our current musicmakings involve use of a lot of electronic instruments. our current recording project (titled "Two Moons") recently received a grant for its creative exploration and research into sample-based music as well as the development of live performance with an electronic music ensemble.
a lot of Dirt Room’s early stuff (2016-2018) had a pretty folky vibe to it, though.
however, all of our composition took place on a computer using Logic Pro, our Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) of choice.
some songs like this one relied heavily on the virtual instruments provided within the DAW.
as we began preparing for live performance the obvious question arose: “How do we recreate this live?” our so-called solution was to unplug the bass guitar halfway through our set and plug in macbooks with aux cables into the bass amp… yeah, the sound guys loved us back then.
there’s nothing wrong with using a laptop as an onstage instrument, but our approach lacked integration that would’ve made the electronic elements more seamless. A laptop can be an extremely powerful instrument, and the fact that we were running not one but TWO macbooks simultaneously for only TWO different synth patches for ONE song just wasn’t adding up for me. not to mention the stress of reconfiguring the setup in the middle of a performance.
and so there was this friction between the Logic Pro compositions and what we were capable of onstage, especially when we came up with a song like “Headroom” which fused our psychedelic garage rock roots with drum machines and chopped up vocal samples.
of course, a song like “Breeze” making the setlist was completely out of the question.
still, we insisted on developing our live performance to reflect the limitless potential of music-making within a DAW which we all enjoyed so much. So it became clear that to make this work we were going to need to try a different approach, and thus far the electronic instruments have proved to lend a helping hand in that regard. a song like "Breeze" incorporates different kinds of dynamics than "Marathon", and our goal with the synthesizers is to be able to play with those dynamics in a flexible way similar to how one could approach an acoustic instrument.
