A little about my approach to live, stubornly sans laptop but now with theoretically less chaos...

No More Spinning Plates

The following is a quickly-assembled set of notes on how I got myself organised, belatedly, for all type of gigs I'm likely to play. From small ones where you get the same space as a DJ, expandable up to the largest solo or collaboration performances I might do.

At the time of writing I have about 20 songs in the Octatrack/Cirklon that I can play at any time. Blimey! Repeatability at last! Although the Octatrack can be used alone, it's so much easier under Cirklon control so that's how I'm approaching it. This does offer the unusual (for electronic music) possibility of offering a set list in advance and letting the audience choose which tracks they want to hear, not that they'll have heard of most of them but it'd be interesting for me and a challenge too...

Getting started

How I approached it was to first learn what Octatrack could do for me. Having done this (it took a while), I then decided that each bank should be a song, later adjusting this decision so that each Octatrack part was a song. There are 4 parts per bank and each part contains a separate set of track/sample assignments. It's the Elektron way and maybe they'll change it one day. For example, in the 1.1 update they added a great live means of sample triggering that led to me going back and totally changing my sample slot mapping to make playing related samples easier. And prior to that they removed the limitation about 24 bit samples, just after I'd converted most of my library to 16 bit!

Organised at last?

Each song typically has an ambient section and a 'prepared' song (prepared in some way from being just a skeleton to the whole critter). Oh and there's always a section that incorporates my hands-on sequencing and therefore has the potential to grow and become messy. I'm trying to keep the number of Cirklon scenes down to the essentials and name them meaningfully etc.

One decision I had to make early was how to structure the Octatrack's folders. I have a 16Gb Lexar CF card packed with selected samples - drum loops, songs, individual sequences, hits, speech, you name it. I won't bore you with all that here but suffice it to say it was important to group related material together given the Octatrack's small screen.

Octatrack doesn't give you a useage count for each sample in a project plus long sample names aren't shown in slot lists too well. Early on I began naming all my songs with the key and tempo then using this info in each part name as a reminder. Octatrack doesn't always get the tempo right for imported samples so you want to make it easy for yourself and naming does it for me.

Using Cirklon I can swap songs without stopping - generally without glitches or problems too, which is a nice surprise. Those ambient bridges help, of course. :) At some point Cirklon should gain features like gradually changing tempo, morphing patterns etc. but for now I get by. Wouldn't want to trim all the rough edges, right?

Octatrack Parts/Banks/Patterns

It took a bit of work to get all my Octatrack parts and patterns correctly assigned. There's no Bank copy feature so I spent a while setting up bank A's tracks and scenes then copied the files offline on my laptop to every other bank. This gave me a common track/sample starting point of:

Track1: Static	Main Tune
Track 2: Flex	Loop
Track 3: Flex	Various
Track 4: Flex	Various
Track 5: Rec5	Live sampling
Track 6: Rec6	Live Sampling
Track 7: Rec7	Live Sampling
Track 8: Static	Ambient Bridge

The patterns used are allocated in groups of 4 for each bank. The first four patterns are linked to part 1, the second four to part 2 and so on. Cirklon selects pattern A01 for song 1, A05 for song 2, A09 for song 3 and A13 for song 4, B01 for song 5 and so on. I also reserved Radias patches, one for each song. I keep the other patterns for variations I manually select; these tend to exploit Octatrack's cool sample mangling functionality and are treated as volatile, to be messed-with at will.

A Cirklon-driven song

Each Cirklon song consists of at least three separate scenes. The first triggers the ambient bridge using a P3-type pattern that is long enough so it loops the full length of the sample. Could be minutes long. This bridge might be supplemented by a suitable Radias or Proteus patch or other samples on Octatrack. It could last and be developed for ages, inevitably.

Cirklon sets the song's tempo and selects the Octatrack pattern and scene pair (for the optical slider) plus any other remote MIDI stuff required. For example, to get more from the ambient bridge I might set up further Octatrack scenes¹ that are then manually selected that take liberties with its rate, tuning, effects, filtering, modulation etc. etc. Although the bridges are prepared in advance and tailored for each key, they can be totally transformed and reused by all manner of Octatrack processes, that's even before I let Cirklon do some of its wild aux stuff.

