Spider8 Gear

So lets talk gear, and when it comes to Spider8, there is lots of it. If you have ever seen us play live I’m sure you have seen the mess of twisted cables covering various signal paths, and just thought, WTF!! In fact similar expletives come out of my own mouth just before I set about assembling the rabble of synths, mixers, effects processors, and midi controllers, etc.

So where should I start…... Lets look at the toys on stage

The number of synths we use live seems to be growing actually, at last count we had 4 on stage.  We also have a midi controller for some software assignments, just for a bit more control of the sound. Here are the bits and pieces;

Korg Radias

Novation SuperBass Station

2 x MicroKorgs

Korg KP3

UC-33e Controller

The Radias is generally my weapon of choice for the bits I actually play live, mainly bass parts and crazy modulations which the Radias is good for. I also have the audio running thru a couple of Boss pedals, and a Korg KP3 (Yes more Korg gear, it’s the shit!), which is really good for mangling the sound.

The Novation synth is a little diddy I picked up on eBay, totally analogue, and sounds freakin’ phat! This one is used for the earth shaking basses in tracks, and has some pretty rad knobs for timbre tweaking live.

The MicroKorgs are possibly the coolest synths available for the money, total bang for your buck. These are used mainly for leads and heavy sequenced stuff. Cam plays all his leads on one of these bad boys.

The UC-33e as mentioned previous is used for some software assignments, just to have a little more control over the sound, a great controller with heaps of knobs and faders for heaps of parameters to f#@k with.

But how do we play all these you may ask…?

As I personally am not a fast-fingered savant on keys, I have embraced the world of MIDI, so the big daddy Ableton controls the set. Ableton is hands down the best electronic music tool ever created, and we pretty much give it a hiding live and in the studio. Just about all the synths have midi going into them, but it changes from song to song as to what we play live, tweak timbres, or just blatantly mangle audio. Most of the important stuff is programmed in Ableton, program changes, instrument volumes, etc. but we do leave it open to throw in extra stuff into the mix as we see fit, we don’t want to play exactly the same set every night.

So hopefully this gives you an insight into the rats nest of audio and midi cables on stage with us, and if you follow this, we could use a roadie.