Beautiful Music!

[Eli]

I recently stumbled onto an incredible Herbie Hancock performance online with Marcus Miller and Harvey Mason. Check out about 11:30 into this video:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/herbie_hancock_s_all_star_set.html

They go into an extended version of Watermelon Man and Herbie makes all this technology we use sing!!! He has a laptop there with Logic clearly loaded up in the background. He uses a variety of sounds, but one of them is certainly the EVD6 with some very very nice real time wah control that he is controlling with one of the keyboard's knobs or sliders.

Anyway, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole performance and just wanted to share.

.......Any thoughts on the programming of the EVD 6 and the wah control?

 

[wilmot]

Not to take anything away from Herbie, but coming in from a slightly different angle, I think a more extreme example of this are the reunion tours (2009-2010) of Ultravox.

Here you have a band that were once (seventies and eighties) innovators in electronic music, creating completely new sounds out of a limited flora of available equipment by connecting or rebuilding in previously unheard of ways. Then having to go on stage with scores of different instruments and gadgets - Now converting all these sounds into a setup with just four macbookpro's, mainstage (plus, apparently one logic express), and midi-keyboards (apart from the non-electronic stuff, such as drums, guitars and violas).

I'm not sure which plug-ins they use (though there seems to have been a lot of them), but I've seen minimoosta, Oddity, impOSCar and CS-80V mentioned in interviews.

And they sure know how to get this equipment to sound fantastic.

There's a great number of clips from these tours ("Return to Eden", "Return to Eden 2") on youtube, but both because most of them have really poor quality and because it's really copy-righted material I'm not posting any links here. But if you get hold of the official CD/DVD have a listen/look at songs like Astradyne and All Stood Still - Thats getting a lot out logic!
Astradyne in particular (at least in the room, at the actual gigs) sometimes transcends music as such and becomes just blissful noise.