Building a Live Rig, Part 3 – Adding A Laptop

If you’re a laptop DJ type, you probably know how to get the setup you want with your laptop and you’re probably already using something like Traktor or Ableton Live. For keyboard players though (and anyone else wanting to do clever things with their laptop via MIDI), there’s a lot of ways to keep things as simple as possible, as well as a lot of new concerns that arise when adding your laptop to your setup. If you haven’t read my previous articles on setting up a live keyboard rig, you need to (they’re here and here) – a lot of what I have to say now expands on things I’ve already talked about.

There are three reasons you might want to bring a laptop to a gig: to get access to better or more sounds, to play backing tracks or loops, and to display your sheet music or chord charts.

Additional Sounds: Keyboard players in the 80′s and 90′s would typically tour with a whole host of keyboards and synths. Some might only be used for one song, as the band tried to sound like the studio recording while playing live. Workstation keyboards nowadays have more or better sounds than they did 10-20 years ago, and most major workstations have been converted into rackmount sound modules as well, but maybe you have a lower-end workstation or just a stage piano, but you’ve got a decent laptop as well. You can easily load a bunch of synth virtual instruments or maybe replace your workstations’ piano or strings with better quality samples from your laptop – I’ve used a 13-part orchestra on my laptop.

Loops and Backing Tracks: Maybe you’re a one-man band or maybe your band needs more parts than you have members. Using a laptop can let you trigger extra parts as needed or play backing tracks to fill out your sound.

Sheet Music and Chord Charts: In an ideal world, everyone would memorize all their music. There’s not always time for that, or you might be playing too many new songs to memorize everything. It’s even worse for keyboard players: not only do we have more notes to memorize, if we’re playing off sheet music, but there’s also the changes in sound that often aren’t captured in a single word like string players would have (eg. instead of markings like ‘arco’, we might have things like ‘Upper keyboard B3 – 888000008 fast leslie; lower keyboard string pad’). You’ll probably want to have some kind of performance notes along with you as well. Printing everything is one option, but you might want something more compact, something where you can write down changes without turning the chord chart into a big mess. There are commercial products, like the Music Pad Pro, but they tend to be expensive ($895 on amazon.com at the moment). You might think, “I have a laptop at home, surely there’s an easy way to use it for the same kind of thing?” Of course there is.

Most of this article applies to the first two cases. If all you want to do is use your laptop for sheet music, you don’t need to worry a lot about getting the maximum performance out of your laptop.

Setup and Performance

Playing a backing track doesn’t take a lot of computing power, but playing a number of orchestral instrument samples at once certainly does. One of the worst things that can happen is for something to slow down the processing of your audio so that you get static crackles and pops as you play. I’m not going to go into detail on how to optimize your computer, but things like disabling your virus scanner during a gig, keeping your hard drive defragmented, limiting the programs that run on startup are all things you should do. There are plenty of good guides online on how to keep your computer running well for audio work; find one and stick to it, especially if you’re a Windows user.

Audio Hardware

Your laptop will have a built-in sound card with an 1/8″ output. This may be all you’ve ever used so far. If all you want the laptop for is backing tracks or to view chord charts, that’s all you’ll need. Of course, when using it for backing tracks, you’ll need a way to get the audio into the house system, either by connecting it to the house mixer directly or by keeping it on stage with you and running it through a DI box. If you do this, you’ll need a 1/8″ to 1/4″ cable (or an 1/8″ to 1/8″ cable with a 1/8″ female to 1/4″ male adapter).

