Last Sunday — so that awkward in-between where it happened almost right after my last blog post — I had the pleasure of performing in an open mic in Ubud, Bali. It was a fortuitous event — I was asked by the organiser who was trying to drum up some more support, it had been years since I last performed live but I had wanted to get back into it, and it would be a great chance to demonstrate what I had been working on. Despite this, I finished writing what I was going to perform … on the day. Procrastination got to me again, but I was still really happy with what I performed!

Since I don’t have a physical gamelan, and you can’t play one with one person anyway, I needed something else. I could have used a keyboard, but I didn’t bring mine to Indonesia. The way I’d been writing music here had been either directly writing out the notes onto sheet music either on an iPad or in Dorico, my notation software; or writing directly into Logic Pro. Logic is a application where you program in the music and it plays it back to you — but when I say program, it’s nothing like code. It looks more like those YouTube videos where the keyboard notes fall onto the keyboard from above. You write in which notes you want to fall onto the keyboard at one point, and the program takes care of the rest. It’s a very powerful piece of software, and the description I give here is massively oversimplifying it. My film composition lecturer, Professor Ken Lampl, told me that it was more important to know how to use Logic for film scoring than it was knowing how to read sheet music, as one example. You don’t need to know sheet music, but it’s also just faster. In Logic, I can have a (digital) orchestra playing my music instantly, and a whole piece within half an hour. With Dorico, the sheet music software, I have to program in each note, make sure it’s readable, and then I have to get that performed somehow: live musicians will take weeks or months! So then you can take the data from Dorico and put it into Logic, and at that point you may as well have just programmed it into Logic to begin with. I also have a plug-in for a gamelan, so I can make gamelan sounds with Logic Pro. This made me think of ways I could use Logic as a performance tool.

Apple (the developer of Logic Pro) actually sells a separate piece of software for live performance called MainStage, which is exactly what I was looking for — Logic Pro but re-tooled for live performance. But, MainStage is designed to be used with a keyboard or electric guitar. You plug those into the computer, and then the computer will output the different sounds. This wouldn’t work for me. But back in actual Logic Pro, there’s an option for Live Loops. This allows you to make loops of different pieces and then trigger them either in the Program or in the accompanying free Logic Remote controller iPad app. This I thought had a lot of potential, because gamelan music is built on sequences of loops. So I could pre-program the loops, and then trigger them live on the night, and the live aspect would be when the loops came in at what point and also any live effect changes. For example, during practice I might trigger the loops XYZ in that order. But during the performance, I could trigger them XZY. I might also have X repeat for a longer or shorter amount of time. In addition to that, I could alter the sound of X live, if it was a synthesiser. This was what I ended up doing and using for the actual performance.

How did it go? Really well, but I found some challenges. For starters, stage presence is a much bigger issue than I was anticipating. I thought I’d be like a DJ up on stage, getting people hyped, but that isn’t really my personality and not the style of music I was going for. So I just sat there with an iPad triggering loops. It wasn’t bad, like I don’t think it was worse than say, a live cello performance where the performer is fundamentally also just sitting down playing music. But at least a cellist is moving, I’m just tapping a screen. That’s something I want to work on moving forward. The second thing was that there was a lot going on and I forgot to adjust the synthesised sounds live. I had to swap between views on the iPad to do this, and I just got so nervous when I was up there that instead I just kept the loop screen open. I think this wasn’t a big disaster overall because it meant I focused more on the musical content of the loops themselves than the sound properties, but ideally I’d do both. Finally, I found it hard to end the performance. Gamelan typically ends by slowing down and then ending on one long note. Because I had looped everything, and didn’t have a separate loop for the ending, I did bring the tempo down but then I just did a rather abrupt fade out, which I wasn’t too happy with. Overall, these were all minor things and a great learning opportunity for me as my first performance with this setup.

What’s next? There’s another Open Mic on 23 March, where I’m hoping to take these lessons and perform something more impressive, and relevant to my PhD. There was a lot of poetry at this last open mic and I’ve thought about merging those two ideas within my own creative work, so I think this is the perfect opportunity for that, and that’s the last opportunity before I go back to Australia for my next set of commitments. If you’re around, please come! It is at Chai of the Tiger at 6pm. Hope to see you there.

If you want to see a recording of my concert, see my Instagram @joshuarobinsoncomposer or you can click the Instagram icon in the menu of this website.

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