances are anything special. “The laptop is by no means a musical cure-all despite what's its champions would have you believe. It raised just as many problems as it solves especially in the realm of performance. Eye contact is dead.”

To be fair, this is a criticism that has been lodged against electronic music performers since the dawn of dance music. Armed with expectations derived from ingrained rock music sensibilities, dance music audiences had to unlearn and adapt to new performance paradigms as performers hid amongst stacks of electronic gear, pushing buttons like George Jetson and only keeping one eye on the crowd, if they were lucky. With electronic music crowds acclimatized to the hardware format, it was a logical progression for the less-visually-engaging laptop paradigm to undergo criticism.

“I think it's important to show people, albeit subtly, that when you're not doing anything, nothing is changing,” says Drew Smith A.K.A. MUX. This can be difficult for the laptop performer, who, safely separated from the audience by the computer, might as well be checking their email or playing Half Life instead of performing. Public performances on laptops discourage trainspotting almost by design – the laptop itself is a shield from behind which the performer works his or her magic, and most hardware controllers are nothing to sneeze at physically. Says Smith, “I think the most important thing a dance music performance can have is a rapport between the dancefloor and the musician; we're in this together, and we're here to have fun.  Too many laptop folks can't seem to look up from their screens and make a connection with the people who paid to be there to see them.”

Some artists have gotten around the perceived barriers presented by laptops, with performers like Atom Heart and Sensorband setting up video displays to show the audience what is happening on the computer screen and the fader box. One only has to witness the Kiss-meets-Liberace costumes of Jamie Lidell or the barnyard shenanigans of Crackhaus to see how other performers have attempted to reconnect with the audience by bringing back an element of extroverted showmanship to electronic music performance.

Certainly the biggest advancement that has stifled criticisms that laptop performances consist of nothing other than a few spacebar taps and mouse clicks has been the proliferation of USB-MIDI control surfaces. Controllers made by companies like Novation, Kenton, Doepfer, and M-Audio allow producers to link software functions to hardware controls via MIDI. Some producers have explored other options – Jordan Teschke’s live PA consisted of Live connected to an 88-key control synth, with every single key from the lowest to highest octaves not reproducing musical notes, but controlling a function in the program.

Hunsberger believes the music is the message, and that the need for showmanship is overstated. “It’s about the music opposed to the show. I’d rather see someone focus on what they want to do musically rather than make sure the fire they’re breathing doesn’t burn their chin during a performance.” Hunsberger is convinced that if artists focus on the music, the rest will take care of itself. “Is a guy standing behind a laptop interesting to watch? Not really. But forget what the crowd wants, I’m going to give them what it is that I do and hopefully that’s the reason that they want to come out and see me.”

Building Blocks

Taking a quick look at Hunsberger’s laptop as it runs Ableton Live, one may be excused for thinking that it’s little more than a bunch of coloured cells on a spreadsheet, or a stack of mixed Lego bricks covering the screen. In fact the bricks or cells represent audio loops or MIDI information, arranged top to bottom in tracks that allow Hunsberger to switch between them at will during a live performance. The audio loops stacked one atop the other are grouped by sound or effect, some having slight variations on the main theme to give the illusion of a sequence that can be changed back and forth while retaining the same overall feel through a variety of techniques unique to the software world.

One such technique is known as ‘scrubbing,’ using a mundane sound engineering practice to work musical magic, where the start point of a loop can be moved forwards and backwards while the loop is in play, resulting in an unsettling shuffling effect that is critical to the glitch techno sound. These start point movements can be recorded and the modified loop then skips automatically as it repeats. To replicate this in a hardware environment would require an itchy trigger finger on the sequencer stop/start button, to say the least, but all it takes is a few herky-jerky clicks and drags of the mouse to modify the audio.

Hunsberger crafts a live set in two ways, by programming in Live from the outset, and by deconstructing his finished tracks into easily-manipulated chunks of data. “Some tracks will appear first in a live show before they are sequenced into a full song. I’ll be building a song within Live as opposed to a finished, sequenced song, and in some cases I’ll take a song and decompose it and take it back to its components so I can manipulate the song in a live fashion and have more control over it and change it on the fly. It works both ways.”