If you’re using your laptop as a sound source for your keyboards or another MIDI instrument, things get trickier. Your on-board sound card probably doesn’t cut it, since it probably has too high a latency (the time between when the laptop gets an incoming MIDI signal and when the sound is produced). Consumer-grade sound cards often have a latency of 40ms or more, which is fine for gaming, but as a keyboard player, it’ll be enough to throw you off. I personally need a latency of 15 ms or less. If you’re on Windows, the ASIO4ALL drivers might work; I’d recommend getting a proper low-latency audio interface and using that instead. As a bonus, your audio interface will probably have the 1/4″ outputs that are more ideal for connecting to the house system. Some audio interfaces have multiple pairs of stereo outputs, which can be nice to give you easy mixing of different sounds (output a piano on one pair, orchestral sounds on another, synth sounds on a third, etc.). If you’re using a click track and loops/backing tracks, you’ll want two outputs right there (the click can probably be mono; it doesn’t have to sound good as long as it’s audible) plus at least one more for the sounds you’re playing live. If your house system wants everything in mono, you only need three outputs for the most basic setup (loop, click, and live); you could easily use more or use stereo outputs for everything if the system can support it.

Master Device

If you’re just playing backing tracks, you can skip down to the Loops and Backing Tracks section.

I talked about choosing one keyboard to be the master keyboard and send out program changes. When you’re using a laptop, I’d recommend you let your laptop become the master. There’s software, particularly Bome’s MIDI Translator that will do virtually any transformation to incoming MIDI. When I’ve used a laptop in my setup before, I’ve sent program changes into the laptop (only!) from a pedal, and used Bome’s to send appropriate program changes back to my keyboards. The big advantage is that it’s probably easiest to arrange your setlist in order in Bome’s, where you can drag and drop, and you can leave all your keyboard presets alone on the keyboard, out of order (eg. when you make a new one, just store it in the first empty preset) and have the laptop call up the right ones every time.

Laptop Presets

If you’ve never used a laptop for live performance before, you’re probably used to DAW software like Cubase, SONAR, or Logic. You might want to try and use one of these for live performance; after all, you already own one, right? Other than the Mainstage component of Logic, this is a bad idea. Think about how you might arrange plugins in your DAW. Each will be on its own MIDI channel, which already means you can only have a maximum of 16 instruments. If you want to use a few instruments from a plugin that doesn’t support program changes, you’re down to even less than that since you’ll have to use a few channels for several instances of that plugin. And what about loading different orchestral instruments into a sampler like Kontakt? Sometimes you’ll want the full orchestra and sometimes just strings or brass. How will you mute all the other instruments, especially since you’ll only be able to send one MIDI channel into Kontakt? You could do it well enough with your DAW’s MIDI Learn capabilities and a MIDI controller with buttons to mute some parts (and even get clever with Bome’s so that the mutes are set as you change presets), but it’s still awkward.

The main problem with any standard DAW is that they have no idea of overall presets or state. You can’t set up a preset in Cubase that describes exactly which of your virtual instruments are muted, what the volumes are for each, how much they’re sending to effects, the internal state of each plugin, and so on. It is possible to use a normal DAW, but expect to spend a lot more time in setup and run into more issues than you would otherwise.

If you want to use a laptop on stage, you really need software designed to be used for live playback. My recommendation on Windows is Cantabile. I’ve tried a few packages and this is the one that gives the most flexibility and stability, and unlike some, it also has playback of MIDI and audio files, so you can include your loops and backing tracks right in the software. Other alternatives on Windows include Native Instruments’ Kore and Brainspawn Forte; on the Mac, there’s just MainStage in Logic Pro and Kore, as far as I know. Regardless of what you choose, the important thing is the ability to use presets that you can easily change on the fly.

What about Ableton Live?

Ableton Live has the reputation of being the live performance software, so why not use it? What do they actually mean by ‘live’? Ableton’s power is in the session view, which makes it easy to trigger individual audio or MIDI clips. Actually, if you want to use triggered loops in your band (and don’t want to use the same laptop for hosting instruments for your keyboard to play), Live is the software to use. When you’re playing the keyboard, though, you won’t be triggering clips, and outside of session view, Live is just another DAW. Maybe future versions will do things differently, but as of the Live 8 demo that I tried, it’s no more flexible than any other DAW.

Preset Loading vs. Switching

So now that you’ve picked a live performance host, you need to think about how to arrange your presets. If you’re like any other band, you probably don’t want a lot of downtime when you switch sounds between songs or even within a song. There are two ways to get around this.

