Deadmau5 to Build "Live" Show

Deadmau5 has announced via his famed Tumblr that he has thought of a way to truely produce live music at a show.  Up until this point he had slammed press & Play DJ's in Rollingstone and even decrying his own show as a simple process.

You can read below all the technical jargon Deadmau5 threw at us.

Nevertheless, if Deadmau5, aka Joel Zimmerman, is able to put this type of performance together it really would be magical watching him compose live.  Not to mention it would make him the most original live performer in the game...beat that!

(Deadmau5) "sometimes the most obvious solution…

… is usually the best one. touche, lex parsimoniae.

So, in all my years sitting around in a studio, ive always imagined… ‘how cool this would be if i could do it on stage’ and over the past few

years i;ve always struggled with *cough* ‘live setups’  screens, controllers, le cube et al… and have always had to meet it in the middle somewhere with a few compromises of course… but now i think i just might have it all figured out.  bring the studio to the stage. i guess it would be that simple…ish.

the problem i’ve always found with DAW’s, live’s to be specific… is the limitations i always run into trying to “reassemble” a complete produciton on the fly… which really isnt a problem, the problem is, switching seamlessly from one project to another. sure, abletons great for playing clips… but i wanted to load entire control schemes, mixer bus settings, plugs, hardware n everything… which would yeah, work fine… for one track. Then you got Cubase, which i also use… which isnt live… or anything like it… but the sonic possibilities and flexibility has always appealed to me more (along with MIDI to ext gear that actually fucking works).

Problem is, not all tracks are produced the same… and different control settings would have to be recalled, projects would have to be loaded, possibly in different DAWS as well. and thats *still* not something you can simply do on the fly on a single point workstation. 

so heres what im proposing to do here… built a fully functional studio, on a stage, twice. yeah, twice.  2 points of processing, while one DAWS project / control scheme is firring away, the other can load / initialize in the background, then seamlessly keep playing off the 2, bouncing freely from one to the other. Of course it will be a hell of a juggling act, but i think this can be done pretty smoothly. And, better still, we’d all be hearing the very same “studio quality’ reproduction of my works with ALOT more creative twists in them as opposed to simple playback of 8 channel stem “masters”. Because stemming everything out to ableton clips then RE-mixing live, fucks up the sound WAY too much (due to mastering / bussing / comping that’s typically done in the studio)… in other words… none of my shit sounds NEARLY as good as the “mastered” version if you just break out stems then “sum” them together on a mixer… doesnt work like that.    at all.   just like it doesnt WORK when you play 2 songs at the same time.  you run into all SORTS of shit when you start “mixing” mastered tracks… phase cancellation, timming issues (if you still cant count to 4) , shit EQ job mashed up with another shit EQ job… the list just goes on and on… but thats another story.

i certainly know my way around the studio, so it’s nothing new to learn here for me, the benefits are… well, im free from the timeline finally. SMPTE can then (hopefully) be shot over in smaller segments for lighting / video cues at certain points, maybe even make better use of MIDI going to the roadhog console, as opposed to SMPTE, who knows… still got alot of work / discussing to do with the techs and light designers. Im pretty confident it’ll work out.

Then, i figure a massive control scheme (one for each workstation) will come into play at this point… since i would then no longer would have to worry about control assigments “per performance” i can now scratch that ball of shit mess it ALWAYS turns into, and begin programming control assignments per SONG or segment. which is MILES better.

Right! so. as soon as i get home, im gunna start bashing my head on my shiny new desk until i get this figured out… im really feeling this one. Then, once the tech is sorted, tested, and becomes a working concept, then we’ll wrap it up, screw in the bolts, make it look sexy, then throw that shit on a stage and tour it like hell, because thats going to be one hell of a financial dent to unfuck. But, shit, youre all worth it… and im gunna make music anyway, so, might as well be doing it properly on a stage.  lifes about to get good again."