Members tehJESSEH Posted May 3, 2011 Members Share Posted May 3, 2011 Hey guys, First off, I wanna say thanks to those who replied to my thread the other night about the amp vs. speaker wattage question before my gig, don't wanna bump that thread up so I'm thanking you here! Thanks! So our band would love to gravitate towards using more samples in our live gigs. We already do quite a bit of that but only very simple stuff - drum samples, short vocal samples, ambient samples etc. We want to start doing something along the vein of this: Long vocal samples or melodic, riffy guitar/synth lines in the back just to spice things up. To keep long, tempo-less samples like these in time... is using a click track the best bet? We've tried using tap tempo but it just isn't accurate - or maybe, it's too accurate. Either way, we haven't really been able to do this properly. Setting up a click track seems like alot of work, too. We have no in-ear monitors, let alone any individual monitors. Will some plain old electronics-store bought earbuds work? What are some other suggestions you guys have to playing live samples and keeping them in time? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Shaster Posted May 3, 2011 Members Share Posted May 3, 2011 Sample the stuff you want to the tempo you normally play it. Then just play back the stuff in time. IME you won't notice the very slight difference. Especially since there will be a human playing it back - ie. hitting the keys assigned to the samples. For example.... you want eight bars of four different vocal whole notes to play in the chorus (repeated once). Set your click/metronome to 120 (or whatever) and sample the notes. When you do the song live, check your portable metronome at 120 bpm (unless you know where 120 is), count the tune and there you go. Maybe when you get to the chorus you'll be at 121 bpm or 123, or 119 but it will make little difference. When it's gonna matter is with a series of Zappa like 16th notes that are counterpoint to other frenetic riffs. Otherwise you should be fine. Playing to clicks for infrequent passages can be annoying - the pros do it, but it's still annoying unless you like that kind of thing. And it's funny, I was just talking to a drummer yesterday about this very thing. He plays theatre shows where there might be a hundred or more bars of click and then suddenly there's a sample.... of some sort. He has to play to click for all that time before, just to hit the sound on the mark (we're talking prerecorded tracks here). My opinion - from someone who played in a live/sequence band for ten years. Re: that band on Letterman, nice cape Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members kmart Posted May 3, 2011 Members Share Posted May 3, 2011 What are some other suggestions you guys have to playing live samples and keeping them in time? Beat Bug on the snare MAY help, but...still prone to user error/drummer inconsistency. Another thing to consider/think about...Is someone going to be triggering/playing these samples live, or will they be sequenced? If they're played live, depending on the gear you're using, the person triggering them may be able to manipulate tempo of the samples on the fly, and match the tempo the rest of the band is playing at, etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members mrcpro Posted May 3, 2011 Members Share Posted May 3, 2011 If you don't want to use a click, one option would be to chop your long samples into much shorter ones, assign each short sample to a single key in chromatic order, and have your keyboard player trigger them manually one after the other on the "one". That way if things drift a bit they will reset when the next short sample is triggered. As a keyboard player I've done that in the past. I've also set up click tracks for bands too - which is the usual way of things. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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