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Building a portable live set

Designing a small setup that can travel from a bedroom to a stage.

Equipment6 min read
NANaya Arunika
Bandung city lights seen from the hills after dark. Photograph by Farid Rafif, CC BY-SA 4.0.
Bandung city lights seen from the hills after dark. Photograph by Farid Rafif, CC BY-SA 4.0.

My ideal live setup fits into one backpack and can be ready in under ten minutes. That constraint has made the music better, not smaller.

Three ideas for a portable setup

The current setup is built around three ideas:

  • Keep the signal path understandable.
  • Choose tools that invite improvisation.
  • Leave one part of the arrangement deliberately unfinished.

Most of it is a small semi-modular synth and a sampler. The synth plays the bass and the pulse; the sampler holds the field recordings.

A Moog DFAM and Mother-32 semi-modular synthesizer on a desk. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.
A Moog DFAM and Mother-32 semi-modular synthesizer on a desk. Photograph via Wikimedia Commons, CC0.

Leave somewhere to go

The last point matters most. A live set should have somewhere to go.

Writing, sound, and everything between.

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