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Praises to DJ C.A.!


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Let me be the first to congratulate and praise the highlight of my time at the NAMM show. Our fearless moderator Craig Anderton laying down the phat beats at the MPN gathering. Craig showed his stuff with great flare, dynamics and spontaneity in front of a large crowd of industry folks. This is the first time I've heard his music after years of reading his words and I must say that this guy rocks. Craig battled the low output of the PA system to deliver a sample pushin', fader ridin', string pluckin' , solo button, mutin' mix with extreme precision and taste. Nice to see you so happy in your domain.

All the best and hope you enjoyed the performance as much as I did.

Dave Reitzas

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>>All the best and hope you enjoyed the performance as much as I did.<<

 

I had SO MUCH FUN, it was one of my favorite times ever playing in the US. What I couldn't believe was Russ beat-matching to the sequencer, throwing down beats on top of what I was doing in Reason. We'd only played once before at the Winter Music Conference, but it was easy: he DJed, I overdubbed guitar. What he was doing the other night really surprised me...it was one of the reasons I was so into it. Just goes to show something about the importance of collaboration.

 

If anyone's curious about the setup and how the sounds were made, I'd be glad to post if there's interest.

 

There's nothing like live performance!!!

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so are turntables going to be replaced by laptops? what a crazy setup you had going on from the pic i saw on the other post... A LAPTOP! whodathunkit. just goes to show how quick technology is moving these daze. sure beat lugging a drumkit/amps/et al to a gig. all you need is a backpack!

alphajerk

FATcompilation

"if god is truly just, i tremble for the fate of my country" -thomas jefferson

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>>so are turntables going to be replaced by laptops?<<

 

No, Russ was using two turntables and a dual CD player. He was doing the DJing. The laptop replaced the Ensoniq ASR-X I had been using. I suppose some would think what I was doing could be considered "DJing," but it's more like mixing/playing.

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>> If anyone's curious about the setup

>> and how the sounds were made,

>> I'd be glad to post if there's interest.

 

Hi Craig,

 

I'm interested in the setup!

I'm sure others are too.

 

Thanks, ell

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INDEED! I second Dave Reitzas' post about C.A.'s excellent musical entertainment. Hey, you're right, Dave, getting up alone in front of ANYONE can be intimidating, let alone a huge crowd of industry types! Rock on, Craig!
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Okay, here's the setup.

 

On the guitar end of things, a Peavey Milano going through Line 6 POD, followed by a Goodrich stereo volume pedal.

 

On the computer side, I was running Reason on a Powerbook G3, connected to an Opcode MIDIport 32 USB interface. The only reason for the interface was to accommodate the Peavey PC1600 fader box.

 

I also had a Minidisc with transitions recorded on it for when I needed to exit from one Reason song and load another. Unfortunately, at the moment Reason cannot transition smoothly from one song to the next.

 

All audio from guitar, computer, and MD went to a MIDIMAN 6-input analog mixer. The thing is tiny and really quiet!

 

Now about Reason. What I did was load up each song with 16 digital audio loops, using 16 NN19 samplers. These are loops I had mostly generated on the ASR-X when I was using that for my live performance solo act, although some were commercially available loops, mostly from the Wizoo and eJay libraries.

 

I also loaded up two mixers to handle the 16 outputs from the samplers. A couple tunes used the Redrum drum machine, and one used the Subtractor analog synth.

 

Each mixer channel fader was assigned to one of the PC1600 faders. Also, each channel's solo button was assigned to a PC1600 button. This is what allowed me to solo just fills, for example, to provide a breakbeat effect.

 

The loops were playing at all times, continuously. Playing protocol basically consisted of bringing the audio in and out in (hopefully) musically-interesting ways. Once things were cooking along, sometimes I'd play along on guitar.

 

Russ was DJing and often threw in beats and various pieces of audio over what I was doing. After I figured a tune had run its course, I turned to Russ and he picked it up from there with either vinyl or CDs. He's a great DJ.

 

Of course I'd be glad to field any other questions about this...

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Forgot to mention a couple fine points...

 

I have other presets in the PC1600 for altering POD parameters via MIDI. Makes it more general purpose than just a Reason controller. Also, I use the PC1600 snapshot feature to save mixes I particularly like, on the fly. Then I can send the snapshot whenever I want an instant change to a mix, or revert to a previously-used mix.

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Craig, Dave, everyone -- did you check out Melodyne? http://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/biggrin.gifhttp://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/biggrin.gifhttp://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/biggrin.gifhttp://www.musicplayer.com/ubb/biggrin.gif

 

I gotta have one!

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