Lights - GEAR MASTERS Ep. 626

So we've created this as our intro to Up We Go, as just a fun gag and a throwback to the past. Robbie does the honors for me every night. Boom, and then I perform from the chair. What's up, I'm Lights, and we're at the Chicago stop of the Come Get Your Girl tour. About halfway through the tour, it's been amazing. We've put together such a wicked set, and it's the first time I've actually worked with some stage travel choreography and some new little props and little things that both bring back old Lights things, kind of running across the eras, but also some new things on stage too. So I'm excited to show you what we have going on here on stage. This is my main guitar. It's a Music Man Mariposa, I love it. I put these on it so that I can see in the dark. They glow in the dark, if you can believe it, and they tell me where the frets are. It's really helpful. That's a hack. So this is my, probably one of my favorite guitars that I own. Our playback professional, Robbie, knows what kind of strings I use on this thing because he changes them every few days. What kind of strings are we rocking on this thing? Okay, right now we are rocking the 9.5s in the Ernie Ball. So we're keeping everything Ernie Ball. So the 9.5s are 46s, which is wonderful. I mean, for the scale length and everything, it works really well. Keeps it nice and 80s vibe. Yeah, we're doing a lot of new wave, dark wave type sounds, which is really fun. And it's got a really small neck, so it's really easy for me to play. I was just telling him how you make these glow in the dark for me every night. This man, shout out Robbie. We always have it on this pickup all the way down and on the brightest setting. I really like kind of a bright light sound, not something too dark that gets lost in kind of like the mix of everything. All the guitar tones actually come from the Neural DSP stuff that we're running through Ableton. All automated, all the tone changes are automated. And that's also the software that I use, the Corey Wong Suite. That's what I used for the record too, on A6 and A6 Extended. So those are tones that I built with Brody here, our MD. He's also in the band. We built out the kind of tones that are across the board, what we use live and what we use on record. And it's all very light, kind of chorus-y, 80s sounding tones that just like kind of accent the heavy sort of bass synth stuff that we do. And it's a really nice little combination. Like I don't get to hear it a lot in music, and so we have a lot of fun with those tones. This here is my backup guitar actually, which is not giving it the credit it deserves because it's an amazing guitar. This is a Suhr Custom. And we worked with Suhr actually on the Skin and Earth era tour to make two Suhr Custom guitars, the pink with the red logo and we have a purple with the pink logo. And they're awesome guitars, so beautiful. I love the Tele body. I love the Tele sound. I've always been a big fan of that. Really nice and light, like great for the dark wave stuff. But the joy of playing the music band has kind of overtaken this one for this tour. So this has become the backup, which is sad because it's an amazing guitar. I love my Suhr Custom. So this is the gem of the tour. It's kind of a gag at this point. This is my KX-5 80s MIDI controller guitar. It has no onboard sounds. It's literally just a MIDI controller, but I used to play these back in the day and lost them. I lost them for like over a decade. I didn't know where they were. Managed to unearth them weeks before the tour under my parents' stairs collecting dust in a soft case. I have two of them. So we kind of scrambled last minute to find a way to integrate them into the set. And it is such old technology. It's literally old MIDI. And we're running everything on Ableton, everything automated, everything like time-coded. So we're like, how do you put something like this into the set? And these geniuses here, Robby and Brody and everybody worked hard to figure out a way to do it and have adapters on adapters. And we're wiring it through MIDI and actually recreated the opening synth line, synth patch for Up We Go on Omnisphere, I think. Did we do it on Omnisphere? Yeah, Omnisphere all the way. Most of the patches we've run are on Omnisphere. And Brody's really good at putting, recreating all the patches from all old records and stuff. Some of those tones are lost to time, you know? So we've created this as our intro to Up We Go as just a fun gag and a throwback to the past. It's actually clunky and not that easy to play, so. So this is Brody Taveras. He has been playing in the band for like 10 years at this point. How many years now? Oh, like 12? It's almost 12 years now, but we've known each other since high school. He is our MD. He programs the set. He helps me build out all the tones. He played on the last record and we wrote a couple songs together as well, so. Oh, and he plays bass and guitar. So he does a lot. Man of many things. And he knows a little bit more about what's going on in here. We run Ableton Live because it's super stable and we can automate all the tones so I don't have to like change tones with a foot pedal anymore. There's nothing on stage anymore. It's really clean and everything really flows. And you can talk more about that. Yeah, well, I mean, just take a look. It's right here. We have a, we're basically running a redundant system. Two MacBooks running exactly the same session. We're hooked up to the iConnectivity. Play audio to you. Shadow iConnectivity. This stuff's the best. So using that as outputs of the tracking and stuff like that, as well as using a redundant system. So if one computer fails, it automatically switches to the other one. We're running all of our MIDI changes through Ableton. Coming out, like for example, all of Light's guitar tones coming through a quad cortex right here. These trusty Neural DSP quad cortexes. Come get your girl, the first song. You know, it's loaded up, ready to go. We made a tone for the record called the Big L. Big L. So we use Big L for everything. Various versions of Big L. Some with more reverb, some with less, but it's so, so good sounding across the board. We're all wireless as well. So like all my gear over there is running on an ethernet cable to a Mio and other iConnectivity product. All program changes firing to the other side. Everything's connected wireless and it's really seamless. We haven't had a problem yet on this tour. So, I mean. How often does it switch? I'm interviewing you now. It's zero times. How often times does it switch to redundancy? Zero times on this tour. It has in the past when we used older Intel computers. So, I mean, with the new stuff, it's very, very solid. Very stable. Highly recommend. Is that why we use Omnisphere? Omnisphere is very stable as well in the system. And all the synth sounds we use are all like reprogrammed into here. We're just playing MIDI to trigger it. And it's honestly, it sounds better than the real thing sometimes. It kind of does. It's just big