Rush has three members. Rush has always had three members. You may as well suggest they get a second drummer so Neil doesn’t have to work as hard.
That’s pretty stupid, really.
I dunno, I think most bands would love to have a fan base as devoted as Rush’s.
And if Rush wants to use triggers, player pianos, or Rube Goldberg machines, who are we to argue? It’s obviously worked pretty well for them - I doubt these guys have had to work a real job since the '70’s (which helps explain the libertarian nonsense, come to think of it).
But their fans. Everybody should have fans like that.
I always prefer it when a live band sticks to its core membership throughout. There are obvious, cool exceptions: Talking Heads with set of crack funk musicians; Prince doing whatever the hell he wants.
I think it is a musician’s thing. Or a thing some musicians focus on. Own your shit. If you are driving the triggers and dropping them in when you need to, as part of your complicated set of roles to deliver music that connects with your audience - that’s owning your shit.
I just watched a one-man show last night where the guy continually sampled and replayed himself blending it into the song. It was exhausting just watching him do it. The audience was filled with musicians which in itself is an indication that his skills were appreciated on that level. It was awesome.
Ed Sheeran does something similar in his live shows - he plays solo acoustic and uses multiple loop pedals to create a full sound - he’ll bang on the side of his guitar to set up a drumbeat, he’ll set up backing vocals, a rhythm line, etc. and turn them on and off as necessary throughout the song.
Here’s a pretty amazing example of him doing so on an 11-minute jam.
Yep, that type of looping has been around for a while. It is very much a form of owning your performance while also using augmentation as an integral part of the sound.
We used to tease a friend who had an echo-plex by telling him he was just playing with himself.
5 boxes that help people loop on stage:
This is my favorite example of a looping artist.
You can see exactly how he does it all and, if it looks easy, it isn’t.
Explicit lyrics:
Thrift Shop by Macklemore Cover (Auto Tunes w/Flula) - Explicits!
The first musician I remember doing this was KT Tunstall in her solo performances, as in this 2007 clip. She did a really good job of using the loops to add a full sound without using it as a crutch to hide bad singing/playing. Of course a LOT of bands used loops/extra musicians to fill out their live sound before, they just hid them offstage.
Agreed.
I don’t see any meaningful distinction between “triggers” (or looping or whatever) and lip-syncing.
If I’m hearing pre-recorded or even just recorded sound during a live performance, to me it’s not a live performance. May as well just listen to the studio track.
I also don’t consider DJs to be musicians, though, so maybe I’m just an old man. Get off my lawn!
The distinction is that the sampling is an active addition to the music and not someone pretending to play the music. The vast majority of songs are altered in some form or other. Solo musicians who sample a back beat and their own vocals in real time while they perform requires they do it perfectly. It means they have to be human metronomes with close to perfect pitch or it all falls apart. This is on top of operating foot petals to add echoes or change the tone of instruments all the while singing and playing an instrument.
Meh. I’m no more impressed by it than by people who are really good at Guitar Hero.
If we’re talking live sampling and looping, you really should be. It’s tricky to get just right.
The difference is that with lip syncing the singer could be singing live but they aren’t. The audience are generally there to hear the singer live but that’s not what they’re getting. On the other hand, a three or four piece band who are playing all their own instruments live but use a bit of technology to flesh out the sound are still giving all the live performance they can, they’re just enhancing it.
If I were to see Pink Floyd live, I want to hear Gilmour play a solo live, I’d be pissed if he was essentially playing air guitar. I don’t however, give a fuck that they didn’t have an actual beating heart mic’d up for some sound effect instead of using a backing track.
And Guitar Hero isn’t?
Ha! I’ll totally give you that.
This.
Guitar Hero is a toy that requires twitchy reflexes but no talent. There is a hell of a lot more to playing an instrument than there is pushing some buttons.
As Wordman pointed out, Geddy has so much going on during shows that the general response from musicians is ‘How in the hell does Geddy do that?’
If you watch at about 1:20 in you can see a Moog pedal board under Geddys keyboard. That is there so that he can play bass lines with his feet while playing keyboards. And singing. And that, my friends, is insanely hard. Hell, just singing and playing is rough.
Heck, for the non musicians in the thread, try it yourself. Pick a song, preferably a Rush song as they tend to be a bit more complex than other bands. Play it a couple times so that you can tap your foot each time a bass note is played. Once you get that, tap the melody line with your hands. Once you get that, do your feet and hands at the same time. If you can do that, then sing the lyrics on top. You’ll quick only find that it is really freaking hard. And that isn’t even including the fact that Geddy has to hit the right notes while you are just tapping.
Rush routinely has three musicians playing 5 parts. Vocals, bass, keyboards, guitar and percussion. That really isn’t easy.
Slee
Par for the course for any half-way decent church organist. Should a rock musician get extra credit?
I jest, but only a bit …
How about the school choir for “Another Brick In The Wall”. Certainly sampled and triggered when I saw Pink Floyd live in '88. While that segment is iconic and essential to the song, sampling didn’t detract. They couldn’t tour with a choir of schoolkids just for one song.
However, sampling/triggering can go wrong. I’ve seen a video of a Van Halen concert, where the synth intro was triggered at the wrong playback rate, by just a few percent. EVH just could not adjust - the difference was under 1.5 semitones, and the song went to pot, live.
KT Tunstall calls her looper “Wee Bastard”, because sometimes it just goes wrong.