The Live Set-Up - Part 2: The Ableton Years!

So the decision to change to Ableton Live from Cubase was a massive one.

I knew about the capabilities of Live - I'd been playing around with various version of Live Lite since v4, but had never really properly got my head around how we'd transfer our songs into the Ableton way of thinking. However, to an extent, we'd already got into the whole 'songs as a series of scenes' idea, since we'd been doing loops in Cubase previously.

So the next question was one of control. With the Cubase method, we'd been using a small mixing desk to control mutes/fades for each element of the track. After some research (and friendly advice), I settled on an Evolution UC-33e. This ticked all the boxes - completely re-assignable, lots of faders, pretty robust looking... This, and a copy of Ableton Live 6, was the start of the new set up.

It was around this time that we recruited our drummer, Alex Lane. This added another problem to the mix: the drummer needs a click. Of course, this isn't really a problem - we just routed a generic Impulse drum machine playing an on-beat hi-hat in Ableton through a separate output of the sound card.

I was still running my trusty Roland JV1080 as my sound source, with piano sounds coming from my Alesis QS7. Andy was playing mostly electric guitar, and occasionally bass guitar. Owen was now a permanent fixture behind the Ableton controller, but had also added a turntable and DJ mixer to give us some scratching in the tracks that needed it. To top it all off we had a new female singer, Kay Juviler-Bacon, for a little extra flourish.

We decided it would be easier to run the effects for the vocals ourselves, to save the hassle of getting a sound guy to hook up our effects module and turning it on and off on the right tracks. This meant continuing to have an on-stage mixing console to route everything accordingly.

All these elements were giving us quite a technical headache, not least because of the amount of kit we had to lug around everywhere. We'd also faced criticism from sound guys at venues for taking too long to set up...

Investing in cases and cables is always a difficult choice. I mean, it's great spending loads of money on things that make great noises, or things covered in big knobs or flashing lights, but cases and cables are just things that make other more exciting things work better. It's a bit like trying to get excited about buying a new headlight bulb for your Ferrari.

Anyway, I had a case custom made for me by the Flightcase Warehouse - 12U top for the mixer, and 6U front and back for equipment. In this was a Yamaha MG166CX mixer, a Phonic PPC8000E power conditioner (for power distribution), a Behringer HA4700 headphone amp, a TC Electronic M350 effects processor, a Behringer 8-way DI rack and my trusty M-Audio Quattro. This flightcase was internally cabled up, including power, so that all that was needed was for the few external connections to be made into the mixer. The DI rack had a 6m XLR loom on it for connection to the venue sound rig. This whole beast came to be known affectionately as the Mega Box. It just about fitted in the car...

Additionally, I bought a Gigskinz Laptop Rack Bag with its own 3U of rack space. This held my old Dell laptop and my Roland JV1080. I LOVE these cases, and would heartily recommend them for anyone who uses a few bits of rack kit with their laptop on stage. They're hard-wearing, have a good sized side pocket, large rear access through a separately zipped opening and an access hole between the rack bit and the laptop bit, so things can be cabled up easily. Genius.

This was the complete set up until I made some down-sizing changes early this summer, and worked a treat - apart from the missions of having to lug the Mega Box around. For the first time ever in our gigging history, we had a reliable, easy-to-use, quick-to-set-up system that allowed us to deliver a quality show without worrying about the 'how' of it all.

That on-stage kit list in full:

Main Stuff:

Dell Laptop running Ableton Live 6

M-Audio Quattro soundcard

Evolution UC33e MIDI Controller

Yamaha MG166CX mixing console

TC Electronic M350 effects processor

Behringer HA4700 headphone amp

Behringer 8-way DI rack

Phonic PPC8000E power conditioner

Custom 12Ux6U flight case

Matt's Stuff:

Alesis QS7

Roland JV1080

Andy's Stuff:

Yamaha electric guitar

A borrowed bass guitar

Owen's Stuff:

Technics SL1210

Erm... some sort of DJ mixer!

Next time I'll detail how we do things now, after deciding the Mega Box was a little too Mega after all!

The new home for Eat More Cake blogging!

So this is the new improved Eat More Cake blog.

What's changed, I hear you say? Well, the address for one. Also, it's now a collective blog, not just Matt's. So you'll still get the long-winded wanderings down memory lane from him, and now the added bonus of the crazed ramblings of Andy as well!

We're just too good to you.

Anyways, keep an eye out here for gig announcements, free download info, release dates, etc. - subscribe via RSS, if that's your bag - and enjoy!

Oh, and if you haven't already, head over to Facebook and become a fan! Already a fan? Tell your friends to become fans too!

One Eskimo 'Kandi' FINALLY available on iTunes!

We like One eskimO. In fact, we like them so much, we can't help but remix their stuff every time we get our grubby hands on it...

We did a remix of Kandi AGES ago, which the fellas were good enough to include on their US-only EP, but until now it's been unavailable in the UK.

Thankfully, they have now released a UK bundle of Kandi remixes, featuring ours along with several mixes from Cicada and Tom Neville.

Head over to iTunes now and grab yourself a copy! And why not check out One eskimO's eponymous debut album while you're there?

Bloggety Blog

Urban Torque, our record label, have made a free download of the Diogenes Club's Radio Edit of Red Sky available via SoundCloud, so go and grab a copy now, while it's hot!

It's also good to see some music blogs have picked up on the free download thing, so thanks to both Danger Danger and Blog Rockin' Peet for the props!

