The dangers of live laptop looping...

[David Trenkel <improv@peak.org>]

I've been taking my laptop, a P4 1.8G IBM ThinkPad, out to gigs with my 
band for the last few months, mostly using it to trigger some 
pre-recorded loops in Ableton Live. Lately, I've decided I wanted to do 
some live looping of my bass as well, so I put together a Live Set that 
has Ellotronix XL, Mobius, Supatrigger, and a few Pluggo plugs as a 
live looping/manipulation/devastation-station. Worked up a looping solo 
that would be the intro to one of our new tunes, actually a cover of an 
Ethiopian pop/jazz tune from the 70's. Anyway, played with it a lot in 
the studio, took it to the gig Friday night, and all was cool, other 
than accidentally nudging the knob assigned to the "Silence" function 
in Supertrigger, setting it to a very high value and briefly causing 
some severe dropouts. Otherwise, totally cool, got a great response, 
the band dug it, etc...

So, anyway, I take it to the gig Saturday, and all works fine during 
soundcheck, I even demo the looping setup for a friend who is a student 
in the U of Oregon electronic music program. We start our first set, 
and the tune before the the tune with my bass solo has me triggering 
some tabla loops from the Live. Since the laptop wasn't used for since 
soundcheck, it had gone to sleep, and Live never works, at least on 
this machine, when waking up from sleep. So I spend the rest of the 
tune desperately trying to reboot the computer, while playing bass, 
which kind of takes both hands. The tune is in E, so I can pedal on an 
open E string while I force-quit Live and reboot. The computer is just 
coming back up when we finish the tune. I signal the trumpet player to 
kill some time while I get setup, and wait for what seems like an 
eternity while Live loads the Set. I believe that VST's made in Synth 
Edit, like Ellotronix, take a while longer to load, at least on this 
machine. When it seems like Tim just can't fill any more time without 
telling a joke, and trust me, you never want that to happen onstage, 
and the set STILL isn't loaded, I start my solo. Sometime into the 
solo, the set finally wakes up, and I see signal going into Live, and 
signal coming out on the meters, but, no sound. So I'm desperatley 
trying to play a solo, tweak my mixer and MIDI controller, and about to 
give up, when, all of a sudden, the last bit I've played in the solo 
comes out booming, So I pull the volume down to a reasonable level, 
wrap up the solo, start the tune, and, later in the tune, take a raging 
fuzz-bass solo to clear up some of the built-up frustration.

Moral of the story? Turn off the freaking Sleep function, dummy!