Hi, I'm Simon. I produce as Swarm Intelligence. And I'm here to explain a bit about how I perform.
When building my live set, one of the things I drew inspiration from
was the experience of seeing some of my favorite artists perform.
One of the most important things for me there when I saw them play
was that I would be able to recognize something. But this wasn't exactly as I'd heard it,
it was something new, maybe something else had been improvised on top of it,
tt was a bit more exciting and different.
And that was something I was really striving to achieve myself in my own live-set.
So in order to do this, the first thing I did was
I rendered out all of the separate parts of my tracks.
So I rendered out the bass-stems and the lead-atmospheric stems together.
And then I broke these into different parts. For example, here is the intro of the atmospheres.
And then the middle parts.
And the same here for the bass.
On the main bass parts.
Break-down in between.
And then I also have all the drums here separately.
So when breaking these into parts
I try and extract sections of the track, so these would typically be 16 or 32 bars.
This gives me some time to improvise on top
where as not too much time that I stand there waiting for my cue.
So all of these loops and patterns make up the foundation of the live-set.
What I haven't mentioned yet, is that the drums are all midi.
So when I open up this track, it's actually a group-track,
and contained inside are two sets of clips.
And what these actually are, are... one, I call them a driving
and deep version of the drums.
So I can mute and unmute on part and these midi patterns will be feeding my drum rack.
Essentially what I call this is the "techno-button".
So it's easier just to show it.
So say for example if I trigger these.
Both of these patterns are playing at the same time.
And now I can activate my 'techno button' and turn off the quieter ones
and turn on the more techno version.
So this basically means programming two patterns for every single corresponding
bass and atmospheric part, but it's totally worth it,
it's a really great way to interact with the audience
and give people what they need at that moment.
Another great way of responding to that is just having really fundamental controls
at your finger tips whenever you need them.
Again, with the drums, I always have access to the 'mutes' for various drum parts.
If I was to trigger another pattern...
that's my 'techno button'.
I can quickly mute the hi-hats or take out the kick for a second there,
and the snare... bring everything back in.
So that's the main purpose that the launch control serves in the set.
It gives me quick access to these most fundamental controls that I need.
The kind of overarching controls that stay the same no matter where I am in the live-set.
Over on Push, what I do a lot more is the more improvised parts of the song,
it's a lot more focused, more zoned-in.
I have two different synths that I use, one is more of a lead-synth,
and the other one I use a bit more for pads.
And these are quite flexible. I can take them from being kind of more atmospheric sounds
to being a lot darker sounds...
And this one is kind of a bit more of a pad sound.
And again, I can push this more into the background with a bit more reverb.
Just make it a noisy thing up on the top.
And here it's not so much about replicating parts of the song,
it's more about jamming and improvising and responding to the moment.
So to do this I limit myself to just having eight controls for each synth.
I really know what they do and how they respond when I use them.
And similarly over here, I have a big drum-rack, I usually use the 64-pad layout for this,
and this drum rack is the same drum rack that's getting fed by the other midi-clips.
But then I can improvise on top. The colors really help here because I know exactly
where different sounds are, for example, I know...
exactly where my different kicks are, or my snares.
I have different hi-hat sounds here, some effect sounds.
And then the different percussive sounds that I can add in on top.
This makes it really easy again to interact with people, to create build-ups,
and to take out some parts for a second while you improvise some other things on top...
bring it all back in. And this really gives this extra level of control that allows you to play with people
and build up the night, rather than just going through what you've rehearsed.