Ye Olde Ju Ju Live Rig
Back in the day we over-compensated for lack of experience by trucking down to each gig a truly ridiculous amount of gear. Later, as the gig count rose, this was scaled back - but on home turf, for a long time, we had a tendency to go big in terms of setup – particularly for long sets at big parties. My friend Dave had an old brown Tascam console, an M320e I think, 20 channels, 2 sweeps, 3 auxes and 4 busses. We used to hump this monster down to all the early gigs and everything sounded great through it. I think that brown era of Tascam gear sounded really good, It was later that they got really cheap and cheerful and nothing of Tascam’s has sounded quite as good since.
We later got some smaller Mackie consoles and these have served us well but for a long time the heart of the Ju Ju System was still the 808. For a whole era of the classic Ju Ju gigs my rig would be as follows:
I have a little Roland ‘sequencer’ called the MSQ100. This was from the VERY early days of digital sequencing, and was capable of storing one pattern and some very basic delete a bar or insert a bar type functions. The beauty of this little thing was that it spoke both Midi and Din Sync, would slave to either and spit out whatever it wasn’t slaved to. So... I used to set up an 4 or 8 bar loop in Notator, and write a bunch of bass lines, lead lines, one or two rhythmic things etc... to a total of 16 – each line would be set to a different midi channel. Then once they were all happily written into Notator I would lock up the MSQ to incoming MIDI Clock, hit record, and record a four or eight bar loop into the little unit, with data on all 16 midi Channels. That was the limit - Only 16 lines. A given Ju Ju jam might consist of 3 or four of these lines, sometimes bass lines from other jams being directed to wacky textural sounds to just provide some extra detail etc... Then, I would set up my multi-timbral synth module, the JD-990 to have a multi-timbral patch for each track or jam. Thus, changing patches on the JD would tune into different lines coming in from the MSQ so changing from one jam to another would be as easy as turning a knob one notch. The main drawback of the MSQ was that it had no real memory as such. Turning off the power to the device meant you had about 3 hours before it would ‘forget’ all it’s data. This led to some fun and often terrifying games of brinkmanship where we had a definite time limit before our precious lines would vapourise. Securing a reliable power supply that would not be turned off before we went on was always the first thing on the agenda at that point.
The JD had the ability to lock delay times to incoming midi clock as did the DP4 which I used a LOT to beef up and warp out the 808. The 808 then was the heart of the system. The MSQ would be locked to incoming Din sync from it and spit out the Midi lines at the JD and clock to everything else. Thus all the delay times, midi lines and sequences were controlled by the 8-oh's fat analog dial. I used to slap the start stop key, BAM, BAM, BOOM, BAM – hard! and the whole room would jump – in time. Great for drama after you had been steadily building a jam for some minutes and people were getting comfortable. Really bought home the impression of it all being very live, which, or course, it was.
Alex would have a totally independent system, more based around his keyboard playing angle. His eternally beaten up but always working D-50. His wonderful little SH-09 for bass lines and blips and bloops (Every now and then Punishing the Sound system with unexpected level jumps) and varying other keyboard and effect bits and bobs. Sometimes I would feed signals, either directly from a JD output or spontaneously from a mixer buss to the input of his SH-09 for him to filter and squelch out. This kind of system interaction was tricky to control live, but when it worked, would often result in really special shit. Early on in the day he also used an Ensoniq rack sampler and would program little jams into that, giving me the opportunity to prepare the next thing. But later I incorporated more of his lines into my sequencer and he concentrated on his thing- playing. Like a motherfucker.
A jam would have to be constructed, from hats onwards, squirting things into echoes, balancing the kick, bringing in bass lines and hitting the fill key on the 808, set to the corrrect fill for that jam at the same time as un-muting the cymbal and percussion patch on the JD, and then having something extra ready to bring in on the next 'one' to make it feel like it was going somewhere. And to do this musically, and keep the dancefloor happening, and make it all sound polished and intended – that was a real skill. Such a level of live really taught you how to arrange and sculpt jams, how to compensate for things going unexpected and allowed you enormous freedom to change a feel or slow down, or skip something, or go somewhere new whenever it felt right to do so.
When I see people now, hitting play on their little Roland all in one hard disk systems and occasionally muting a stereo pair of a completely pre-programmed set, or worse (and all to frequent) DJ’ing from CD’s and trying to pass this off as live, I feel cheated. I know what it is possible to do if you try and are committed to the live performance aspect of electronic music, and these fakers, and there is an abundance of them out there, are just cheating themselves as well as the punters, of the opportunity of something truly memorable – the opportunity for magic.
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