Hmmm... Yeah, playing live is difficult. For about 5 years we used to do 50/50 sets; we'd take the whole studio up on stage and play alternate tracks from the PC (no audio, MIDI only!) and from DAT so we could set up the system for the next live track. For our music and system I think this was the best way of doing it at the time; the live tracks had an immediacy and power you can't get from pre-recorded mixes; audience interaction was, well, fucking fantastic; the uncertainty of playing live meant that magic could happen, and it sure beats standing there pretending to twiddle knobs. We ended up releasing 9 live tracks as our debut album.
HOWEVER... it kicks fuck out of the equipment (we were doing 2 gigs a month in the UK for a couple of years - a lot of tearing down and setting up) to the extent that one thing preventing us from playing like that now is our gear is broken. It also used to take us a week to set the studio up at home after a gig even though we could set up and soundcheck in an hour and a half at a gig, which meant that writing was often difficult. Plus the uncertainty of playing live meant that things could go wrong very easily! If you're trying to mix the tracks live on stage you need proper monitoring; not something you have every time.
Another thing against the way we used to do it is that our writing methods have now changed completely. Previously, our live sets sounded like the records because exactly the same gear was used in exactly the same ways to do both. Nowadays all our music goes down as audio - this is stuff that you _can't_ perform live, 1 instrument per part, because we don't have that many keyboards.
Personally I want to do as much live as possible when I play, but at the same time I want my tracks to come across as well as possible. At the moment this means playing .wavs and playing live keyboards/guitar/percussion/didge (delete according to which act). It's a compromise, but there you are. At least there is musicianship on stage during the live set - it's more saisfying for me as an artist/performer and, I hope, satisfying for people who want to see some evidence that performers are doing more than pressing 'play' and dancing.
I always used to say that acts who did DAT/CD/WAV 'live' sets were lying to the audience, that if all they want to do was pretend to perform then they should be DJing. I think now that with production taking the direction it has, this is more of a necessity if you want your tracks to sound the same on stage as they do on vinyl. But if you're not going to give added value (and most of the acts I've seen live _do_ have some performance aspect to their set) then for Bog's sake, get off the stage and on the decks.
Colin
