Underworld was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. Now don’t get me wrong, it is still not the best show I have been to. But Underworld was special in a different way. We get there and its the usual greeting of folks we know or are aquanted with. Then we bump into B.P. who owns the local record store. He and S. are looking for L. so that they can give him his VIP pass. Well, L. was never found so M. and I had the pleasure of using the pass and watching the show from a birds eye view.
We were right above the stage. I looked down at about 12 feet away is the huge mixer, two Powerbook G4’s, two nify Pioneer CD players and all the other audio equipment that drives the Underworld show.
Being the geek that I am, until they cam out the people I was with and I specualated on what all the equipment was for(it really wasn’t that much). The big question in my mind was what were the Powerbooks going to be used for. I heard that the Chicago show sucked because the Powerbook kept crashing. Later I heard second hand that someone said it sounded like they were having problems with their drum machine in Chicago. I’m sure that it is the same issue.
When they started playing I knew exactly how they were running it. They were using the Powerbooks to run almost everything. I’d have to guess 32 channels were coming out of the Powerbook via its USB connection & some nice audio hardware. I would have probably wanted to leave if I had seen a wire coming out of the std. line out of the PB. So basically what it came down to were all audio sounds being played on all channels pre-sequenced via the PB and then simply being mixed for the audience in realtime. It certainly wasn’t a band playing insturments but it was absolutely facinating and awesome to watch. The mixer was huge. The case was 7 or 8 feet long. I’d guess the main mixer was 64 channels divided out in a custom Underworld fashion. Then a turntable, and a little 8 channel mixer that the ‘other’ underworld guy(I don’t know their names) used for his vocals.
Good time had:- checkski!
Thanks for the good view B.