Haven’t played live in quite a few years now as I’ve mostly been stuck in studio producing, mixing and mastering. However like you a lot of stuff was created in the box and I needed to find a good way for it to translate on stage.
I do most of my production on Cubase in studio but what I did was get pretty clued in on Ableton. Then I cut up stems from the original recording sessions and created Ableton tracks that I could mix live on stage (so a bunch of loops for each song basically).
I was part of an electronic duo who worked with guest vocalists and MC’s so we also had drum machines, keyboards, samplers and some analogue delay units that we brought with us to play some live lines on.
When one of us was playing keys the other would be mixing in Ableton with a controller.
The beauty of doing it this way is that when you saw the crowd reacting to a certain thing you were doing live you weren’t stuck in a situation of the track moving along the timelime and you not being able to improvise instead you could just repeat loops and build from where the crowd was enjoying it.
One thing I would strongly recommend though is that you get yourself an interface with at least 8 audio outs.
Don’t be giving the front of house engineer a stereo feed and be expecting your mixed tracks to sound great.
The engineer would prefer to have access to your basic stems as they’ll know how to adjust for best playback for the room/field (if you’re doing a festival).
So for instance how I used to do it was for each track on the DAW I would be able to give the engineer a separate kick, snare, a stereo feed of drums loops/overheads percussion bus, a mono/stereo Bass feed, a stereo feed of keys bus and a stereo feed for guitars bus/odds and ends.
Then I’d also be giving him a stereo feed from our own mixer on stage which had the extra synths, FX and samplers etc.
Well before playing a gig we’d rent out a big rehearsal space with a large P.A. system similar to what you’d expect to find in a venue. We’d then eq our loops as best we could for a live setup and pull off a lot of the compression we had on tracks so the front of house engineer could adjust for that at each venue.
In fairness though we did have our own front of house engineer we worked with so we were in safe hands.
In fact a lot of the time we found ourselves nearly zeroing all our EQ’s on a lot of stuff (as every venue you visit is different). By giving our engineer clean feeds it gave him a hell of a lot more wriggle room to sculpt our sound in the venue/festival so it matched our recordings. It also helped us to consistently achieve that super loud impact you want from transients, particularly your kick and snares, but also meant that things that could get lost in the mix if it was just a stereo feed could be adjusted live (for instance that quiet but really cool keyboard part that always gets lost in the mix!)
If you have that luxury and know someone who’s good at live mixing (especially for electronic music) rope him into your live set up as at least that way you’ll always know your sound is getting the best chance it deserves.
All that being said though the main thing is that you’re comfortable with whatever way you decide to output your music. If you’re not comfortable on stage you’ll never be able to put on a good show. So see what works for you and what you enjoy doing the most. If you’re enjoying yourself onstage it goes a hell of a long way in insuring that your crowd are enjoying themselves too.
TLDR
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Use Ableton, cut up stems from your original recordings into easy to manage loops
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Play some instruments/sampler/drum machines/FX live (so you can put on a show for the audience and also have some fun too!)
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Be flexible/able to adapt to the crowd and whats working for them.
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Send as many individual stems out to front of house as you can
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Rehearse your live setup in a rehearsal studio that has a big P.A. system (bins, tops mids), to get a good sense of what to send out to a front of house engineer.
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Get your own FOH engineer
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Use what you’re most comfortable with, enjoy yourself!