Veterans Day Weekend - Tour Journal

After my weekend in Oregon I had a whole weekend off from shows which was super nice, but by no means did I rest!  I’ve just finished a rather large project and am slowly starting to feel the weight lift from months of labor and so many hours in the studio.  It’s always a bitter sweet feeling when I finish a big project.  There’s a sense of relief now that I’ve accomplished something rather major coupled with a sense of loss as I’ve put in all my focus and attention into one thing for so long and now I’m essentially abandoning it. There’s excitement to share your work coupled with anxiety about how it will be received. I would definitely say there are more sweet aspects of finishing a big project than there are bitter feelings.

Anyhow, I’ve just returned from Austin and have been trying to sort out my thoughts after a pretty rough show, technically speaking.

The show was in a little town outside of Austin called Bee Cave. It was part of Buzzfest (get it?) and took place in outside in the main square.

I was asked to perform live for this show which I haven’t done since before the pandemic, other than A View Of U live which was streamed and not in front of a live audience.

Initially I was a bit hesitant to take the offer since at the moment I’m not actively touring a live show, but knowing that I’m going to eventually start working on a new live show (more on that soon!) I figured it would be a good practice to get myself back in the headspace of live show creation and performance, so I decided to give it a shot.

I had a general idea of what I wanted to do for this show, kind of taking a similar approach to how I performed A View Of U and Human Energy live shows. My main concern initially was the state of my current laptop : a MacBook Pro circa 2015 that has been through many tours, tons of sessions, as well as loads of wear and tear. Would it crap out on me in the middle of my show?

I was looking in to buying a new laptop for this occasion, but decided to hold off since it was rumored there would be a new Mac Pro announcing soon.  By the time they made their announcement I was 2 weeks away from my performance and when I tried to order one I realized it wouldn’t arrive in time for me to properly prepare for the set.  So alas I had to have faith that old trusty laptop of mine.

(Live show pre-production in my new studio)

So I started building the live show in my studio.  Since I didn’t have a lot of time to rehearse and prep, I decided to forego playing guitar and keys and focus on a more controller based set.

My setup is basically this : MacBook Pro running Ableton Live 11, Ableton Push 2, MIDI Fighter, MIDI Fighter Twister and a DJM 900 NXS2. I use the push to launch clips, MIDI Fighter to play drums/drops and cut up breaks, Twister to turn fx on and off while controlling values with the knobs, and the DJM as a controller/audio interface hybrid. For those that didn’t know, yes you can use a DJM as a controller and interface!

I won’t get deep into how I set up my live session just yet, more on that at a later date ☺️

Anyhow, after a few run throughs of my show in my studio I was confident that my laptop was going to do just fine when performing. I fly out to Austin, drive to Bee Cave, check in to the hotel, and walk to the venue for soundcheck. I'm already nervous at this point and even more nervous now that I'm seeing the setting of the venue. It's literally in the middle of a galleria neighboring Barnes & Noble, Dicks Sporting Goods and a bunch of restaurants. Not exactly the most vibey setting for a live show. Additionally it was abnormally cold and misty for Austin, and I wondered how many people would drive 30 minutes outside of Austin to a mall in the cold and wet to see me play!

(Soundcheck in front of little kids running around and a local library)

The festival organizers and staff were wonderful and made me feel welcomed. I did my soundcheck fairly quickly as they seemed to be running behind and needed to officially start the festival. Apparently night #1 was cancelled due to a downpour so they had to fit in some of the cancelled acts in to our schedule, and that took away from my originally scheduled soundcheck. Even with the speedy soundcheck, I was still confident that the show was going to go smoothly. I checked all my controllers, ran through a song that has the most bits going on to make sure everything was working correctly. I grabbed my laptop and headed back to the hotel to finish some edits to the live set before heading back to the stage.

After dinner (Grilled cheese with smoked pork yummm) I walked back to Buzzfest. Local indie/psych-pop legends The Octopus Project had just started their first song. I loved their vibe, evoking 90s Stereolab era goodness. They even covered one of my favorite Broadcast songs and I sang along the entire time (Check the attached video)!

