playing a gig with my guitar and my laptop (long thread but well worth it )

[heartparts]

I just finished school and have had an enormous amount of time to write and record new music, which i haven't been able to do lately... I write and record my own stuff and i was going to put a band together to play with me but i've decided to just play shows by myself for now. the kind of music i write doesn't really allow me to just play the songs acoustic. ( i think that's really boring anyways)

anyways i was wondering if anyone had any suggestions on how i go about doing this. one idea was to just use the drum machine in reason and that's it. or maybe load a few tracks in protools to back me up. if i do this, then i might as well just hook a tape deck up to the pa and play against that.

i saw letigre (http://letigreworld.com/) and they were using a laptop that was running idvd. the girl would choose a track on the dvd, and there would be a video running in the background which had the drums on the dvd. they would play the rest of the instruments. this was really cool because the songs were in sync with the video projection behind. that's just another idea.

i was hoping someone else has done this in here? any ideas?

if you want to hear some of my stuff to get an idea on what i can do. go here. http://www.mrfusion.net/music.html

[Heritage]

I play live with my laptop all the time. All of my effects come from the computer. Even though this is a Digi forum, I must admit that i use Logic for the live stuff. Mbox wont go down latency wise enough for me to use effects in real time without feeling displaced. It's something i really wish they would work a lot harder on. emagic has a USB interface that works at 64 samples of latency on my friends clamshell ibook, thats some pretty efficient hardware writing.

[heartparts]

my stuff is pretty lo-fi, so i'm not really dependent on effects and such.

[Micah777]

I would recommend you not play with recorded tracks by yourself. It's just pretty cheesy if you ask me. I can understand your problem as I write "full band" type music as well but don't have a band. I would suggest trying to find at least another guitarist and maybe playing a couple songs to pre-recorded material but do the majority of your stuff by yourselves. You have a cool vibe and you could tweak your stuff to sound good with a couple acoustic guitars. But whatever you do, don't go out and play full band gigs by yourself with a pre-recorded band. Unless, of course, you bill as Karaoke night with mrfusion [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

Good Luck

[Fourtsian]

I saw Square Pusher's show the other day.
He was playing a bass guitar with his laptop.
It was incredible. Enormous amount of energy just from
one guy and his laptop.
It's one of the few memorable shows I have ever seen.

He was using a lot of pedals, and possibly MIDI controllers with knobs, and his Vaio laptop.
Looked like he was triggering his recorded materials with his MIDI controllers, so, it didn't look cheesy or something, because he was actually improvising with his recorded materials.
Like Micah777 , says, if you just play a drum beat and play with it, then it could be cheesy because audiences
would feel like listening to your recording, not your live music.

You might want to check out Square Pusher's stuff.

Good luck!

[heartparts]

i wasn't going to do a whole pre-recorded band. i want to keep it acoustic-y but i'm just wondering what to do with things like keyboards and stuff like that. i think i want the drums to sound like they're from a drum machine. i'm just starting to think about this so i need some ideas to get me started.