It finally happened. I played laptop music in front of people this past weekend. The event, WTFeb, was organized by my friend Guidewire, aka Ryan. It was supposed to be in the basement of our local Ethiopian restaurant, but they double-booked and ended up playing in the apartment/loft of an appreciative fan. The consensus was that this venue was much more fun and conducive to a party atmosphere, and it certainly was.

I was the second of five performers on the bill. I brought my trusty MSI WInd netbook, an Evolution UC-33e MIDI controller, and my Novation XIO 25 synth/controller. Rather than use the Wind’s built-in Intel soundcard, I used an Edirol UA1-EX USB soundcard. Not exactly pro, but miles ahead of Intel HDA by most people’s estimations. Synth and laptop were connected to a Tascam MM-1 keyboard mixer which served as the PA mixer on this night. The mixer was finally plugged in to a fairly beefy home stereo. Hindsight tells me that we should have rented a small PA, But the stereo seemed to do just fine.

My main musical tool was Pure Data, specifically Pd-Extended. I used a patch originally written by Hardoff, a major contributor to the Pure Data Forums. The version I used had been further modified by another Pure Data forum member, and I in turn made more additions.

The Pd patch is essentially a dual loop player. There are a number of effects that can be applied to the loops, all under keyboard control. Each looper has file selection keys that move forward and back through a configured audioloops folder. The loopers are synchronized somehow, so it was important to select loops of the same tempo. That was the patch author’s recommendation, in any event. Most of my loops were in sync, but even those that weren’t were somehow forced to be in step, even thought the result had some audio artifacts (which I personally found seemed to fit).

So for forty-five minutes I moved through my loops folder, made things echo, jump about in pitch and position. Every so often I would add some ill-advised synth punctuation, but even some of that wasn’t too bad.I’ve learned that I need to find some more rhythmic loops, and that I need to play louder.  Oh, and that I should practice my synth parts.

If you’d like to hear what I did, stay tuned. I’ll have my performance posted before the end of the week…