New to Sequencing On Stage

[b3beater]

After many years of swearing that I would never use sequencing live I find myself in the situation where I need to start doing just that. I have a few questions if everyone can bare with them:

To give you a little background, I plan on using a Motif ES and a Roland X6 on stage. The music will be primary 80's cheesy pop and some late 70's dance thrown in there.

I've been asked to figure out running sequencing from the system. Most will be backing tracks however I'm starting to get the feeling that there may not be a actual bass player in future.

Some of the questions that pop up are:

1) Do I have to use a laptop since I already have sequencing availble to me onboard with both units.

2) Any thoughts on which one would be the master?

Any other concerns that should be brought to my attention would really great as well as any recomendations for companies that sell pre-made midi traxs. I would rather make them all on my own but I'm think that I may not have time to make all of them and would like to have something to fall back on to fill in the holes.

Oops, just thought of more questions...

What is the best may to send the audio to board? Just a stereo mix... stems...?

And would the rig allow me to set up both synths upon calling up a sequence? That would be just grand!


Thanks everyone in advance for helping out and suffering through the post!

[AnalogUniverse]

hmm.. there are a lot of questions in there, and i can't answer all of them but i'll take a stab at a few..

first off, it would be helpful to know what degree of sequencing you need. are you just going to be playing composed pieces straight through? or will you jam out at all? are you going to need to sequence in real time? meaning, sequence a track or number of tracks during the performance.

i'm not familiar with the extent of the features on these boards, but, if all you require is prerecorded sequencing with no real time editing, i'm sure they'll be more than up to the task, and a laptop won't be neccesary. if you need more advanced features, it's probably best to check the manuals for your synths and see if they can handle it.

getting both synths to play together should not be a problem.. midi patch changes and the like are fairly straightforward.

how you send audio to the board also depends on your needs. whether or not you'll be using external effects, or if you want eq or compression once you're out of the synth, etc....

[the1Hub]

there are some advatages to having a laptop be the sequencer. one is easy editing that can be done quickly by working on multiple tracks for arrangment and so on. also a laptop would alow you to send a click on a seprate audio path to the drummer/band. idont think the motif well let you assign the click to anything but the main outs, i have no idea about the roland. of course if your laptop goes done then youve got some problems. another benifit to using a laptop is the ability to play real audio tracks without using all your internal sampling time on the motif. this was the swaying factor for me chosing a laptop over a hardware box. now its too the point were i dont use any midi. i just bring a controller key board for the parts i play live, i mostley play bass, and just use a modified protools/reason sessions from the original recordings for are songs. i prefer real audio sense if will not hang any notes like some midi setups can. with protools (any DAW really) i can create individual monitor mixes for each member of the band wich is really helpfull. to me the laptop gives me so many more options that its worth the cost.

my rig it if your curious it a powerbook g4 1.33 756ram 002 rack and a firewire drive. hasnt crashed on me yet

if you have any specific questions beyond this PM me