Tag: live music

  • Live Recording from within your DAW

    Live Recording from within your DAW

    While traditional studio recordings provide the luxury of multiple takes and post-production editing, capturing a live performance brings a distinct charm thatโ€™s hard to replicate. The unfiltered essence of a sound’s chemistry, the real-time interactions, and the genuine connection with the music come alive on screen, giving a taste of what itโ€™s like to be front and center at a concert.

    I don’t think there’s any doubt about. But how to do it that on a computer? Even in digital world you need “cables” to connect the audio output of your DAW to the software you use to record, whatever it is. If you are on Windows, the operating system will probably not help you and will make the use of an audio router almost essential, and you will have to have the patience to align the various software regarding Sample Rate, latency, USB buffers, etc. etc.

    Furthermore, Windows has the unique ability to reset your audio preferences with each update, find out why. So if you had set your preferences manually you will find them back with the default Windows setting, which almost never coincides (for example, I record at 24 bit/48000 Hz but Windows regularly sets 16 bit, even if the sound card driver says otherwise). The worst thing is that Windows also resets the preferences regarding the so-called audio Exclusive Control, so something that used to work no longer works.

    I mean, you’ve prepared your performance and all kinds of drugs are pushing into your brain and lo and behold, you press Record in your recording software and… error. “The recording device is not responding”. It’s not nice. Coitus interruptus of the worst kind.

    But there is a way to solve the embarrassment: record directly from within your DAW. Fortunately, there are VST plugins to do this.
    Personally I use MRecorder by Melda Production, the free version.

    Very simple but effective, with a series of options (some only usable with the paid version, but not essential for my use).

    MRecorder interface.

    It is a free plugin, downloadable with the MFreeFXBundle by Melda Production (38 free effects, not to be underestimated). And that’s the end of this problem. Put it in the main stereo mix bus on DAW mixer and live free.

  • Livio Korobase @ HeArt & Soul Gallery for Selen’s “Captive Lights” opening

    Livio Korobase @ HeArt & Soul Gallery for Selen’s “Captive Lights” opening

    ๐—ฆ๐˜‚๐—ป๐—ฑ๐—ฎ๐˜†, JAN 12๐˜๐—ต – 12๐—ฝ๐—บ ๐—ฆ๐—Ÿ๐—ง
    Line Up:
    12pm SLT (21:00 CEST) – Livio Korobase
    Afterparty with BookaB Vibes!
    Dresscode: ๐™œ๐™š๐™ฉ ๐™˜๐™ง๐™š๐™–๐™ฉ๐™ž๐™ซ๐™š!

    Where: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Durdane/211/210/78

    I’ll be playing my music at this opening on Sunday, for anyone who wants to come and listen.

    I like Selen’s pictures on the walls, inspired by the works of James Turrell.

    I prepared some new music and sounds inspired by Selen’s colorful sights, and I hope everything works well.

    My basic track is ready, I’m satisfied. To play it in a concert, I will use the technique exposed in a previous post and here.

    Why do I want to specify this? Often in these cases we receive unclear requests regarding “live” performances.
    Anyone who has made any music knows that we only have two hands, and if you don’t just play one instrument and maybe sing over it’s impossible to produce an interesting performance.

    Personally, I’m not interested in playing piano bar, I prefer complex and layered compositions, which would require an entire band to perform “live”. And even if that were possible, but it’s not, everyone would have to be in the same room and use the mixer output for feed the stream, because of the high lag affecting audio streams (mean: you play a note, and this note can be listened in Second Life after a delay of 30 seconds or more, and there is no solution).

    Sometimes you also hear about double or triple streams, but that’s nonsense: in Second Life the stream applied to a parcel can be one and only one.

    So I looked for the most useful workflow for me, and I’m happy I found it, as explained in the aforementioned post: i prepare my basic track and i play over, with my two hands.

    After the performance, as usual, I will publish the recording on my Bandcamp, at https://liviokorobase.bandcamp.com/.

    All my music can be defined as “live”, and this is both an advantage and a flaw from my point of view. I don’t have a studio version of any of the music in my Bandcamp, it’s all live recordings of me playing them (Revox was once used, now a digital recorder but is the same approach).

    A glorious Revox B77 MK2.

    This also means that if I want to repeat the same thing, I wouldn’t know how to do it: often these are moments captured on the fly, and who remembers how I did them?

    But that’s fine with me, that’s what I want, for me this is “live”, influenced by my moods, ambient around me, my inside. I like to tell a story, if I can, and sounds for me are the colors with which I paint a scenario.

    I believe that the real distinction should be that between “I play my own music, produced and played by me using the needed tools needed to try to create the feeling that i want to communicate” and “I play/sing music produced by others“…

    It is clear that the first case is the interesting one for me, but it is only my opinion. You can freely continue to call “live” something that for me is intrinsically dead, there’s no problem.

    I much prefer listening to a live recording of original music than something fake, perhaps using a MIDI base prepared by others, in a piano bar style. Some are very good at this, no doubt. But it’s not a “live”, it’s a performance sung or played over a backing track, a pre-recorded medium generally produced by others.

    The difference between streaming music and live music is in the artist, not the medium. Who can create the โ€œcollective effervescenceโ€ is the winner, dead or alive ๐Ÿ™‚

    I’ll leave the discussion open, there are certainly different opinions.

    For now, see you on Sunday at http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Durdane/211/210/78