So far I have been taking the approach of making the whole of the music in the time of playing; the idea of this was to remove the mystery around electronic music making and make the music something exclusive for the very moment it was being performed. This is a very extreme approach, since most electronic musicians play prepared tracks in the stage. I have not been very successful by making this. In the other hand , I have been making music in my DAW (Reaper) that has been well appreciated by others.
It happens that in live creation of music, it takes too much time for me to build up into the interesting parts. The intention of my music is not to be something hard to play, that people would say: “wow, he is really good” but rather, that people would enjoy listening. But I was indeed trading the enjoyability of the music for the spontaneity of it’s creation. In other words: It doesn’t matter If I am literally playing all the instruments in front of the audience, if the music sucks.
I sent several demo videos which were a conversation terminator with all venues and people I tried to contact. So I was considering to include some prepared music in my performance by using some dj tools such as traktor, to the offer more interesting for venues. After all, I was the creator of those tracks, and making the music was what I most enjoy. Then it came the Electribe: I won a prize from an IXL contest, that granted me 400 dollars in amazon. Instead of buying what I would have considered the best designed and most useful tool (Ableton Push), I bought just what attracted me most.
For a fact, all the Electribe functions are better covered by the Maschine. I can make whatever I can make in Electribe by using the Maschine; and indeed the sequencer in the Electribe is the worst I have seen (without considering my own creations) But the limitations of the Electribe brought me some insight. I now can’t make the tracks live, on the go. I started producing my tracks by using the Electribe practically as a VST, by plugging it to the DAW midi outputs, and back to the audio input. Yes, a VST that can’t encode more bit depth than 16 bits. But for some reason I started producing a lot more of music and melodies. Is just that when the tracks are pre-prepared, despite the limitations of the Electribe, designing the playability is so much easier. So now I somehow found the sweet spot between putting pre-recorded tracks in a turntable and making the whole track from scratch, live. I now have it MIDI-sequenced in the Electribe, and I can launch it and tweak it to a certain extent, while Maschine will allow me to put an additional real-time created layer on top.
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