In preparation for my solo piece, I had been watching other artists live performances, mainly artists who had performed at home, or in a studio, or somewhere that didn’t have a live audience and was filmed themselves. I watched these kind of live performance videos because it would be closest to what I would have to do at home.
In the last post I talked about an artist called Chet Faker; he was my main influence for my solo piece. His music is quite slow and calm and he mainly uses electronic instruments, like synths keyboards or midi in his performances plus using his own vocals. I decided to do something similar to his music since I had similar equipment at my disposal.
Here is what I used: MacBook Pro Laptop with Logic Pro X Live Loops, Akai MPK mini keyboard and Shure MV7 microphone.
For this project I had to incorporate electronic sounds and live looping while also playing an instrument live; I chose to play a piano and synth part on my keyboard and sing. The way that I had decided to play this song live was to make some loops beforehand so I could activate and deactivate them as the song went on, I did this because I didn’t want to create a full backing track, I wanted to make sure it was all played live as much as possible. Most of the loops I had created were linked to the drum pads on my keyboard for easy access and I also had a delay effect on one of the knobs on the same keyboard, next to the drum pads, for my microphone so I could manually add how much of the delay I wanted on my voice.
Performing with live electronics was very different than any of my past performances which were on stage with a real audience and performing solo or in a band with every band member playing an instrument. This time, I was mainly relying on electronics, more specifically the premade loops I had recorded previously and the software itself. If both the software and my loops had broken or stopped working then I wouldn’t of been able to perform, this wouldn’t be a problem in my previous performances but then again anything can go wrong even if without electronics.
The feedback I had gotten was quite positive, most of my peers really enjoyed my song and enjoyed the atmosphere I had created with the background and lighting which suited the song very well. One of the feedbacks I got was the camera positioning, it could have been at a wider angle so the viewers could see more of me and my set up at the same time.
Mariana Bagulho 