If this sounds like a lot of gear then it certainly is, creating some extra challenges to contend with. “I’ve had to enlarge the size of my booth to put all this gear on it. There’s a lot of custom made shit that we had to get. It’s going to be a lot more hands on. The level of difficulty is going to be much harder than the previous tours, which is exciting and terrifying at the same time.
“I’ve got a pretty grandiose vision. We’ve just got done with the first week of rehearsals where I just needed to experiment and see if all of my ideas were actually possible with the technology, processing the whole band before it goes out to the PA with vintage effects and vintage hardware and stuff like that. If there is even five milliseconds of
all analog outboard hardware to process drum signals on stage so they sound like they do in the studio,” he says when we ask about this process. “So they sound like old school break beats in a live setting. That’s the biggest challenge. That’s not really been done before. One of my responsibilities on stage as a performer on stage will be having all of the microphones go through this super computer/analog hybrid set up, where I can basically manipulate the sound and everything in the band to make it sound older and more vintage, more like it’s off wax. That’s going to be a huge part of what’s going to make this band sound different.
“It’s not going to be just like the drummer sets up and gets mic-ed at sound check. It goes to a whole system that I have in the DJ booth where I’m actually mixing the live drum kit and the keyboard breaks and the horn mikes. and I’ll be able to echo them out and have an effect and manipulate the live instruments in the band. But at the same time I’ll be triggering clips in Ableton with a Push and triggering samples and sequences with Machine.
“I’m going to have four laptops up there and one processing live instruments with 32 computer cords. It’s this crazy, massive super computer that’s more like a musical instrument where I’m using it to play samples with the band. So we can be free of a click track as much as possible but still be performing completely electronic and dope music. I’ll also have a bass and some other live instruments that I can play. And then I’ll have two other computers that I can do my typical live production DJ set with. It’s a lot of computers on stage!”
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latency between the drummer hitting a snare and it coming back through his headphone, then it would be impossible. That’s why I had to invest in a super computer, to take care of all of the processing and then use a lot of devices where I can.”
It all plays into the album he has spent the last two years of his life working on, ‘A Color Map of the Sun’. Released last July, Smith set about creating an all analog electronic music record by producing an entire collection of vinyl sounds to sample. After that, he mixed the album by experimenting with vintage synthesizers, which took another year. You can learn more about the process by watching ‘The Making of Pretty Lights New Album: A Color Map of the Sun’ on YouTube, It’s
a half hour documentary that covers the entire recording process in Colorado, Brooklyn and New Orleans. Throughout, Smith can be seen rollicking and gyrating his six foot plus frame as an assortment of blues musicians and jazz singers perform the music he wrote. Recently he was one of the first electronic producers to appear on the Conan O’Brien Show to promote the new LP.
Months after its release, Derek is still brimming with excitement from the project. “First I found a studio, then I found an engineer, then I found all of these musicians. I’d go in and the common misconception is that I’d just hired a bunch of musicians, had them play and recorded it. In fact I actually had to go in and write every part for every musician for every recording. Because I was playing these musicians a flat rate I didn’t want them to be writing things on my record. So I had to write everything and have them play that. That was a massive learning experience for me.”
Taking 24 months to finish the project might have been a daunting prospect but in the end this meticulous process paid off. “I was very pleased and very proud of the record. It’s something that’s never been done before. It really does sound like now, though it spans the last 80 years of music, and has some new elements and style - past, present and future. I’m really stoked on that.”
* Download ‘A Color Map of the Sun’ and buy tickets for Pretty Lights’ Fall Tour, starting October 10, at
prettylightsmusic.com.
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