Live performance and production software has not brought about an end to loop-based performances, although now instead of MIDI loops, producers deal with loops of audio imported from elsewhere or recorded directly into the program. Hunsberger sets up his tracks in loops of varying lengths. “It means I have to do a lot more, a lot of weird things like poly-rhythms show up when you run different loop lengths simultaneously, so it’s changing and rolling over time,” says Hunsberger. Shorter loops don’t give him much lag time to decide where to take his live set next, which is all a part of the fun.

For Hunsberger, the ubiquity of the Live platform and proliferation of laptop performers pushes artists to differentiate themselves from the pack, especially in an era where factory-produced presets and plug-ins programmed by the hottest dance producers of the moment are all the rage for those just starting out into the world of production. “You have to be generating your own sounds. Music is about being creative, and being innovative and doing things that haven’t been done before along with elements that people can already relate to. Electronic music is strange because you can buy sample CDs and regenerate what other people are doing. It’s my hope that the market can recognize the difference between creativity and preset-ville.”

Strong preparation ahead of time, a working knowledge of the loops and tracks that have been put together, and an arsenal of effects plug-ins are important components of a performance using Live, according to Hunsberger. “I set up different effects parameters I’ll be using in a performance. A large portion of my show at this point is already on the computer when I arrive. How I lay it out to the crowd is not, and that in my mind makes it a live show.”

Final Words

In detailing the many facets of live electronic music performance, from non-MIDI-based hardware and repeater setups, to sequencer formats and even non-linear software applications, it’s difficult to hold onto the myth that all live performers do is just press play on their sequencer or laptop and let the machines do the work. There is a human element of performance that goes into even the most limited live setup, and as long as a performer is not just playing back a DAT or minidisk, there’s little room for detractors to claim that live electronic music is anything other than what it is – a lot of preparation, practice, blood, sweat and tears.

For all the good-natured jibes, by and large, the hatchet has been buried and the debates have cooled between the software and hardware enthusiasts. When it comes to deciding what sort of setup to use when performing live, producers can agree on one thing – use whatever works. Hunsberger remains open-minded. “I think the exciting thing about electronic music is that you don’t ‘have’ to do anything. It’s about experimentation and pushing the boundaries of music and innovation.”

Smith says, “I especially like that the laptop people really seem to be pushing the envelope - like, when drum machines and synths hit the scene, everyone was using them to recreate popular music styles, or hybrid styles like synth-pop and progressive.  After a while, a new kind of music came into being, when 'the street found its own uses for technology'.  I think we're right on the cusp of that - right now, a lot of people seem to be mostly using computers to emulate hardware synths, except for some of the laptop folks who are really pushing things.  I expect we'll see some fantastic, completely new forms of music appear soon, stuff that just can't be created on traditional synth hardware.”

Says Miller, “ the great techno still eludes the mediocre. There is no software that can turn a bad musician into a great one. There is no substitute for talent or brilliance. And in that sense, music is as it always was. And will always be.”

Gear Lust: J. Hunsberger

Computer/Software

• PC laptop p4 with 2.6 gig HD, 1 gig RAM
• Ableton Live 4.1
• Kawai 16-channel MIDI controller
  

Sound Sources:

• Nord Lead 3
• Korg Electribe ER-1
• Korg MicroKorg
• TC Electronics Voice Prism
• Roland Jupiter 4
• Roland TR-707
• Roland TR-727
• LXP 100
• DBX compressor
• Miscellaneous microphones
  

Resources

• ableton.com
• cycling74.com
• microsound.org
• mutek.ca
• laptopbattle.org
• livepa.org

Controllers

• kentonelectronics
• doepfer
• m-audio
• edirol
• novationmusic
• evolution
  

The author would like to thank J. Hunsberger, Drew Smith, and Graham Miller for their assistance with this piece.