Backstage Pass: Electric Skychurch’s James Lumb Demonstrates Ableton Live
Backstage Pass: Electric Skychurch’s James Lumb Demonstrates Ableton Live
URB Magazine’s Alex Leon Hosts the Discussion on M-Audio’s Main Stage at NAMM
URB Magazine’s Alex Leon Hosts the Discussion on M-Audio’s Main Stage at NAMM
LINK: Watch Electic Skychurch demonstrate Live at NAMM. Click here.
James Lumb, recording artist, composer, singer and producer, founded Electric Skychurch in 1989 as an outlet for his solo material. He and the band quickly earned a reputation for their unique blend of sounds that range from the energetic to the ethereal. In particular, they are credited as pioneers in the fusion of rock and electronic music. Since those heady days, Electric Skychurch has expanded from a one-man band to a full multimedia ensemble with a revolving cast and crew.
M-Powered artists since 2002, Electric Skychurch uses such gear as the Oxygen8; Quattro; Omni i/o; Propellerhead Reason, ReCycle, and ReBirth; and Ableton Live. James Lumb and lead singer Roxanne Morganstern appeared on M-Audio’s Main Stage at Winter NAMM to demonstrate how they use Live for interactive live performances, recording, and DJing.
“We’ve been touring and playing live electronic music for about 12 years now,” says Lumb. “And we used to try and bribe porters at the airport to get our 1,500 pounds of keyboards on the plane. We’ve been doing that for years, and the great thing about Ableton Live is it allows you to everything I was doing before, but with any laptop.
“The one I’m using is not the latest greatest—I stole this from my wife. It’s just a G3 iBook, and you can stuff as many loops as you could imagine into this thing and keep going. And then we have a keyboard - I’ve just written down the names of the little parts on the keys. And I can turn loops on and off in front of you.”
Interactive Live Performance
“The great thing about Live is that instead of just getting up and playing our songs, we can get up and interact with each other. It’s a really great way of getting away from your studio and getting a little bit closer to being a musician. You can be in a group of people. You can have your laptop. And you can actually be changing things, breaking things up, and performing live with other people--you’re not just alone anymore.
“Live is also perfect if you’re performing somewhere unknown, where you don’t know how big the sound system’s going to be, or you don’t know what the audience is going to be like. If you’re a DJ, you are sort of stuck with the records that you brought, or if you’re normally an electronic band you would have to put together a bunch of loops or an entire show—being pretty much restricted to whatever you would program before the show.
“But with Live, it’s different. If you anticipate playing an ambient set, and you get someplace and everything’s booming at about 160 beats per minute, you might want to change up. You might want to go with something louder. You might want to go with something simpler. Coming here and playing today was like that for us. We didn’t know exactly what it was going to be like, but we have a bunch of different material that we can just select live.
“It’s easy to do everything really quickly in front of an audience. This program can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. You can spend all day putting layer, after layer, after layer, or you can make it completely beer goggle-proof, where you have five things to turn on so you get on stage with all your friends, and nothing can go wrong. It’s rock solid stable.”
Recording Live
“Another thing I love about this program is that you can be playing live, and you can also record what you’re playing with this program. At any time you can hit record, and you can record to a part or we could record Roxanne singing. And you can build up layers live. Say you’re putting together a live set—you can record what you’re doing live in front of the crowd. So everything we’re doing can be recorded. And if you’re working with a singer, you can record what they do, then take it home and listen to it later.”
Ease and Simplicity
“Let me show you real quick how easy it is to assign something to a knob. Say I want to use my modulation wheel here, and I want to use it to control filters. So what I’ll do is just go up to the top of the program, hit that button that says “MIDI,” then go over to the parameter I want to change, which is going to be filter frequency. And that’s it. So you can map out the entire keyboard. You can map out whatever you want. “You can use other software to build your stuff, but at the software interface level Live is simple. This is one of the easiest programs that I’ve ever used. In a couple of days a beginner could be performing in front of a crowd.
“Like I was saying before, Live allows you to DJ entire tracks. You can stick a two hour piece of music in here and hit play, then walk away, and it’s gonna play. Or, like a DJ, you can take individual tracks, cue one up and hit go. Now, I know that a lot of the other musicians I talk to love being able to take their work out and play it live in whatever format it’s in, whether it’s just loops and ideas, whether it’s segments of songs, or an entire song.
“Once you have an entire song, you’re like a DJ. You can do whatever you want with it. Live also has this cross fader function down here, so you can set two tracks going together at the same time and DJ them back and forth with the cross fader. You can set up Live with the DJ controller as easily as you can set it up with the keyboard controller.
