Mike Dean and Kanye West’s Tour Set-Up

The homie Noz sent this over to me last night, and I definitely found the video interesting. Nice to be informed what type of gear Kanye is taking on tour. But beside the fact that they call the SSL "a big heater," the highlight is getting to see Jazz Mutant's Lemur in action. I myself wasn't that familiar with The Lemur, but I remember when Kanye performed on the Grammy's with Daft Punk, and I was watching them mess with the sequencing of the "Stronger" vocal samples by pressing on this little box with lights, I was like, "wtf is that?"

Well I just watched the Grammy performance again, and it definitely looks like The Lemur is what they're using. That piece looks sick!

From Jazz Mutants' site:

"It comes with an essential collection of highly customizable standard user interface objects (pads, switches, vertical and horizontal faders, knobs, leds and digital displays, signalscopes) advantageously replacing any type of known control device. Unique to the Lemur the widget library contains a set of brand new and extremely powerful objects such as the MultiSlider, the Multiball and the RingArea. Besides the power to control a vast number of parameters at once, these objects present physical properties and realistic behaviors that you can configure at any time even while performing, so that on-screen objects will resist and respond to your motions. With subtler settings, the results mimic real-world objects. With dramatic settings, the objects take on a life of their own. Items can either stay where you drag them, or slide away from your finger as if on ice. These properties can be set up by user-defined arbitrary values at editing time. They might as well be remote-controlled in real-time either by lemur-based objects or by messages coming from an application."

Sign me up for one!

It'd also be interesting to see what type of usage The Lemur would get during the actual creation stage of music. I can see why anyone would grab it for live applications, because you can freak all these different controls in real time. But to use the controller almost as an instrument in and of itself, that'd be real cool. Though I'm not sure what type of place such innovation has in hip-hop production (which, let's face it, is still stuck in loop mode), maybe with the whole electronica movement going on will see producers start incorporating more stuff like this into their set-ups. I wonder if that's something Kanye is using when he makes beats. Or if he actually makes beats anymore, but that's an entry for another day.