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A nice performance from Paul Harriman on his Eigenharp at Electro-Music 2012:

http://www.synthtopia.com/content/2012/11/25/ambient-eigenharp-performance/

Hi, Randy. I'm glad you liked it. I can't do a half hour of anything and not develop it; there needed to be a flow and the whole piece (which was actually part of a composition I did) was, to me, just right to do for the EM festival.

Everything except the EWI was done within EigenD, as you probably can guess. I don't use Live, or even any extra loop software. No external MIDI either. Factory 3 was able to hold it all.

The glass organ loop, along with the basic backgrounds, was done by recording loops from the studio version of that piece and then processing them with Apple Loop Utility, so I had 4 of those to bring in and out. There were an additional 4 environmental loops which I had also imported via apple loop utility (the water, the thunderstorm, the nightscape and the bamboo wind chime), and then some drums, mostly also brought in from the Apple Loops DVD - I opened them in Audacity, saved them as WAV to blow away whatever Apple does to them to make them misbehave, then used Apple Loop Utility to reset them. I think all 16 loop slots had something non-stock in them.

Both Arrangers were used as step sequencers. Those were augmented with some delay plugins. I tend to use the Arrangers in that way, actually, they make pretty good step sequencers and can be programmed quickly.

The AUs used were Omnisphere (much of the ambient section was played with that), Camel Audio player (bottom half of the splits during the quiet parts), Aalto (the lead part in the middle, I programmed that sound) and Zebralette (AU4, Arranger 2). Sampler 1 for bass (one of the few recorder tracks), and sampler 4 for Arranger 1, that used a sawtooth sound font from a Korg series sound font (orbit, I think). It makes kind of a delayed organ thing.

I *should* have been a man and just did my mixing on the Alpha without resorting to Stage. I'd have not been crawling around as much. But I had rehearsed it with Stage, so that's what I used. I need to practice more with the mixer page. It was pretty fiddly as it was, sound was very much in my face in that performance and I felt it was way too loud a lot of the time.

That was, by the way, the last performance with 1.4. Once I got home I moved to 2.0 and have manually ported all of my performance patches to it - anything left over isn't worth bringing.

By the way - using the apple loops saved a LOT of CPU. I have other performances (the May one in Asheville for instance) that I used a bunch of recorder loops. I got dangerously to the edge of the Macbook's ability to reproduce it without skipping. Using the loops, dropped the accompaniment load by 2/3.

-Paul

PS. whenever Ken Macbeth gets around to sending out the Micromac D, I will have one, and I'll get more used to MIDI (I'm playing with doing some of the iPad apps on MIDI) but as a friend of mine says, don't play out with the max of what you can do, you'll be more successful if you are not stressed out worrying if you'll mess up that massive lick.