“Now, you’ll notice that I can take parts in Live and I can copy them around while the music is playing, and there’s no stuttering. So as far as the program is concerned, everything is just fine.”
M-Audio would like to thank James Lumb and Roxanne Morganstern for taking the time out of their busy schedules to join us at NAMM.
James Lumb, recording artist, composer, singer and producer, founded Electric Skychurch in 1989 as an outlet for his solo material. He and the band quickly earned a reputation for their unique blend of sounds that range from the energetic to the ethereal. In particular, they are credited as pioneers in the fusion of rock and electronic music. Since those heady days, Electric Skychurch has expanded from a one-man band to a full multimedia ensemble with a revolving cast and crew.
M-Powered artists since 2002, Electric Skychurch uses such gear as the Oxygen8; Quattro; Omni i/o; Propellerhead Reason, ReCycle, and ReBirth; and Ableton Live. James Lumb and lead singer Roxanne Morganstern appeared on M-Audio’s Main Stage at Winter NAMM to demonstrate how they use Live for interactive live performances, recording, and DJing.
“We’ve been touring and playing live electronic music for about 12 years now,” says Lumb. “And we used to try and bribe porters at the airport to get our 1,500 pounds of keyboards on the plane. We’ve been doing that for years, and the great thing about Ableton Live is it allows you to everything I was doing before, but with any laptop.
“The one I’m using is not the latest greatest—I stole this from my wife. It’s just a G3 iBook, and you can stuff as many loops as you could imagine into this thing and keep going. And then we have a keyboard - I’ve just written down the names of the little parts on the keys. And I can turn loops on and off in front of you.”
Interactive Live Performance
“The great thing about Live is that instead of just getting up and playing our songs, we can get up and interact with each other. It’s a really great way of getting away from your studio and getting a little bit closer to being a musician. You can be in a group of people. You can have your laptop. And you can actually be changing things, breaking things up, and performing live with other people--you’re not just alone anymore.
“Live is also perfect if you’re performing somewhere unknown, where you don’t know how big the sound system’s going to be, or you don’t know what the audience is going to be like. If you’re a DJ, you are sort of stuck with the records that you brought, or if you’re normally an electronic band you would have to put together a bunch of loops or an entire show—being pretty much restricted to whatever you would program before the show.
“But with Live, it’s different. If you anticipate playing an ambient set, and you get someplace and everything’s booming at about 160 beats per minute, you might want to change up. You might want to go with something louder. You might want to go with something simpler. Coming here and playing today was like that for us. We didn’t know exactly what it was going to be like, but we have a bunch of different material that we can just select live.
“It’s easy to do everything really quickly in front of an audience. This program can be as complex or as simple as you want it to be. You can spend all day putting layer, after layer, after layer, or you can make it completely beer goggle-proof, where you have five things to turn on so you get on stage with all your friends, and nothing can go wrong. It’s rock solid stable.”
Recording Live
“Another thing I love about this program is that you can be playing live, and you can also record what you’re playing with this program. At any time you can hit record, and you can record to a part or we could record Roxanne singing. And you can build up layers live. Say you’re putting together a live set—you can record what you’re doing live in front of the crowd. So everything we’re doing can be recorded. And if you’re working with a singer, you can record what they do, then take it home and listen to it later.”
Ease and Simplicity
“Let me show you real quick how easy it is to assign something to a knob. Say I want to use my modulation wheel here, and I want to use it to control filters. So what I’ll do is just go up to the top of the program, hit that button that says “MIDI,” then go over to the parameter I want to change, which is going to be filter frequency. And that’s it. So you can map out the entire keyboard. You can map out whatever you want. “You can use other software to build your stuff, but at the software interface level Live is simple. This is one of the easiest programs that I’ve ever used. In a couple of days a beginner could be performing in front of a crowd.
“Like I was saying before, Live allows you to DJ entire tracks. You can stick a two hour piece of music in here and hit play, then walk away, and it’s gonna play. Or, like a DJ, you can take individual tracks, cue one up and hit go. Now, I know that a lot of the other musicians I talk to love being able to take their work out and play it live in whatever format it’s in, whether it’s just loops and ideas, whether it’s segments of songs, or an entire song.
“Once you have an entire song, you’re like a DJ. You can do whatever you want with it. Live also has this cross fader function down here, so you can set two tracks going together at the same time and DJ them back and forth with the cross fader. You can set up Live with the DJ controller as easily as you can set it up with the keyboard controller.
“Now, you’ll notice that I can take parts in Live and I can copy them around while the music is playing, and there’s no stuttering. So as far as the program is concerned, everything is just fine.”
M-Audio would like to thank James Lumb and Roxanne Morganstern for taking the time out of their busy schedules to join us at NAMM.
