Jon Hopkins - Open Eye Signal (Live on KEXP) 

its like I revisited over 100 times

Truer words have never been written, dude.

What do you mean? It's all pretty much just percussive.

It has tonality to it, he's going from Fmin to Abmaj, which is simple but effective the way he does it in creating this gorgeous buildup and release cycle to drown in.

Im a live tech for bands and acts so I can figure out some of what he'd doing by watching. The three identical things he has that he's messing about with are Kaos pads. These are boxes that can add various effects to things which you control with a touch screen. For example one effect could be the higher up you touch on the Y axis the longer a reverb is, and the further along the X axis the louder that reverb. He is playing some stems from the laptop to the DJ mixer, then each of these stems is going through its own Kaos pad. In the middle is processing some drum parts (mainly snares I think) as you can see at 1:44 he obviously uses it to add a reverb to a snare hit. The one to his right (our left) is doing bass sounds as you can see at 1:58 he adds some filter or modulator (Im not sure exactly what) to the bass line. Im not sure exactly what the third one on the right is doing, but again he's using it to process some stems of the track. He uses a number of different presents on all of them, reverbs, delays, filters and repeaters. The DJ mixer to the left is being used the same way a DJ would use it, to filter some stuff and add effects, and adjust levels between the various stems he's created. The white thing at the top is a Livid Cntrl:r which Richie Hawtin helped design which is a midi controller that you can use to sequence parts live. He's not using it here but for example he could if he wanted suddenly add an extra hand clap or hihat loop by basing in a few buttons, then have full control of the sounds and effects of that. I suspect he's using Ableton software as that's that the cntrl:r is designed to work with (although you can use it with anything) and he's not triggering any clips or improvising on the arrangement of the song, he has essentially pressed play and is more making things more dynamic and interesting by improvising adding effects to existing arrangement. This style of "playing live" is similar to what deadmau5 does it has nothing to do with DJing or being a traditional musician, but instead doing live processing to existing audio. I think he's got a pretty neat set up here where he adds some real interest to the track as well as being cool to watch! Hope that helps give you some idea as to what he's doing. Without diving into the computer and looking at all the signal routing it's hard to know exactly what's going on, but that's the gist of it!

Dave Samwell man I want your job

Dave Samwell fk man you have keen eyes ;p didn't know that Livid worked with @Richie Hawtin. that's so cool. you may already know but for the sake of other people,@deadmau5's cube setup is worth checking out, it's a tightly sequenced live MIDI->synth based show with visuals all wound up by SMPTE. so the synths are playing 'live'. he tweaks them and adds FX on the fly... that's about as far as you get from the traditional DJ setup. only downside is a rather rigidly fixed track listing, so it's a bit too predictable in that aspect. and there be a huge load of gear.

omg this made me do a double take

of the year 2525.

@@tonikboy7 true

Ya te digo , es una puta corrida

Si, estoy viciadisimo a esta canción

This is a good comparison, since he has to set everything up in before playing.

@@prohibitedbeatz I disagree. I mean I'm using an absurd assertion that conductors don't do anything to make the point. Because musicians like Jon also compose (of course) but there is an immense technical aspect to what they do too, and proficiency in choosing, configuring, understanding and manipulating complex pieces of technology. My favourite rebuttal to people who try to belittle performers like Jon (but also numerous others like Orbital, Vitalic, Gus Gus, Underworld etc. etc.) is to say "Ok, here's a room with all the same bits of kit as [insert aforementioned group here] I'll give you a couple of days to come up with the same sound and put on a live 1 hour performance. Ok? I'm mean it's just twiddling knobs. Right? Should be easy. Right?" As The Prodigy's Liam Howlett once said, the manual for how to undertstand a guitar is just a few pages. The manual to understand a Roland W30 is over 200 pages thick. It wasn't meant to claim that one was better or easier than the other, just that it's a very different set of skills, and the latter is often depreciated by those who don't "get it". To be clear, I realise you're not one of the "it's just twiddling knobs" brigade, but I disagree that conducting an orchestra is somehow inherently more skilful. It's not. It's just very different.

All of us have a fridge full of ingredients

Jon is a higher power

The sky was pink Icelandic remix. Alter ego why not.

3 kp3's

@@helugoconache right? Only two hands.

xy pads are korg kaoss pad kp3

:)

shit load of effects. Drums through one, pads and atmospheres through another, and any other shit through another KP.

He jacks the tempo around a lot when he's using the loopers and then feeding that into the second KP for further punched-in effects, which gives a whole palette of possibilities for glitching up his dry sounds. Really clever use of these samplers.

+Guillaume Parola There's some aspects of the song that exist in a kind of raw form, and that raw form is being shaped by a ton of different parameters. Producers are generally doing two things while they perform: first, they tell the system what needs to happen and when, so the raw sounds are playing when they're needed, and second, they're making the parameters whatever the hell they want instead of reproducing the entire song as it existed when it was published.

+Zuzu Superfly thanks for explaination

+Guillaume Parola Although, that is only the case for 'live' sets. In DJ sets the DJ plays a selection of songs, usually with the goal of making the transitions between the songs seamless.

itsossian Or in more elaborate cases, mixing stems from different songs to create something unique before committing to the next song.

DB Pooper agree hahaha

Clearly you don't understand this music, so please go away with this grammar text book~

Frank Meier he's layering, something that he's known for, I agree less is sometimes more but there is no right or wrong in music

hahaha make a song for me frank.... you have no idea what you are talking about... maybe you dont like it... but standard melody.... garbage?

Bro how even dare you. Jesus Christ

Son, did you drop your ears on your way home?