The show was a sensory feast. The lighting, LEDs, videos and other visuals were incredible. Daft Punk, two French guys who always dresses up as robots, controlled their "greatest hits" set from atop and giant pyramid in the middle of 0the stage that was decked out with more lights, LEDs and video screens than some casinos in Vegas.
Unfortunately, it was impossible to see what the two guys behind Daft Punk were actually doing in the pyramid--it was clear they were manipulating something, but the audience sure couldn't see what it was.
Given the tight audio visual synchronization of the show, I don't think it's hard to accept that a good portion of their set was just being played back from some unseen machine backstage. Hey, it's the 21st century and most performers understand that modern audiences expect a "show" and the value of expert production occasionally means sacrificing some "live" elements.
So what exactly was Daft Punk doing back there? From the picture above, it's clear that there is definitely some equipment they are doing something with up there in the pyramid.
I've done some research and have found a bit more about the equipment that Daft Punk uses in their modern live sets.
Moog Voyager Rack Mount Edition
Daft Punk uses several of these powerful analog filter devices in their live set. Costing almost $2500 a piece, the machines are extremely high end and can even be controlled via MIDI. The Minimoog Voyager RME is based on one of the most classic synthesizers of all time, the Minimoog. The Voyager has six sound sources. Five of these (three voltage-controlled oscillators with switchable waveforms, a noise generator, and an external line input) pass to a mixer with independent level controls. The mixed output of the sources is then passed through the voltage-controlled filter and a voltage-controlled amplifier, each of which has its own ADSR envelope generator. The voltage-c ontrolled filter can itself be made to oscillate, thus comprising the Voyager's sixth sound source.
In addition to similar features of the original Minimoog, the Voyager was designed to have a memory bank capable of storing 128 presets, a touch pad modulation control, dedicated LFO, two modulation busses (one controllable via the modulation wheel and the other with a foot pedal), two ADSR envelopes for filter and amplifier control, a pressure-sensitive keyboard, 14 voltage-control inputs, and MIDI input/output.
As cool as the Moog Voyager RME is, this next Daft Punk "instrument" is truly out of this world.
JazzMutant Lemur Modular Touchscreen Controller
When Daft Punk performed their collaborative hit "Stronger" with Kanye West on the Grammys this year, the energetic performance hit it's pinnacle for me with these live overhead shots of Daft Punk operating some sort of touchscreen-based instrument that looks like it's from a science fiction movie. Check out this video..towards the end, Daft Punk gets the spotlight:At first, I thought it was just for show. The entire performance of the song was incredibly visual, so I figured that Daft Punk was just keeping with that theme. But was there really any way those amazing displays were actually controlling the music?
YES! These amazing touchscreen controllers are called "Lemurs" and are made by a company called JazzMutant. Here's what JazzMutant's website says about the Lemur.
The Lemur is a top of the range control surface for audio and media applications, that breaks from the prior art on several grounds. Its major innovation consists in its brilliant modular graphic interface concept and its exclusive multitouch sensor technology. The continiously growing palette of configurable graphic objects enables you to design made-to-measure interfaces by using the free available JazzEditor. This endows the Lemur with the unique and protocol independant capacity to adapt its behavior according to the application you are controlling: sequencers, modular synthesizers, virtual instruments, VJ software, 3D animation tools and light control.
Essentially, the JazzMutant Lemur is an interactive videoscreen touchpad that can be utilized to control all sorts of things with visual style unmatched by hardware based devices. Check out this demonstration:
Even better, owners of the $3000 Lemur can even create custom interfaces for the machine, which is very likely what Daft Punk did for the Kanye West Grammy performance.
