Is there a way? Help Please?

[cooky1992]

Hi all,

My band has a lot of synthesizers involved, when playing live, we currently use midi keyboards and a laptop on stage, this is highly irritating to set up and sound check, is there a way of getting the computer synthesizer sounds onto a keyboard so there is no need for a computer live?

If so, what sort of keyboard is needed, and any other equipment?

If not, are there any other alternatives?

Thanks for any help.

[tehLORD]

There's a device called a Muse Receptor which is a rackmount PC that's designed specifically to run 3rd party VSTs.

I've no experience with it myself and they're quite pricey but it's probably worth a look :-

http://www.museresearch.com/receptor2.php

[seedyproductions]

A Mico would do it too but their also expensive. your best bet may just be a hardware synth?

[Elvis2]

My band used two laptops and a hardware synth live a few times and i wouldnt ever go that way again if i could possibly help it.
We had once set up our gear during the soundcheck, we had a 30 minute set and only 5 minutes to set up our gear so we had connected everything and got our stuff up and running before the gig.
The band we followed on stage was really drunk and they kept playing well past their alotted 35 minute time slot, the sound engineer had no choice but to cut off the electricity on stage thus resetting our gear setup, it took us 15 minutes to get the laptops/synth to sync together again, it was our worst gig ever.
Get a hardware synth for the parts that you want to play and some kind of basic playback device for secondary parts, always keep your live rig as stripped down and basic as you possibly can, you dont want to be the guy twiddling your thumbs for 15 minutes onstage while your laptop tries to find the keyboard and sound files.

[eivind]

if you know how to multi-sample sounds - for instance a sample for every third note.. you could capture the sounds and program them into a hardware sampler

and - as mentioned above - using hardware synths willl make your problems go away for ever.. (a combination of hw-samplers and hw-synths is pretty nifty)