# Devices to play samples live? -



## lewis (Sep 12, 2014)

Right guys this will be my bands first foray into this sort of thing so atm we all no zilch.

We played with Heart of a coward live in our hometown, and after seeing them/chatting to them. We found out they have a tech guy off stage with a box covered in little buttons. I noticed he was in charge of playing all their samples or something. He knew the set inside out and appeared to be activating the samples to them playing.

Ive never seen anything like what he had in his hands before to do this. We want to explore the Idea of getting one of our band friends to come along and do this with our set every gig.
Anyone have any inside info/knowledge about what we could use.?

I know 808 pads for drummers exist and our drummer will have this but this is about something a tech can do NOT a member of the band.

sidenote, we dont want to go the Laptop running clicks/samples live route so has to be what Ive described.

Appreciate any help here as I genuinely dont know what Im looking for. Thanks guys!!


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## eyeswide (Sep 12, 2014)

lewis said:


> Right guys this will be my bands first foray into this sort of thing so atm we all no zilch.
> 
> We played with Heart of a coward live in our hometown, and after seeing them/chatting to them. We found out they have a tech guy off stage with a box covered in little buttons. I noticed he was in charge of playing all their samples or something. He knew the set inside out and appeared to be activating the samples to them playing.
> 
> ...



I just responded to a bunch of topics in this thread that go over exactly what you're asking. Have a look at those! If you have any more questions, let me know!


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## Alex Kenivel (Sep 12, 2014)

I've triggered samples with an iPod plugged into a small guitar amp while I was playing guitar. You just have to know what you're doing and be smart about when to push buttons 

Oftentimes I make samples with my looper. 

Another thing to think about is if those samples are being played rhythmically with what the band is playing. You'd all probably need to be playing to an in-ear click or something.


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## GunpointMetal (Sep 12, 2014)

Why not sequence them? It does two things: allows you to be tighter than shit cause you're playing to a click, and it keeps everything pretty hands free once the song starts, and also, should your band ever actually make money, you don't need to pay some guy to push buttons on the side of the stage....

reminds of a band I saw years ago that had a guy with a little midi controller hooked up to one of those Antares Rack Autotune units and was playing the melodies for the vocals back behind the stage....


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## teamSKDM (Sep 13, 2014)

The easiest EASIEST way to do samples is to do this.
If anyone owns a laptop with a daw, upload your song and upload the samples on another track and pkace them where you go. Pan the samples right and the song left. Send the left to your drummers headphones and the right to the house monitors. also panned to the drummer Add something that goes through the course of the song like some snare hits to work like a metronome that start before the song does, and continues during moments of silence to keep perfect time. I find that works better, and works even better with time signatures, than a daw metronome. Thats the EASIEST way to get good quality samples as well as put on a tight live show. Just pay attention to your drummer and everything will work smoothly and sound natural. Some people may not keep the song sending to the drummer, but who cares it doesnt hurt anything. Eventually once you get bigger and play bigger venues you can take the more expensive and professional route.


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## JohnIce (Sep 13, 2014)

My drummer uses one of these:


He uses it both for backing tracks, samples and for personal monitoring via in-ears. This way he gets a monitor feed from the mixer that he can blend with a click track.

The benefit of this system over an iPod or sequencer is that you can't get out of sync with the backing. If you for example play a bridge 2 bars too long, you can just start the chorus backing 2 bars later to compensate.


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## TheWarAgainstTime (Sep 17, 2014)

My band uses an iPod live and at practice. Copied from another thread: 

_*"My band runs our clicks and backtracks through an iPod and a small/cheap mixer. 

We pan the backtracks 100% right and the click+the backtracks at a lower level 100% left. The iPod is run around 80% volume (to prevent any clipping from maxing it out) into a splitter that sends the left side into one channel of the mixer and the right side into another channel. The channel of the mixer that has the right side of the iPod is sent to the FOH and the channel with the left side is sent to our drummer, so he hears the click and some of the backtrack for reference in his earphones. 

In theory, you could take the mixer out of the equation and only use the splitter, but then you wouldn't have control of how loud the signal being sent to the FOH is since you'd have to set the iPod to however loud the drummer needs/wants it."*_


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## ZXIIIT (Sep 18, 2014)

TheWarAgainstTime said:


> My band uses an iPod live and at practice. Copied from another thread:
> 
> _*"My band runs our clicks and backtracks through an iPod and a small/cheap mixer.
> 
> ...



If you bypass the mixer for the drummer, headphones with volume control come in handy, that was my plan for my other band's live shows, but I ended up eliminating the drummer completely (well, more like can't find one....)


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## lewis (Sep 19, 2014)

Thanks for all the help guys, seems getting a small mixer for the Drummer and doing the ipod method will be the best thing to do. 
I tried finding ways for someone to activate samples using a controller and couldnt find any product suitable. So seems the most logical way of doing this.


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