Harvey Sutherland: Finished stems, open decisions

Sutherland consciously separates his show formats. In the duo, he works more along the arrangement timeline. A limited time window and possibly a light show with timecode require a certain sequence. Solo, he falls back on Session View: material runs in loops, a vocal or another drum element can be added as needed.

The interface bundles stems and live-played keyboards onto eight output channels. On larger stages, these can go to front of house; in the demonstrated solo setup, Sutherland mixes himself on the DJ mixer. The musical responsibility thus very tangibly returns to him.

His handling of drums is particularly appealing. The material is mostly rendered audio, the drums even as a complete mix. A crossover plug-in splits this into low, mid, and high frequency bands, each with its own effects. So, no individually recovered drum tracks, but new intervention possibilities in an already finished mix. An elegant repurposing.

For chord and rhythm material, he shows complex macro assignments on the Novation controller. Added to this is his love of dub mixing: bringing elements in and out, changing delay. The fact that an effect device might sometimes make too much noise is not a fundamental design flaw for him. It's precisely this attitude that makes the demonstration interesting: the setup is allowed to make itself known, instead of just reliably staying invisible.

In sonicstate's 2017 Instrument Racks feature, Tom Lonsborough deals with a less joyful stage task: selecting the right sound. He bundles instruments in rack chains and lets clip envelopes set the chain selector. His example also combines keyboard splits as well as internal and external instruments. The change can be triggered with a scene – without having to disarm one track and arm the next. Here, it's not the musical decision that's automated, but the work of making it ready to play.

Rapid Flow reverses the direction in his 2024 'Track in an Hour' video. He produces directly into his live set in the studio and uses a template he sells himself. From recorded passages, he builds a first song version by playing with faders, filters, and effects, capturing the result in the arrangement. The controls have fixed assignments; he doesn't have to search every time for where the kick or hi-hats are.

This first version is explicitly not flawless: at the drop, he identifies reverb that's too loud as a correction point. He still likes the position of the drop. First capture the musical gesture, then fix the failed effect level – that's a viable counter-model to endlessly shifting blocks.