Live PA with just two boxes

I’m calling DAWless Live PA from now on. That’s what it used to be called and I was on livepa.org way back. It’s funny how things progressed. It’s great actually, it’s no longer a fringe thing and honestly everyone’s game really improved. Back then it was people with a bunch of keyboards on a giant rack and an MMT8 that they muted and unmuted tracks. There is so much more live-oriented hardware out there now.

Grooveboxes with audio inputs make this setup so much more compact. You don’t need a mixer.

Of course the Octatrack has 4 inputs, or 2 stereo if you are that kind of person. It’s an overachiever in this way although I wish it had 8 inputs. Or maybe I don’t. Maybe that’s a creative limitation. Anyway the market is ripe for someone to come up with an 8 track digital mixer/sampler/sequencer that has a good workflow and is less scary than the Octa.

I will take a moment here to say that the Minitaur is one of the most amazing live synths Everything just sounds so great and it’s capable of a diversity of sounds that makes it possible to do an entire track with just the Mini.

I started to think this way (minimal hardware) and I’ve seen some Youtubers like Jon Makes Beats where he uses just two or three pieces of gear to make a track. I think this is the way to go over having every piece of gear in your studio all hooked up at once. It’s a losing battle. It takes way to much space and it’s never going to be as ergonomic as having things that you are using right in front of you instead of reaching or walking across the studio back and forth.

There’s the cable management part of the process though. Also storage. I want to be able to grab two boxes off the shelf and plop them down with cables ready to go. It’s harder than it sounds. I standardized on some 9 and 12 volt adapters so I can have power mostly ready to go but it doesn’t always work out. There are some boxes like the Akai MPCs that have different plugs or different polarities.

That’s a digression for another time. In the meantime I’m going to be doing a few posts on minimal setups.