The Live Set-Up - Part 1: History

It's about time the whole live show got its own blog post. Of all the technical things surrounding Eat More Cake, it's the live set-up that I'm most proud of. It's almost become a labour of love...

Not that I'm going to take all the credit - we've got to this position after plenty of advice, plenty of mistakes, and plenty of on-stage disasters.

But first (as always), some history.

Andy and I played our first gig as Eat More Cake way back in 2003 (I think), at the Trinity Bar, Harrow. It was a wildly ambitious set that involved me dragging my entire studio down to Trinity. It featured something like 5 different singers and a good couple of hours of music, alternating between an original track, then a cover for the entire set. Some of the covers included Portishead 'It Could Be Sweet', Tasmin Archer 'Sleeping Satellite', Kosheen 'Hungry' and Faithless 'Insomnia'. In the end, the overly complicated set-up got the better of us, and my laptop gave up a few songs into the second half.

Now we were really proud of the fact that we'd managed to even get close to pulling this show off although, in honesty, it must have sounded terrible...

This was clearly NOT the way to go about playing live. The only difference between my studio kit list and the on-stage one, was that I took a laptop instead of my studio PC. Some refinements were needed.

Our next big gig was our 'album launch party' to celebrate completing our first full-length demo album. We held this at Ginglik, Shepherd's Bush in August 2004. This was still amazingly ambitious, but at least we had learnt how to pare things down a bit. We only used two singers this time - one male, one female - plus Andy, then me doing some backing. We managed to take a lot less stuff as well - just a few sound modules, two keyboards, a laptop, soundcard, mixing desk, some guitars, amps, etc. I seem to remember that during a couple of dance tracks, I made the singers wear headphones so they could sing along to the click track! Somewhere, there exists a really bad recording of this gig which, once again, demonstrates that we weren't actually that good on the night! How depressing...

We played Ginglik again the following week, performing an acoustic set. This was much easier - two guitars, one electric piano (well, not quite acoustic then...) and a djembe. I think we finally started learning that 'less is more' after this gig.

Our next experiment was to go for a completely live band - no computers/sequencing/click tracks. We recruited our drummer friend Roland Trimmer (who played v-drums - this meant we could continue to provide a variation of sound between tracks), added a bassist (Andy Potter), a new female vocalist (Jenny Moore) and kept our existing male vocalist/second guitarist Baby Dave. Andy still provided guitars and more vocal while I played keys and sang backing.

There were lots of pros for this set up - rehearsals were much more fun, my life was a hell of a lot easier and everyone seemed to be in good spirits about the whole thing. However, without the original samples some tracks lost their impact, and the lack of click track meant that we were not always quite as tight as we were used to.

After a few gigs, we took another break from playing live until we finished 'The Red Sky EP' - our second self-produced demo. We knew we were going to put on a big event for the launch of this CD, so we took it back to the drawing board. This was the first gig that Owen did with us, as a kind of on-stage sound man. We also managed to blag two session musicians for free (by advertising on Gumtree) - Xan Blacq on percussion, and Wun Chan on bass. Both of these guys were amazing - quite how they put up with us I'll never know! We recruited a new female singer, Lisa Lee and a new male vocalist, but after a couple of rehearsals we had to ditch him due to - ahem - 'irreconcilable musical differences'. Baby Dave came back in to deputise.

For this, we brought back the computer - running Cubase on stage. Where possible, songs were set up in 4- or 8-bar loops, with each part running through a separate output of my soundcard. These outputs ran into a mixing desk which Owen had control of, so he could mute and fade tracks as necessary. Kind of like a primitive, manual Ableton Live.

This was a great show - probably the first time we'd ever managed to sound remotely professional on stage. The launch party itself was held at TenWest in Ladbroke Grove in March, 2006 and was a truly memorable event.

We downsized this set-up a bit to just Owen, Andy, myself and Lisa and played a number of gigs throughout the rest of 2006 and beginning of 2007.

When we signed to Urbantorque, we once again decided to redefine the live show, and that is where the history becomes the present...

Red Sky - Adverts on Spotify!

Jason from the label sent us a copy of the advert that they're running on Spotify for Red Sky Part One. I really like it - kind of makes the whole thing seem a bit more real and it's nice to know that random Spotify users will get to hear about us and the release.

There's a whole big world out there of potential listeners - I guess it's difficult to get my head around how many people we can potentially target. I mean we have loads of business cards, and we give them out to anyone we come across that might be interested. Then there's gigs, and that's a whole other way of getting the name about. Then we think about our online presence - YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, this blog... It's never ending!

Spotify was well off my radar - I'd heard of it, but I don't really know many people using it so hadn't really thought about it as a potential source of new 'targets'.

Anyway, here's the ad on SoundCloud for your listening pleasure:

Red Sky Spotify Ad

Red Sky Single Release Details

So all the details have now been confirmed for our release of Red Sky. Here's the lowdown:

Red Sky Part 1 will be released on 7th December on Beatport, iTunes and all good download stores. Part 1 features the album version, Lazybones Dub Remix, No Logo Remix and The Diogenes Club Radio Edit.

Part 2 contains the full length Diogenes Club Remix, Borkmanns Remix, Avatars Remix and Nikola Gala Remix. This will be released exclusively on Beatport on the 7th December, and will be available on iTunes and other download stores on the 4th January, 2010.

Click the artwork to hear a preview of the tracks.

We're looking to have a single launch party nearer the time, so keep an eye out for details of that!

Meanwhile, we've been writing lots of to-do lists and meeting with various people about videos, the christmas podcast, more giveaways and all those good things. More details soon - definitely exciting times ahead!