Rick's technique

[undarrenworld]

Yeah it would be nice to have some video from the Underworld sound "kitchen", for me as visitor is Underworld live performance pure magic...

[lloyd]

Rick plays the Nord live too. (if you know the synth) You can most times hear it blasting the speakers and dancers to pieces.

Perhaps a future project for Rick, a photostory about the mixingdesk. Or a 2dvd with him talking us through the routing and lots of anecdotes about the equipment...
I know it's part of the magic but so many of the fans want to know how it's done.

[Buji]

Taken from Remix website:-

“Five Macs onstage,” Smith says with a laugh. “It looks ridiculous, doesn't it? But they all get worked. It's all to do with trying to get 'round problems of electronics and sequencers, and having a predictable, linear presentation. In the early days when we used to use one computer, an Atari 1040ST, you would prepare this open jam, a series of loops and options that could come up on the console but, of course, it still hung around this spine. What we tried to do was take two different pieces and run them in parallel, just as a DJ would, but not just overlap them. The five Macs really come from the need to run things in parallel; very largely, it's to keep us guessing.”
Native Instruments Kore lies at the heart of Underworld's ability to work comfortably onstage today. Running inside Ableton and Logic, Kore is holy manna as far as Smith is concerned.
“I really do think Kore is the most amazing musical invention for a long time,” Smith exclaims. “It saves us fortunes because of the interfaces and options it makes available to us. We generate so many random ideas that when archiving those ideas, it is a bit like a library that is not organized. You need something to alphabetize all that. Kore allows you to access information in a very quick fashion. A file that is made in Logic or Ableton can be played back in the finder, copied across and played on a different computer with no problems, and you can still know where it is and what it is from.”
The multiple Macs store the elements of Underworld's original mixes, so no need for absolute pre-tour preparation or extracting single elements for eventual mixdown. Underworld creates new mixes at every show. But with Oblivion With Bells, there was mental preparation.

Full interview and more about the setup here:-
http://remixmag.com/artists/electron...ostcards_edge/