How do I perform live and make it look good????

[tvdude]

I'm hoping someone or some people might be able to help me out.  I love dance and trance music.  I write it in OpenModPlug Tracker.  I live in the a very small town in the middle of nowhere, and have never been to a rave.  I'm sure many of the big dj's like tiesto write their music in a computer program.  How do they then take that to a stage and perform it live?  Do they get 12 inch records of all their samples and mix it?  I've seen video of Tiesto performing live and he's spinning records, but they are his own tracks ( as far as I know).  How do I perform in public when I write everything in a computer program?
I'm very interested in being able to perform live, so any help I can get would be great.  And sorry for being such a kook...lol...I just don't have the experience to know how this works....

BTW "Let The Music Take You Away" has been as high as number 11 on the top 40 chart at www.7161.com.   I'm not trying to be pompous, I just want to share my excitement.  I'm very proud of being voted into a music chart.  Regardless, anyone with some knowledge about performing tracker files live, please give me some insight.

Thanks very much.

[BooT-SectoR-ViruZ]

1st of all:
tiesto has a producer that writes the music for him. he just adds some
samples and stuff to the almost finished tracks (info from some tv-report)

2nd:
yeah, the big names in trance and other popular dance music prefer to dj with their own tracks... i wouldn't call that live.

3rd:
there are many different ways of playing live and most of them depend on which kind of equipment you're using. i know a lot of people who perform live with their tracker-software. (i'm also one of them)

another way is to bring a bunch of hardware equipment like the chemical brothers do. (as we're already talking big)

4th:
about looking good... you either already do or get a plastic surgent


:lol:

so long
erik

[tvdude]

Thanks for the reply BooT-SectoR-Viruz!

1st of all:
I had no idea tiesto had a producer that writes music for him...interesting...

2nd:
I assume they get vinyl of thier stuff pressed then

3rd:  
Please tell me how you perform tracked music on stage without just standing around and pressing one button every now and again to start and stop your song.  This is the category I fall in, so any information would be great.

4th:
Know any good plastic surgeons?

[LPChip]

OpenMPT has the features to perform life, by allowing you to switch patterns, and toggle channels during the last line on a pattern.

You can create a few patterns, and use your own skills to toggle channels on and off while jumping through different patterns.

[BooT-SectoR-ViruZ]

2nd:
I assume they get vinyl of thier stuff pressed then

unfortunately a little expensive for non-commercial musicians (~30-90€ per record)

3rd:  
Please tell me how you perform tracked music on stage without just standing around and pressing one button every now and again to start and stop your song.  This is the category I fall in, so any information would be great.

well basically i'm also not very innovative on that right now,
but i plan on involving more midi equipment and vocal experiments.
(vocal experiments means having my onboard soundcard as a separate channel and doing some chaotic stuff with vst-effects in a minihost on the mic-signal)

at the moment i use two program instances of modplug tracker, each one assigned to a different channel of my soundcard and send them to a dj mixer. so ompt one is channel one and ompt two is channel two on that mixer. this way you can dj your songs (although syncronizing is difficult).
in addition i do some editing of the vsti (playing with cutoff and stuff), insert/remove patterns according to crowd response and some variations on beats and melodies by muting or unmuting channels.
in addition to that one can disable "follow song" and do live pattern editing

and i guess there are a thousand more possibilities

4th:
Know any good plastic surgeons?

i don't need one


btw. i guess you're not performing in front of 10.000 people like the big names do, so just relax...

[pelya]

To schedule some pattern to be played next hold CTRL and click on it in Pattern Orders List (that cannot be performed with keyboard shortcut ). Right-click on channel header to Mute/Unmute it (or create shortcuts in setup for that). Press "Keypad +" and "Keypad -" keys in Pattern Orders List to have some pattern played twice.

Someone on forum got another idea of live performance:
Load your song and play it. Then switch to Instrument tab, pick some instrument and perform solo on keyboard while your song playing on background. That's not saved with song though  :? .

You may also record solo live in pattern editor. You may even use 2 different instruments for it using Keyboard Split toolbar.
In Pattern tab press "View/Channel Manager", there press "Record select", then left-click on channels 1-8 (they become green) and right-click on 9-16 (they become red). Close manager, select your favorite instrument in "Main Instrument" toolbar and select your second instrument in "Keyboard Split" toolbar.
Now set cursor on channel 1 and play some notes. Notice that each note recorded in different channel up to channel 8. Keyboard rows "ASDFG" and "ZXCVB" will play first instrument, and row "QWERTY" will play second one (the best place to use drums IMHO. You need to create custom instrument that have different drum sample on each note for that). Also note that the "]" key will play instrument 1 - that's a bug :lol: .
You may also press Shift+Key - that will play chord of 4 notes - you may modify chords with the "Chord Editor" button on toolbar.
If you have MIDI keyboard notes played on it will go to channels 9-16 (you should enable MIDI Record).
If you have Record button not pressed, your notes will be played, but will not get recorded in a pattern.
Also enable in setup options in General tab "Play new notes while recording" (nothing will work without it), "Record note off" (you need it unless you have no looped samples), "Automatic delay commands" (that will record precise time of your keypress instead of sticking to beat).
You may also want to increase your pattern size to 1024 rows :wink: . Or post feature request to have keyboard row "12345" play notes.
Now press "Play pattern" and perform live .