(Buzz Fest Main Stage where I played, water droplets visible and cool looking through the lights)

At this point the mistiness in the air had started to increase and you could visibly see the water vapor in the flashing lights of the stage. I got a bit nervous about my gear, even though it was covered under the roof of the stage, this mist seemed to be traveling in all directions. I go up to check my gear before hitting the stage and notice a whole layer of wetness on everything. I get a towel from the stage manager and start wiping stuff down. It seemed that as soon as I would finish wiping something down it would instantly be wet again.

I get them to run power to my gear off stage so I can make sure everything is working properly. After quickly checking as many things as I could to see if they were working, it was time to bring my setup on stage.  At this point the night is already nearly 30 minutes behind schedule with an apparent "hard sound curfew" that I had to be conscious of since I was the final act of the night. 

(Anxiety Dreams are a bitch!!)

A quick-ish side-note: I'm sure you've all experienced some form of occupational anxiety dreams at some point in your life. For me, my anxiety dreams typically involve travel hiccups (losing a bag, missing a flight, having to take a bus to a train to a plane, forgetting my passport etc) and performance nightmare situations. This typically includes gear not working, having a hard time deciphering my gear (it's written in some kinda alien language), not recognizing any of my songs, crowd visibly getting upset that I haven't started my set yet, and all kinds of other fun stuff! I had one of these nightmares the night before my show but didn't let it affect me too much or read in to it.... hmm

Anyhow, this Buzzfest performance ended up being a very real nightmare. As we get my gear set up on stage, the Push is not turning on, the midi fighter twister is turning on and off over and over again, my external ssd (fully weatherproof btw) isn't being recognized. I realize that the USB hub I'm using must be the issue as when I plug different gear directly in to my laptop it starts working perfectly. I try to blow on the usb hub, dump any moisture that have may accumulated in it, and still the push and the twister were non responsive. On top of this, half of the controls on the DJM mixer were not working. I was at least getting sound output to the mixer, and realizing we were getting closer and closer to the curfew I decided it was time to start my set and hope for the best.

I had to use the trackpad to launch clips which wasn't the best but I still was able to launch stuff on time without any hiccups. My limitations with gear forced me to essentially do an ableton dj set and do more heavy lifting with the MIDI fighter and DJM built in fx (lots of dub echo, spacer, Roll/Slip Roll etc). I probably threw an amen break or lynn collins break on practically every song because I more or less ran out of things to do!

(My face says I'm having fun, my mind says oh shit oh shit oh shit)

Regardless, the crowd was vibing! They were very responsive to every song and transition, were very excited about any new song that I played in addition to some of the "hits" (lol), and were generally hyped the whole 45 minutes of my set. At this point in my career I'm pretty good at faking it when it comes to how much anxiety and dread I have going through my body when things go wrong. I know that in general, if you look like something is going wrong then people will think something is going wrong!

I ended my set and the crowd demanded more music! I kinda went back and forth on wether or not I should since we were already nearly 30 minutes past curfew. I finally decided fuck it, here's a new track I'm working on with Topaz Jones and Ezri.  At this point they had turned off the mains, so I did a classic move when this occurs and turned my monitors around so ppl could hear it. 

I got to chat with a lot of the people who came, and everyone seemed to love the set even saying it was the best thing they had seen all year. I took a bunch of photos with people, answered questions, even got to see an old friend from Orlando, and eventually made my way back to the hotel to get roughly 3 hours of sleep before my hotel>airport pickup at 4:30am eeeeek.

(Cracked out on my 7am flight home, luckily with a whole exit row to myself. Yes that's a Human Energy hoodie it was my only clean black hoodie OK??)

Ok that's it! I know its a rather long read, and I'm gonna work on making these more succinct in the future, but it is quite nice recapping the weekend and makes me appreciate these opportunities more and more! It's a nice way of implanting these experiences in my memory so that they aren't so fleeting.

Peace be with you
T