The first is to have one file per song, and have each file contain a few presets, as many as you need for the song. If your host supports it, you can easily switch files between songs. Yes, you’ll have to load the instruments needed for the new song, so it won’t be instant, but in my experience, it’s not that slow, especially if you keep any sampled instruments loaded in each file (I found that with Kontakt, I could load the same orchestral sounds in each file, and once I’d loaded them initially, even switching files seemed to go quite quickly). In Cantabile, you have a Session, which is a file containing a number of instruments and a number of Sub-Sessions. each Sub-Session has the full state of each plugin, including mutes, volumes, panning, key ranges, transpositions, etc. You can then make a Setlist which lists the Sessions and Sub-Sessions you want to use and can respond to MIDI program changes. Sessions are only loaded when needed, so switching Sub-Sessions within the same Session are near-instant. The only drawback to this method is that there’s still some delay in loading time between songs.

The second option is to have one master Session with Sub-Sessions for every part you’d want. This will take longer to load initially, but since you’re only changing state within the Session as you go through your set, the transitions are always near-instant. The drawback to this method is that you need to decide initially what instruments you want to use, and as you add more and more, you may start to run out of memory. Of course, you can reuse plugins for different sounds, but it does become harder to arrange.

However you do it, though, you should be able to use a MIDI program change or other MIDI message to change presets easily, so there’s no reason why you can’t have the one-button preset change I talked about in the previous keyboard articles.

MIDI Filtering and Transformation

There are a couple issues with incoming MIDI that you’ll have to address. Firstly, your keyboards may send MIDI controller information that you don’t want to get to some or all plugins. For example, you may be playing a pad with one hand and a lead with the other, and you don’t want to apply the sustain pedal to the lead sound. You’ll need some way of selectively filtering out the sustain. Good live performance hosts will let you set up MIDI filters as well, and even include the filter’s on/off state as part of a preset. If your host doesn’t let you do this or you’re using a DAW to save money, you can use Bome’s MIDI Translator for this.

MIDI Transformations are also similar and can be solved in the same ways (either your host or Bome’s). Let’s say that your keyboard sends MIDI note information on channel 1, and you want a really flexible orchestral setup in a sampler like Kontakt. You might organize your Kontakt instruments so that they’re all on a different channel (violins – 1, violas – 2, cellos – 3, bass – 4, trumpets – 5, etc.). Your incoming MIDI data will all be on channel 1, so you’ll have to duplicate it on all the channels used for your orchestra, but only for Kontakt – don’t send MIDI data on multiple channels to plugins that expect it on only one. And, if you only want to use string sounds, you’ll have to stop sending MIDI data on channels 5 and above. Again, a good host will let you do this and store it as part of the preset; if not, Bome’s will do it, of course, though it’ll be more work.

Backup Plan

You’ve got your laptop integrated into your setup, and you’re controlling it from a keyboard or MIDI controller. But partway through a gig, unexpectedly, something happens. What do you do? How do you recover to keep the show going on?

The important thing to do is try and remain calm. If you’re independent, you probably won’t have the money or capabilities for a second identical backup system, so you can’t just switch over to a second laptop. Do what you can to recover quickly, and try to get your bandmates to cover for you or stall.

If there’s a power failure to the stage or part of the stage, there’s nothing you can do, and even your keyboards won’t work, so hopefully someone in the band is a good stand-up comic or can keep the crowd going until everything’s back to normal. Even playing some songs with some of the remaining powered instruments could work.

If your host crashes or your laptop reboots itself, there’s nothing you can really do except wait for it to come back up. Hopefully people are patient and your machine is fast enough that rebooting and reloading doesn’t take too long. If you only have a MIDI controller keyboard with no sounds of its own, then this is all you can do; focus on bringing it back up as fast as possible.

If you do have hardware keyboards, you have another alternative: make presets on your keyboards using a keyboard-only setup so that you can switch over to that and either finish out the set without the laptop or keep playing while the laptop reboots and you reload your host and instruments. This is really time-consuming, but if you do any decent amount of gigging, the time you put in here may very well keep you out of trouble the one time the laptop fails, and who knows how important that gig will be?

