Stellar Chant

postmortem

This was my first ever solo live and first ever ambient live. May 2022 at Festiwal Światła

How I prepared

• I talked a lot with folks and gathered informations and inspirations
• I was thinking about using Number Stations sample and got nice SkyKing recording link from my friend - decided to go with it, as it was great even without processing
• Decided to go PC-less, so I took Deluge, Korg NTS-1, looper, singing bowl and drums
• I decided to split whole thing into 3 parts:
  • first, most dark ambient like with the sample
  • second, more energy focused, with live drums
  • third, more casual generative ambient to calm down and finish off
• I still prepared a lot of sounds in my DAW and exported WAV files to Deluge, where I would set them up in a song
• I got idea for underlying beat for part 2 from listening to clipping.
• I bounced demos with friends to get early feedback
• Got in touch with friend to create visuals and control lights
• Got in touch with other friends to do a fireshow during the second part
• Printed (in multiple copies) a “cheat sheet” to know when and what to do

The setup

Deluge was the main “brain” of the operation. It had the whole song arranged, so I had to do there is to press play. I had one track with noisy synth to play at the end of part 2. It was connected directly to the mixer. I had a contact mic on snare drum, that I played using brushes. This mic went to a looper (so I could do other things) that went into Korg NTS-1. Korg NTS-1 had ensemble effect on (to make mono signal stereo again) and heavy reverb with riser delay. I played with delay time and amount to create texture. It went to mixer as well. I had a single mic for singing bowl, went straight into the mixer. Lastly, there was a floor tom with cymbals (and mic to gather the sound) to play during the second part.

What went right

• I survived
• Visuals and fireshow added a lot to the live perfomance
• I did learn a lot during all this time (more on that later)
• I managed to do it all in under a month
• I created a set that I actually really liked
• PC-less setup was actually working great. Deluge may be a small cheat thou, as it’s basically a hardware DAW

What went wrong

• I was too quiet. Definitely don’t soundcheck without external help.
• I didn’t test how singing bowl sounds on larger scale. Hitting it was really meh and I was to stressed to do proper sound in any other way. Quickly ditched it
• I heard myself not good enough - to the point where I lost programmed beat and was playing unevenly on drums to it.
• Fireshow was great, but when it ended and quiet, simple music slowly started to appear, many people thought it was already over.
• Visuals were on a laptop that died day before the show, so I had quickly made up ones. Lesson - always back up those. And have them with you, so you don’t have to rely on external folks
• I let the momentum go away and didn’t finish up live version to release as studio album. And, at this point, I will probably never will - unless I revisit it

That’s it as my memory is bit fuzzy.

It was great experience, great first barrier broken and I’ve learned a lot to make Spectral Forge better.