Did that bunch of text helped you?
Let's discuss any ideas of how make ModPlug to be public-performance tool. To me is seems to be like that:
Four trackers plus one fast PC with OpenMPT plus two PC keyboards plus three MIDI keyboards plugged, each one playing different instrument. The extreme of that is live tracking over Internet on Modplug Tracker Deathmatch servers :lol: (of course if you can bear 200ms note delay).
Some kind of macro shortcuts - e.x. you press some button and 10-notes drumbeat inserted from clipboard to channel 75 (your cursor stays where it was), you press another button and current instrument changes to another one (and when you release that button it changes back) and so on.
Add support for MIDI wheels/pedals/controllers in OpenMPT.
Create list of PC keyboard models best suited for OpenMPT (mine has "\" key near Backspace and can't handle more than 5 keys pressed at once. Google search for "Gaming keyboard" got some oddly-shaped expensive devices with extra-sized WASD keys).

[BooT-SectoR-ViruZ]

Four trackers plus one fast PC with OpenMPT plus two PC keyboards plus three MIDI keyboards plugged, each one playing different instrument. The extreme of that is live tracking over Internet on Modplug Tracker Deathmatch servers :lol: (of course if you can bear 200ms note delay).

unfortunately one will need 6 arms for that or quite skilled feet

:lol:

[pelya]

Four trackers plus one fast PC with OpenMPT plus two PC keyboards plus three MIDI keyboards plugged

unfortunately one will need 6 arms for that or quite skilled feet

:lol:

Oh yeah. Large pipe organ has full octave range and additional feet keyboard and controlled by single man    . I wanna full octave range too  :cry:  with additional USB PC keyboard    .

[tvdude]

There is some good information here.  I appreciate everyones response!  I have accidently stumbled across some of the "live" applications of Modplug in the past, like jumping to certain patterns, and that sort of thing, so maybe I'll dig a little deeper into the program and get some ideas for a good stage performance.  Just for the record, I haven't performed yet ever, so this is a learning experience.  All of my music is created in ModPlug on a Hewlett Packard Pavillion 5250, with an Intel Core Duo Processor T2400.  I use a lot of vsts, and it hasn't glitched up bad yet.  I would really like to see one of my tunes played in a club someday.  That is, of course, if I write a good dance tune instead of just electronica...lol...

[Sam_Zen]

For some months now I'm practising the realtime playing of modules with OMPT on a weekly basis wit two other musicians in my studio.
Done on an old laptop with W98, but it works fine. I use the keyboard play-along with some internal instrument too sometimes, but this is executed with a tiny delay, also on a faster machine. So more difficult for the timing of the playing.
As LPChip stated, some functions are added to OMPT for live playing, with the introduction of : change switch at transition.
There is one option though which is still missing imo. 'stop playing song at transition of current pattern'. This would be an elegant way of stopping the song. ( Sorry Rewbs, I'm nagging again about it )

I found out that it is more convenient to remake an existing module into a dedicated version for live-performance.
In fact one can strip down the module back to only the basic, unique patterns it has. In a fixed composition, the pattern-row may look like
2 - 3 - 4 - 4 - 4 - 4 - 2 - 3 - 5
For a live perf. it is no longer necessary to have, as here, four patterns with the same content. It's just a matter of switching the 'pattern loop' on/off when pattern 4 is playing. So 2 - 3 - 4 - 2 - 3 - 5 is enough. On could even go a step further by reducing to the basic material 2 - 3 - 4 - 5, if one knows how to jump in the row.

Another important live aspect is the mute / unmute channel option within one pattern. A good exercise would be to play with just one pattern in a loop, and try to make a short song with it. Just by 'introducing' instruments at the next transition, or removing them.
You will find out different combinations of channels, so in fact every pattern can produce certain 'sub-patterns' from its own material, which can be used as a unit.

By the way, the options in the 'player' tab can be useful too for live playing. I know they are simple effects, but nevertheless.

[pelya]

at the moment i use two program instances of modplug tracker, each one assigned to a different channel of my soundcard and send them to a dj mixer. so ompt one is channel one and ompt two is channel two on that mixer. this way you can dj your songs (although syncronizing is difficult).

Maybe you may use quadro output and use just one MPT instance? Are you doing that to have 2 MIDI keyboards playing different instruments? Maybe you the one that needs my last proposed feature   ? Or that's just in case one MPT crashes before auditorium  ?

[Sam_Zen]

'Quadro output' triggers an old wish : having the choice between two stereo output devices, and assign different channels to them.

[BooT-SectoR-ViruZ]

at the moment i use two program instances of modplug tracker, each one assigned to a different channel of my soundcard and send them to a dj mixer. so ompt one is channel one and ompt two is channel two on that mixer. this way you can dj your songs (although syncronizing is difficult).

Maybe you may use quadro output and use just one MPT instance? Are you doing that to have 2 MIDI keyboards playing different instruments? Maybe you the one that needs my last proposed feature   ? Or that's just in case one MPT crashes before auditorium  ?

sorry, but i never heard of quadro output...

the main reasons for 2 ompt instances are:
1. sending tracks to different dj-mixer channels
2. avoiding lag, dropouts and other shit when loading a new module while another is playing

[pelya]

sorry, but i never heard of quadro output...

the main reasons for 2 ompt instances are:
1. sending tracks to different dj-mixer channels
2. avoiding lag, dropouts and other shit when loading a new module while another is playing

1. Set in Setup

And use S90 and S91 effects.
You're using single soundcard with many outputs, don't you?
2. In Windows 2000 many programs may share single output device (so you may listen to Winamp music in games). So you may run even 4  MPT instances   .

[BooT-SectoR-ViruZ]

1. i have, but i don't see how this would simplify my setup / fit my needs

2. man, have a song with heavy use of vsti playing and load a module with big samples and a lot of vsti. if you don't have a 5GHz cpu and 2GB ram you'll probably experience some dropouts in playback while loading the other song. this can be avoided by using two instances...

i would appreciate it very much, if you'd stop babbeling senseless stuff where it doesn't belong