Synthesised vs. live

Flexibility of a Live Band

What's been amazing about having a live band, as opposed to having everything programmed on a laptop, is that it allows you flexibility. We were not only booked for dance music festivals, but also for festivals alongside rock bands and at jazz festivals.

• Up mountains, down valleys, you name it, we got booked to play it.
• Having that musicianship within the band was really important to allow us to rise to the occasion.

Adapting to Different Festivals

So if there was a metal festival, our sound engineer would just:

• Turn the guitars up to 11
• Make the TOMS really heavy
• Crank up the snare fills
• Add distortion on everything

This way, we didn't feel like we'd come on stage and be really lame alongside these artists. It was a real baptism of fire, a real learning curve.

Sometimes, when we did a jazzy festival, there would be a different energy, and we could really lean into the jazzier side of what we did.

• The playing would be slightly different.
• Some of the licks on the drums would be different.
• Sometimes the bass would move in a slightly different way.

There was a way of being sensitive to our environment.

Freedom Within Structure

The great thing about playing with real musicians is that, although it was within a structure, there was freedom within that. We could also change the set list.

As we grew as musicians, as a band, and as artists, having released not one record, but two records, gaining an audience and moving up the billing at festivals, it felt like we could experiment.

• We were gaining an audience and therefore not always having to win them over.
• It didn't mean we didn't give it 110% every single time, but we felt we could play around with the songs more when we went out to perform them live.

Performance Considerations

If you are an electronic artist and everything is really programmed, you have much less flexibility. We used something called an MPC 4000 to run our beats from. When we were happy with the arrangement, we transferred it to something called an ADAT machine, which was very stable.

Stability of the instruments we were using was really important. I had some analog keyboards, and sometimes, things would go wrong:

• Other keyboards would go out of tune willfully in the middle of a song , quite stressful!
• Sound patches would sometimes disappear.

Having knowledge of what patch I was going to use for each song was crucial since we had worked on them in rehearsals. Unforeseen problems had to be managed on the fly.

Rig Setups for Touring

One of the other things we found very useful as we progressed with our touring was having an A rig and a B rig. This means having exactly the setup, but duplicated.

• This was often necessary because the distances traveled between gigs sometimes didn't allow us to break down the gear after a show and load it onto an articulated lorry in time.
• Certain gigs would require instruments to be set up beforehand.

While the B rig served as a backup, it was never quite as amazing as the A rig, so we always preferred to play on the A rig. Nonetheless, it was useful to have a backup.

Evolution with Technology

Over the years, we ended up using Ableton Live on our last tour, which gave us a lot of flexibility with moving stems about and rearranging the music for a new era. We had done an album that was a remix album, titled 2.0, to celebrate 20 years of Faithless.

We got some amazing remixes done, and we wanted to bring some elements from those remixes into the live show.

It was incredibly useful to be able to experiment with the stems in Ableton and mix them with our previous stems to create a new hybrid, taking the show into the next era.