Preparing for an EMOM. Whats an EMOM?

We’ve all heard of Open Mic nights before, especially here on Hive, as there are a number of people who love to perform, grabbing a guitar and a microphone to belt out a well known song or two. There are people from Bedfordshire, Hertforshire to Guatemala and Brazil on Hive who are natural performers and have entertained us with their music for a long time now.

An EMOM is a similar kind of thing where a venue offers it’s stage, bar, some seats or stools for the audience with s lineup of artists with the exception nobody tends to sing and you’ll perhaps not see any guitars or traditional instruments. Instead there will be modular synths, keyboards, groove boxes, drum machines and other electronics on show. Pop classics, country music is swapped for Kraftwerk or Tangerine Dream style Berlin School, Techno, Glitch or dreamy ambient.

Electronic Music Open Mic nights are a growing movement here in the UK with some large ones taking place in major towns and cities such as London, Manchester and Reading.

We are attending one tonight and I wanted to document my first as a performer because Ive been to many as a guest before.

My equipment for tonight is all small and entirely battery powered, as I write this everything is on charge to ensure there are no mishaps later on.

The Torso T1 Sequencer is a wonderful piece of kit that is capable of controlling multiple devices. Tonight it will be driving just the two but I know some people use them to drive entire studios or have purchased two T1s. It's the kind of sequencer that you can very quickly build patterns up on the fly for a performance whether beforehand, on the spur of the moment or a bit of both. I have some patterns prepared but could generate some from scratch, to drive the drum tracks and the melodic tracks all from one device.

Yamaha's SeqTrak can be used standalone but I find it works better as a sound module, driven by a keyboard or a sequencer. It has got it's own built in sequencer but I don't use it. There are some great DX sounds built into this machines alongside some other modern synth engines and it has a sampler.

The Zoom L6 mixer and recorder which has built in effects of it's own and supports 32 bit, meaning it is much harder to clip audio and you can normalise recordings that were a bit loud in places with no data loss at all.

The Roland S1 synth which I use for those classic sounds, it's based on their older SH-101 and packs a punch for such a small and lightweight device.

The all important power bank, used to power the Torso T1 and as a "just in case" for other devices that may need a recharge along the way.