Using DP for a live concert

[dirty penguin]

Have an mp3 or cd audio back-up in case disaster stikes during the show.

[Oshman]

Yo,,

I used to run DP live on big shows for a good few years.. now i use multiple Fostex D2424LV/Radial Switchers to run show and use Performer/Logic/Pro Tools to edit offline

As far as i can remember i had

Footswitch to MTPAV (it had two serial connections so you could have two laptops connected at the same time) don't know whats the equivelent these days)
Every song is seperate chunk with the play to end and cue next chunk feature enabled.

The footswitch sent a play command to both machines so that even though each laptop was not locked to timecode they would both play in sync give or take a coupla milliseconds.
Then use something like the Radial SW8 auto switchers to switch between A and B systems..

As a lot of other people said.. keep your project simple with no fx,, also keep projects on both machines identical

One problem i did have was that in the odd occasion even though the wiper was moving there would be no output,, i'd have to re-cue and start the track again and it would work..
I think this was a DP version issue or desktop G4 issue,,, in your case DP5.13 would probably be the best version to go with..

My 2cents

[jlaudon]

Thanks everyone for all your valuable input - it's very helpful. What we will be doing is running DP5.13 on two laptops, and they will have their own interfaces (MOTU for stability), and on the backup, the outputs will be muted at the mixer (the sound man has to be on top of things ). We figured we can use a bluetooth keyboard to control both laptops at the same time (how cool), so it's just a matter of hitting the space bar whenever the certain chunk needs to start, and both laptops stay pretty close. It comes down to the speed of the hard disk and computer, so the key is keeping the audio track count low as possible.

I'l let you all know how it went. So far in rehearsals, everything has been great (we were originally doing 5 songs with the computer, but now only 3 - out of about 40 songs!!!)

[jb]

I've been using DP quite a bit in live situations and I just have a simple
tip about a very useful DP feature that is kind of overlooked (I don't see it
mentioned often ) , it is the DP custom console where you can create a console
and assign MIDI controllers to do pretty much anything like control track volume
or effect send , return etc.. you basically select a MIDI controller number (you can create a Knob,
a slider , an on/off switch among other things ) and then select a target of what it will
control , it could be an audio track volume or mute , a VI , a MIDI track or another MIDI controller
and these a just a few examples.
or one of my MIDI controller is a Korg CX3 hammond emulation
and I assigned a bunch of stuff to the drawbars like Click volume , reverb return , distortion,
panning etc.., the great thing is that you can create as many consoles as you need .
I found it very worth it to take he time to look into that wonderful DP feature .
my two cents , good luck with the show.

[daniel.sneed]

Have an mp3 or cd audio back-up in case disaster stikes during the show.

Always consider worst case scenario. I've had an internal drive died on me a week before first show. Fixed in 24 hours ! What if it died 2 hours before first show ?

[BobK]

Here's an 8-channel switcher box from Radial Engineering that's designed for just this kind of live use. It switches between two redundant systems:

http://www.radialeng.com/re-sw8.htm

I read about it in a recent Keyboard mag article - maybe two of them, at least one of which was might have been by Mike Mc Knight.

[jlaudon]

We did the first show last night - the computer setup worked great. Except that on one song, the drummer came in 1 bar early, so i had to fade out the sequence, but left the clik running, so the dancers got the right tempo throughout - fortunately not a really crucial addition to the song, so it wasn't all that missed. I was thinking about whether or not to stop DP and continue exactly one bar later, but didn't risk it . For the setup, basically we set up 2 laptops with two interfaces both going into a mackie mixer with one interface's mixer channel muted. If something would go wrong, we would just mute/unmute, as the computers are started together. Surprisingly when we tried switching in rehearsal, things worked pretty fine. If I did this a lot, the Radial looks like the thing to have.

I'll let you know how tonite's show goes - lots of fun (almost a full house - around 9000 people).

[jlaudon]

Good news - all went well, and there were no problems. In the end, we manually started both laptops, and the guy that was doing was remarkably accurate - when I muted one and unmuted the other, there were no perceptible syncing issues. IN the end, the one laptop was fine though. Thanks everyone for your helpful input. Chalk another successful live show for DP (5.13) .

Next time I'll program all the different song clik/countins as well, since the chunks concept works so well in DP - did it all off of metronomes and feel this time.