For the "tune" part, I might use a completely prepared track or a skeleton of a track or even just a short loop or two I then have to play/develop. It all depends on the song itself and whether it was recorded on the Mac or was created out of a series of improvised loops on my hardware gear - or any work I happen to have lying around that has some appeal. The important thing is that selecting the Cirklon scene kicks off the tune reliably and that other loops or Cirklon sequences sync up as and when required. It means that during performance I can eliminate the tune completely, break it, twist it or merge it with something else as the mood takes me. Or I can play it in its pure form - e.g. if playing a DJ set I can go for less interaction, play the same tune in a totally live set and I can break it into its component parts, slice it, whatever.

This addresses my age-old problem of playing without a safety net and maybe descending into unwanted chaos that not everybody is caned enough to appreciate. Hey, I can now do what lappies do and sound good if I want to. Well, within the confines of these being my tunes, of course.

Finally there are the sequencer scenes, potentially a fair few of these as a song develops (or gets bloated, sometimes). My Cirklon songs are all "manual", meaning I treat each scene as a complete entity and select them manually when needed. It gives me the flexibility to choose to do a totally ambient gig at the drop of a hat (or other items of clothing) simply by choosing just the ambient sections. If it's more of an electronica-type bash or collaboration, I can summon up a totally live sequencer-type experience just by leaving out the tune scenes, mixing and matching as the mood takes me.

Generally I'll keep the pattern changes to one per Cirklon song since all the necessary Octatrack samples reside in a single part. Actually I do have a song that uses two parts (therefore two patterns) as that proved the easiest way to use alternate mixes of the four main loops used without massively disrupting my standard set of Octatrack tracks (and potentially confusing me in the heat of a live moment). Naturally I do sometimes change the Octatrack track roles on a per pattern basis but that's just cos I never stick to my own rules for long! While working on this song (an old JIC piece actually), I found that Octatrack isn't too keen on having samples overriden unless you're also sending the note trigger from one of its internal patterns. Hence it was easier to just select a different part.

Cirklon kicks off the main Octatrack samples because it's far easier to control them that way, having named scenes, stored tempo, the ability to select paramters on Octatrack via MIDI (Cirklon's Track Values) etc. I typically create a pattern 2 bars long, the second bar looping infinitely, the first triggering note C7 (and resisting any FTS too) to kick off my songs. Unless the song has no end and is intended to loop entirely, in which case I set the pattern to have the right number of bars, for this to happen.

I'm using just 16 tracks of Cirklon right now. When I need more I'll overflow onto Cirklon's second page (17-32) as the songs get more complex and unmanageable. They're set up like this:

Track 1: Octa1	Main Tune
Track 2: Octa2	Various
Track 3: Octa3	Various
Track 4: Octa4	Various
Track 5: Octa5	Various
Track 6: Octa6	Various
Track 7: Octa7	Various
Track 8: Octa8	Ambience
Track 9: Octa#	Octatrack pattern/scene selection
Track 10:	initially unused
Track 11: Radias 1#	Radias track 1 and patch selection
Track 12: Radias 2	Radias track 2
Track 13: Radias 3	Radias track 3
Track 14: Radias 4	Radias track 4
Track 15: Proteus 2000 1#	Proteus patch change and part 1
Track 16: Vermona	Mono Lancet

It's very easy to see what's happening as Cirklon's track buttons light up when active in a scene and have a small green LED below for those tracks containing relevant data I can use if I want - e.g. to add live sequencing to prepared songs.

The hardware

I have a fairly modest set of equipment in this setup. I did try to get it down to one flghtcased box but that proved beyond me if I wanted to keep the ability to be totally spontaneous live. The Octatrack is good - but for my brain only when you have material prepared as a starting point.

The synths I currently use are:

• Korg Radias (4 great-sounding synths with effects)

• Vermona Mono Lancet (I need some analogue! Alas this isn't in a rack so I have it mounted in a sliding rack tray along with an Eventide Timefactor. Would love a 1u version then I could use a smaller flightcase!)

• Emu Proteus 2000 (with 4 ROM cards, sadly not including the vintage pro board that I never managed to find - but at least it does have the world and techno boards that I use a lot)

That's enough, given I can record live into Cirklon or Octatrack any time I want. There's more space in the rack boxes and other gear is in there right now so could get used. But for a change I won't confuse the issue by going on about it. :)

Until next time...

1 It's a case of same terminology, different uses here. Octatrack scenes are definitions for the A/B slider used in perforkance. Cirklon scenes are chunks of music, could be entire songs if you like, imagine them as like a vertical slice of tracks of a DAW if it helps.