How does deadmau5 play live

There are people scrambling to patch modular synthesizers onstage. There are people who sing or add vocals or instruments, live, over their sets, while still maintaining enough underneath that people can dance.

There are people who can play entire techno dance sets, live coding or live patching entire compositions improvisationally. There are artists on instruments like the monome, cutting up patterns as they go. There are controllerists and scratch turntablists, finger-drumming percussionists who toss all the loops and play beats from one-shots, multi-instrumentalists and beatjazz maniacs.

And the list goes on. I saw Deadmau5 at SONAR — and, sorry, while I found his production talent to be as evident as always, I wound up skipping part of a set I found inert, or certainly, to be fair, not my taste. Simultaneous venues made hopping about desirable. At that same festival, there was an abundance of live performance and improvisational DJing. Daedelus was dynamic as always, slicing up sounds on his monome.

The Native Instruments-sponsored Mostly Robot delivered, as promised, everything live: Jamie Lidell singing live, Mister Jimmy playing keyboards live, DJ Shiftee playing turntables live, Jeremy Ellis playing all the beats from his fingers live, Tim Exile mangling sounds in Reaktor live.

As deadmau5 mentions, this is done in part to keep music, video and lights in sync at huge shows. There is not necessarily anything wrong with this, there is room in electronic music for different types of performances and for different kinds of audiences.

Of course it can be really enjoyable to hear a set of your favorite music performed together with a mindblowing visual show at a huge venue, even if you know how most of the music is going to go in advance.

Ean Golden is right that the feedback loop between performer and audience is the crucial thing here : the ability for the performer to feel the energy of the crowd and respond through their performance.

This is what makes for the most legendary live performances, this felt connection between the people in the crowd, the action on stage, and the sounds that result. However, this does not necessarily require a lot of fancy gear or a complex controller setup — the performer just needs to be able to manipulate SOME aspect of the performance in response to the audience. Even if all you are doing is mixing one track into the next DJ-style, if you are flexible in your track selection, creative with your mixing, and in tune with your audience you will be able to interact with their energy and take them on a memorable journey.

Great DJs are expert at using selection and sequencing to shape a mood. Deadmau5 is known to use Cubase for his live shows. Because of how it was designed, Deadmau5 himself has talked about how much more reliable and robust Cubase is over Ableton. Particularly when it comes to latency issues. Previously Deadmau5 has talked about how he performs live using Cubase whilst tracking is done through Ableton.

Whether he still does this is unknown in his current tour setup. Push to see price on Amazon. As mentioned Deadmau5 is known to mess around with different sequencers to produce his music.

He has talked about how much control Bitwig gives you compared to something like Ableton. For example, in this video, he talks about how good he thinks the engine is. That, coupled with its ability to set and change VST parameters, makes it great for sound design and something that he is excited to use. Pro Tools is known as one of the industry leaders, particularly when it comes to recording audio. Although you are able to write and map MIDI in it as well.

While it is run by most major studios, Pro Tools can be prohibitively expensive for home producers due to its limits on channels etc. Cataract is the sampler geared towards more experimental sound designers and EDM producers.

By scanning and modulating or morphing existing audio producers like Deadmau5 are able to very quickly create new, unique sounds.

The benefit is to those that truly understand sound design and play with the many options to create sounds worth listening to. After all, randomly creating alien noises is all well and good… but they are pretty hard to dance to. Put simply, Reaktor is described as a hugely powerful development environment. Not only does it act as a player for premade synths and effects but it actually lets you build them from scratch. You can literally go into edit mode and add individual elements like faders, envelopes or oscillators and then route and patch them in any way you like.

Reaktor also allows you to build virtual racks, much as you would build with hardware in the real world. Given how extensively Deadmau5 has done this in his studio, who knows what he does with the unlimited power of Reaktor. You can also buy an upgrade from Select to Full. Deadmau5 is well known to use Absynth and he can be seen playing with it during some of his live streams. Absynth is a diverse synth that lets you create different soundscapes due to the variety of ways you can generate sound in the first place.

Once a sound has been generated there are extensive feedback and mutation options to further affect the sound. Visual editing and the ability to alter each individual voice and modulation made Strobe super realistic when it came to analog modeling. This was expanded upon in version 2 allowing producers, even more, control and variety. By creating several patches within the same instance of the plugin, producers can now add extra expressions and texture to individual notes.

Previously this would have been done by sampling sounds, tweaking settings and then sampling again. Meaning, once the audio was recorded, it would be difficult to go back and change any individual parameters. In Strobe2 producers are able to save and change anything on the fly. It is details and options like this that Deadmau5 and similar producers to create such sonically, detailed bass and melody lines.

Convex is a dual multi-effect processor that Deadmau5 uses inside Ableton. Making it useful for affecting everything from drum patterns to synth lines. It also processes incoming signals in real-time, meaning that you can input hardware and affect the sound immediately. And Deadmau5 is definitely a fan of analog hardware. The H-Reverb by Waves is designed to be an advanced reverb plugin. In fact, it has been described as giving you so much control as to be mind-boggling and you basically have to be a sound engineer to use it.

Again this complexity and granular control is probably what makes Deadmau5 use the plugin. The level of control comes from the fact that H-Reverb is a hybrid between impulse response libraries and a traditional delay engine. Impulse response libraries use samples of acoustic spaces while delay engines let you affect and control parameters to morph and create different sounds.

Giving the producer both styles in one plugin is what makes the H-Reverb so rich in options and renowned in the producer community. Cryogen is a multi-effect plugin that you can use within Ableton.

Highly customizable, Cryogen can make hugely chaotic sounds from inputs as well as being used to design sound from scratch. The reason Deadmau5 probably likes this software is because of how programmable it actually is. Aside from the built-in range of presets you can tweak and modify every single parameter. Allowing you to create highly personalized sounds, ranging from the subtle to the abstract and deranged. Deadmau5 is known to use the Nerve Drum machine, probably because of how powerful and ahead of the game the software is.