Since I’ve been asked more than once, I decided to write up a small article about our live setup.

Yes, we’re electronic!

Our key component in the setup is the Mac Book Pro. On this we run Apple Mainstage, in which we have a Patch for each of the songs we play.

Mainstage runs backing tracks in the “Playback” wave file player, and these are started remotely from an attached MIDI keyboard (currently a Novation ReMote 37 SL). The same keyboard is used to select the ‘Next’ patch between each song.

Mainstage also hosts all the softsynths, samplers and amp simulators as well as tempo-synced delays – primarily used for vocals. Many parameters are tweaked in real time using MIDI control messages from the attached keyboards and the Native Instruments Maschine controller.

Audio signals in and out of the computer are handled by the Motu 8Pre audio interface. Since this particular model only has 2 analog outputs, we’ve also attached a Behringer ADA8000 ADAT AD/DA converter, effectively giving us 8 additional in/out, allowing us to make separate monitor mixes to each of us – although we do not make much use of this at the moment.

Yes, we play live!

We are using two MIDI keyboards and a Maschine controller. We use ES2 and EXS24 from Apple as well as Maschine, Kontakt, Battery and Massive from Native Instruments. For delays we’ve used the Tape Delay by Apple, but are expecting to replace this before our next gig with something else (probably Rubbadub from ++audio).

Guitar and bass are processed using Guitar Rig from Native Instruments. Our mostly used electric bass of is the Epiphone Thunderbird series.

All vocals as well as anything else you see us perform are in fact performed live – we do not appreciate ‘miming’.