Mayb a very stupid question but when seeing them play ive allways wondered how they use the equipment. I can see they have a large mixig desk, which Tom normally controlls. Then ed is at the back. I presume they have a sampler of some sort with all the lyrics programmed in then they just play these and put effect through them. I also guess they have a drum marchine with there beats in that they distort?

Kind of, except they've got loads of samplers on stage. All drums come from them (I presume, they've said they make their own drum sounds, so they must be sampled), and the sequence the whole thing from an Akai MPC or 2. Obviously they've got a load of synths on stage as well, you can clearly see them at the back and sides of the stage. The exact set-up will vary depending on which songs they're gonna play in a set - no point in taking gear on tour you won't need.

They also have doepfer maq16/3 cv/midi sequencer which you can see blinking away in the background, they probably use this for controlling there older synths.

They press buttons, tweak controllers, slide sliders, and it sounds like heaven on earth for a while.

Perfect opportunity for m2f to share.

Wouldn't that be like a magician telling you how they perform their magic? ;)

point :D

I know i am upping an old thread here, but this is a VERY interesting question.



They seem to be quite proud of being able to make the technology flexible enough for them to have a great freedom when playing live. I think the main sequencing (beside Doepfer MAQs) is done solely by the MPC3000, which is kind of intriguing, even with 4 MIDI out ports.



Think about the amount of work to copy the sequences from the Mac to the MPC, given all the looped sequences to all the tracks, have to be transferred...plus all the samples... and think about the MIDI patching and the general patching work.



this is mind blowing, I always wondered how they manage such a tour de force, but hey, that's the magic of it all.

The sequences won't be to hard to do, they could just execute a MIDI dump from Mac to MPC.



Assigning them to MIDI channels might be a bit more challenging, but I think this is done 'on-the-fly' on the MPCs?

Yeah, the dumping part is simple, but basically they have split the song in loopable sections, (intro, main theme, bridge, variation, break, and so on), before dumping them to different MPC sequencies. Then they have to assing each track to its midi channel that will be the channel the synth/sampler/whatever on stage will be set up to.



Then, on stage, they play whatever first sequence they have, say the synth/string loop from the beggining of Hey Boy Hey Girl... and then when they want the bass drum to come in (thump thump thump .. hey girls...) they have a fonction on the MPC that enables you to select the next sequence to play (instead of looping back to the beggining of the sequence.. just like a pattern on a groovebox, just the sequence can be much longer without looping (you can make your own song on one sequence)), and at the end of the loop, the sewuence is triggered, and so on.



On stgae or on the DVD, you see Tom quickly adjusting the data wheel of the MPC, selecting the sequence to play...



so basically, the song has to be sliced chronologically to get those sequence...



And the MIDI assignations have to remain the same for the whole set, for all the songs.



Plus they creat/ cut paste different sequences form different song to make the transition intros (bits leading from one song to another... on the last tour, (last summer) those have been getting more complex and richer), so that's a lot of work.



then it is all about muting, mixing, effects sending (Tom) and live synth/effects tweaking (Ed). I think I've seen Ed using a percussion pad of some kind (on Out of Control), and i wondered if the percussion were played live, but otherwise, there is little live "playing" (that's not a negative thing, it is just different, I think Liam from Prodigvy sometimes plays riffs live, but Underworld uses more or less the same method than the chems)



Well that's interesting anyway. I would really love to know more about this. that's being a Trainspotter geek, but I hope we'll know more about this on the Q&A section (why so little updates here?) or via Ed posting on the forum, but I don't hope much...

TryptaJunk, im glad you have dug up this thread, having rad what people have said i have a much better idea of the live set.



Im guessing alot of dance bands play like this. The trouble is when ive seen underworld is that i could really see the equipment because of what it was held in, but im guessing they play ina simular way.

what i have noticed about underworld/chems shows:



more work is done live on the sound of the song then on the sequence. basic sequence from show to show within the songs stays the same. what they are editing is how these parts are run through effects, which tracks of these sequences are enabled when, and tweaks on the synthesizers.



for underworld, they have a HUGE console-like mixer running the show. an mpc is doing the drums, but most of the audio must come from that stack of multitracks in the back. almost all changes in an underworld set come from muting/unmuting tracks. then again, the structure of underworld tracks arent that complicated, just intensely layered.



in a chems set, less focus is on layers, as the music is constantly changing. heres how i read what i have seen going on onstage: most of what your hear is either coming out of the mpc or those two s1000s they have racked behind them. if a sound stays constant withing a song, its being sampled. tom is selecting sequences with the mpc, and enabling tracks with the mixer. ed is taking care of all the non-sampled stuff: effects, effects routing, synth tweaking, synth patch assigning. Tom tends to bogart the sets, just by nature of their duties. go check the video of hey boy hey girl. not much tweeking involved, just pressing "next sequence". i think ed touches the rig maybe 3 times.

oh yeah.. crystal method shows tend to be a joke. most of their gear isnt even plugged in!

acid children: that thing in the front for underworld is just a reaaalllyyy big console mixer

cat Escribi�:

acid children: that thing in the front for underworld is just a reaaalllyyy big console mixer

i know its just hard seeing over it, one both occasions ive seen underworld i have been dispaointed because i cant see Rick working all i can see is him looking down. I wonder is Darren Emerson not being there anymore really affects the show. Ive only seen them when it was Rick and Carl so i woudnt know. Its cool underworld have a frontman, and Karls guitar looks so nice with all the writing on it.



Im guessing futureshock play in this way 2 as do many. I would love to see Royksopp and Daft to see if they play differentally.

with darren gone... karl tends to go to the console everso often to screw around. rick does a lot more work now. crazy console acrobatics!

it still sounds kewl

i read all this stuff, really interesting - what's a mpc?

mpc= akai mpc sampler/sequencer



s1000= akai rack sampler. think an mpc without a sequencer, or trigger pads.

that makes it a lot easier to understand...

wouldnt mind getting me one of those X-D