Loops and Backing Tracks

A quick definition here: when I’m talking about loops, I mean pre-recorded audio that is shorter than the length of a song, usually corresponding to a certain part of the song. For example, you might have an audio loop that’s the length of one chorus that contains a pad and a shaker sound. To use loops, you need to have some way of triggering them at the right moment. A backing track, on the other hand, is something that you start playing and it lasts the duration of your song.

To make use of either effectively, you also need a clicktrack (or even the metronome sound from a DAW) to play along with. Send it on a separate channel from your audio interface so that it can be sent only to the stage monitors and not through the house speakers for the audience to hear. A backing track or loop may not have enough definition to make the tempo really clear, but something ticking out quarter notes will. Getting used to playing to a click can be hard, especially in a band where there are so many other sounds going on, but it you want to use pre-recorded audio (or even the arpeggiator on your keyboard), this is a necessity.

The song won’t sound good if you get out of time, and with pre-recorded audio, there’s no way to get back in time unless everyone can readjust themselves to the audio. You can’t accurately speed up audio on the fly to compensate for a drummer who’s getting ahead of the beat slightly. Don’t even think about using any pre-recorded material until the band can play well to a click.

With a backing track, the only other consideration is to make sure that you have a few bars of click before the track itself starts, so that you know exactly what the tempo will be before the audience hears anything. It gets tricky if you want to use any tempo changes in your songs. You could rework the song so that there’s something sustained, a pad maybe, while the click comes in at the new speed, or if the tempo change is after an intro or before an ending, you could start the click and backing track as you’re finishing the intro or stop it as you approach the ending (better yet, have it end on its own in a musical way).

With loops, you’ll still want the clicktrack to run, but you now have to have ways to trigger different parts at different times, and do it precisely. A good host (Ableton Live beats the competition very well here) will let you trigger a clip slightly ahead of time, but delay its start to line up with the next bar of the song. Set up a MIDI controller with a few buttons to trigger clips as you need to, and you’re on your way.

Sheet Music and Chord Charts

If you want to use sheet music or chord charts on your laptop, you need to first make sure it’s in a digital format. With paper sheet music, your only option is to scan it. With other digital formats (including the scanned images), you want to get it into a standard format. I suggest PDF, because it’s platform-independent and easy to create. If your charts are Word documents or some other format, get a PDF printer like the Bullzip PDF Printer. It installs like a printer, but when you print to it, it prompts you for a filename and transfers the content to a PDF file, so you can print straight from Word or other programs and turn them into PDFs. OSX users can send any printed content to the Preview app instead of a printer, and can save as PDF from there.

Once you’ve got the PDFs you need for a gig, you need to arrange them so they’re easy to use. One possibility is to print them to a single PDF for the gig, but that might get tricky to do. I’ve used PDF-XChange Viewer on Windows to display all the individual PDFs. Unlike Adobe’s Acrobat Reader, this lets me open each PDF in its own tab, instead of in a bunch of separate windows. I can rearrange the tabs in the order I need them, and then it’s really easy to use my laptop’s touch pad or press Ctrl+Tab to move to the next tab. I also put it into full-screen mode so the chart is larger and there’s less distraction.

You can even take it one step further. Why stop to press Ctrl+Tab if you don’t have to? By getting a bit tricky with Bome’s, especially with the MIDI-to-keystroke feature, you can map a few buttons on your MIDI controller to the Ctrl+Tab, PgUp, and PgDn keystrokes (to move between pages in a single PDF), or even get fancier and send those keystrokes based on the current preset if you’re sending MIDI program changes into the laptop. The last option would be the most ideal; your presets keep in sync with your charts and you don’t even have to do anything!

Next Steps

These three articles have been a general overview of the things to consider when you’re trying to get set up for live performances as a keyboard player or using a laptop. I’ve avoided going into too much depth in a lot of areas to keep things simpler; if you have further questions or think there’s something I mention that needs its own article, please comment and I’ll see what I can do.

I’m going to follow this up with an article or more on how my current live setup works. I don’t use a laptop on stage at the moment, but seeing how I apply the things I’ve talked about will help make these articles more concrete.

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