aKa: my first run as Production Manager
Jazzu is a talented pop singer from Lithuania, X factor judge and part of her last album was scored by the British producer Anthony Marshall.
During February 2019 Jazzu start Welcome tour across Lithuania to promote the record and for that she decide to bring a selected band by Anthony Marshall from London to her stage in all the Lithuanian’s arenas. My role was to supply specifications about the equipment we were going to use and keep track of the logistics and needed of the band.
The band was formed by: Drummer ( acoustic and electronic kit) , Bass ( bass guitar, synth and samplers) , Keyboards and talk box ( Midi keyboards on Gig Performer - Talkbox with a Behringer Model D), Guitar and Keyboard ( Amp simulation with iStomp / Amplitube from IK Multimedia - Midi keyboards on Gig Performer ).
We decided to bring with us just the computers to avoid the need to re programm everything on a hardware machine.
The drummer was playing a Roland SPDSX that was receiving program changes from the playback session with a Midi over Ethernet connection.
The Bass guitar player had in his setup up two midi keyboards so he could decide if play bass synth (moog little phatty) or samplers (Kontak custom patches) or both at the same time.
The Behriger Model D was chosen after we discovered that having a Moog Voyager in Lithuania is not that easy, but it actually worked really good after a bit of tweaking to set up glide preferences as they are seated up on a real Model D, it’s small and deadly cheap compared to a real Moog.
As well with the moog, also amps were quite a problem to get and manage on stage, so we decide to use iStop with Amplitube from IK Multimedia, worked great.
Gig Performer was the choice for the keyboards set up because is defiantly the most flexible “ keyboard performer” software out there without being too demanding. It also work very well with external input from other computer, like the playback computer running Ableton.
About the playback, was running on Ableton sending backing tracks and LTC timecode to the FOH with a iConnectivity 12 audio interface that allow a full redundancy of the system.
Another security measure I took since the computers were on stage and the playback was played by the guitar player, I added a stop impulse at the end of any song to automatically stop everything in the correct frame.