and so full. Yeah. So basically for all of the neural patches for lights as guitars are based on the record tones. And we use the Corey Wong plugin for most of it has that can do that like 80s kind of dark wavy stuff. So what we have programmed here is basically plugin formats in the quad cortex. So the Corey Wong compressor into the Corey Wong amp number two with a little bit of an EQ and then cab number three, we split that up in the patch. And then the chorus, this will be the delay. It's in a stereo delay at all times. And then the stereo reverb. And I have two because there's one that has a shimmer and one that doesn't. For some songs we add the shimmer because it's part of the song and then for some songs just a clean reverb on there. So depending on the song, we change different levels and it's all automated in the patches. So different parts of the song gets cleaner and the verse is made bigger and the chorus kind of thing. But for the most part, it's very similar across the whole show to keep some sort of like similarity and a level kind of sound. So, yeah. It's been cool. It's been cool to like recreate, like sort of rebuild some of the old stuff too. Yeah. Some of the old songs that we wanted to feel consistent with the new stuff because the new stuff has such an identity and such a sound that, you know, even with songs like Almost Had Me or Same Sea, which come from previous records, we're able to like bring these tones into those songs and perform them in almost a new way that integrates better. Yeah, it really bridges the gap between the old sound and the new sound and it sounds really good. Super cohesive, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We can shout out Strange Electronics set list. It's awesome. And I have this set up to utilize their Play Next and auto-stop features so the set kind of stops when we want it to stop and the correct lighting cues happen because it's all time coded. And other than that, like we've spent a lot of time touring over the years and you kind of get a sense of like how long a pause should be between different songs and stuff like that. Or maybe there should be like a build. So we together built a lot of transitions, just sounds that kind of like take one song into the next song, kind of put the listener into that world quickly and then we can go into that kind of thing. So it's very easy to do with this setup. We don't have to rely on like someone hitting it way too late or something like that. So it's been working awesome for us. It's like, it happens in kind of chunks. Like we have this set chunked out kind of where it limits the amount that I can ramble, to be honest. So it's like, it kind of built in. If I had control, I would cut her off all the time. He would, he does. But I also have a side project where I DJ and I've really learned that how to make things seamless. And I've wanted to integrate some of that, like that idea into this set where it's like, let's not let it be like song and song. And like, we're just playing next on an iPod. Let's make things special from the record. And so we, yeah, we built out vocal chops that carry over and pitch down and moments that extend the next song to the next. So it feels like the seamless chunk of music, you know, that actually really keeps the flow of the show going. It's probably our best set ever. It feels like every section is kind of like a mini album or something like that. Yeah, it's just kind of has its own crescendo through like emotional narrative. And you get like these low times and these high times and it's really fun putting it together. Like all this stuff works so well and he's brilliant. We have a good time. I don't know about that. All right, picks. I have always been using this Dunlop, this 88 millimeter Dunlop. And actually I value these so much because at home I actually only have one and I've been preserving it. It is like my precious. There's, they're abundant. Robbie has me so many every night and I hand them back to him because I think they're so precious. There you go, look. Brody placed these for us. We have a Renault yet. But they, we have a Renault yet because I give them back to you. But they have a grip, which is really important because we get really sweaty and then the pick starts slipping out. So that's really useful. And the 88 is the thickness I use. What's the one you use? I'm on the ones. Same model, just the ones. And I technically turn the pick for a lot of the base parts to get that like grindy, like 80s stuff. That was one of your little hacks when we were working on the record. The edge, shout out the edge. Do one of these. Oh yeah, we have these ones too. Wait, what is this? You've never seen those ones? No, oh, that's Brody's dog. I've never seen that. If you catch one of those at the show, that's my dog for real. That's cute. Cute as hell. What else do we have? Oh yeah, okay, the other really fun thing is this. So it's just fun to bring out new moments in the set, things that people haven't seen me before. I know with everything that goes on in the world right now, we get bored really easily. We're just overwhelmed all the time with cool things. When I go to shows, I get bored easily. So I just want to create special moments. And one of them I thought of for this tour was my gamer chair, my light up gamer chair. When I work in my studio, when I produce, when I'm sitting there writing and rehearsing for the set, I'm sitting in a chair very similar to this. And I was working on the set that we had built and I was practicing it and going, man, it would be cool if I could just do this from my chair. So we bring out the A6 gamer chair. Robbie, you want to do the honors? Oh yeah, here. Here we go. Robbie does the honors for me every night. Boom. And then I perform from the chair. A shout out to all the nerds and gamers out there. All the producers who spend a lot of time in chairs like this. Sometimes you just bring it to the job. You know, here it is. Let's see the mic, yeah. We use Sound Devices stuff and they're awesome. We have two of these custom capsules that have the logo on them. It's funny, our fun of house guy, Chris Kaplinski. Amazing, he's got such a good eye for everything, plus one of the best sound guys, in my opinion, in the world. We have an orange capsule as well and he doesn't like me using it because it makes my face orange. So we stick with the black capsule. But it's a beautiful sounding mic and I love it. And it frees me up to walk around, go into the crowd, jump through the barricade and have fun. We love their stuff, Sound Devices. That was a little look at what the Lights Live show is. It's really fun. We try to make it a special experience every time we come through. So make sure you catch a show when we come through your town. You won't be disappointed. It'll be such a fun night. Find me at Lights on all the socials, or imlights.com, imlights.com backslash hashtag tour. That will take you right to the tour pages. But we always are on the road, we're always having fun and there's so much more to come.