First solo gig of Meerika with GP + Ableton Push

Stories from the Trenches
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My friend Meerika (Jupu Group, Laineen Kasperi, Tre Funk III) released her first single as a solo artist this autumn and asked me to support her on the first live show at a local klub here in Helsinki.
Since the music is very electronic and synth driven in nature, I chose this as the first chance to finally utilise my Push 2 controller on an actual gig, paired with one hardware synth (my trusty Prophet Rev-2) and a handful of plugins.

Photo Milla Ilkamo, @millaemiliart
Photo Milla Ilkamo, @millaemiliart1920Ă—2886 225 KB

I had two instances of Gig Performer up and running, one for keyboard sounds (Keyscape, Omnisphere, Helsinki 1967) and other one for vocal FX chain, since we wanted Meerika’s vocals to naturally blend with the electronic production. Both were routed to separate outputs from Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 3rd Gen. I also programmed drums, bass and some other details inside Live and included some backing vocal and violin stems from the single versions. Ableton Link provided tempo sync for delays and GP sent midi PC messages to both the Prophet and Minifreak.

Photo Milla Ilkamo @millaemiliart
Photo Milla Ilkamo @millaemiliart1920Ă—2400 258 KB

Meerika herself brought her Minifreak for pads and some special FX (and a brief filter resonance solo on the first number!). Majority of our set was original material, except for two covers, one of them being Falling (Twin Peaks opening with lyrics).

I utilized heavily my rackspace and OSC templates to speed up routing. The schedule was rather tight and I had plenty of other stuff going on (writing a master’s dissertation on synthesizer pedagogy being propably the biggest hindrance) but everything went surprisingly smoothly considering I was VERY nervous debuting with this new setuo. I’m looking forward to working with Meerika in the future. I might even modify our live arrangement of one of her songs into a fully produced remix version after the official single release next year.

There will be a more professionally recorded video summary of the gig highlights, here’s just a couple of IG clips for tasters:

Vocal chain for Meerika included:

  1. 12db/oct HPF at 120 Hz
  2. Fast but mild Pro-C2 compression
  3. LALA for slow comp + saturation
  4. De-esser
  5. Saturn 2 for more saturation
  6. Some mild dynamic EQ attenuation
  7. Valhalla Dela
  8. Seventh Heaven Professional

This was actually my second time using another GP instance for vocals, the first time being on this gig earlier this year:

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More videos and in full length :slight_smile:

Great to see Helsinki 1967 in action.

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Great to see Helsinki 1967 in action.

If I’ve understood correctly, there should be better material on the way pretty soon. Today I just received the photos. But I’ll let you know :wink:

This was actually the least propable gig for Helsinki 1967 I had imagined because of the overall synth-driven soundscapes. Meerika wanted to end the gig with an old fashioned, jazzy and “musical style” song she had written and funnily enough, that type of cozy little upright sound fit the song much better than any synth-patch I could have offered.

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