I like to keep my live rig very simple, having just a few powerful instruments and making the most out of them. Usually with only 2 controllers. I think it’s better to have less and really know your instruments than to have everything around you, but feel spread thin. I use a Nord Lead 2 on top, and a Nord Stage 76 on the bottom. I love the Nord Lead because it sounds awesome, (it’s kind of like having four Prophet 5’s under the control of one keyboard) it’s very fast and it’s very small and light, so you can take it anywhere. This unfortunately is a major issue now when dealing with airline travel. The Nord Stage 76 controls the iBook (soon to be a MacBook Pro) which I use to run Ableton Live 5 and Reason 3.0.5 (re-wired into Live). The Nord Lead is controlling a Roland V-Synth XT. So far I just use one volume and sustain pedal on the NS76. I don’t use a traditional mixer anymore, I now use a Motu 828mkII. I use Motu’s Cuemix software to mix the hardware instruments, and the rest of the audio signals from Live, including Reason and any virtual synths, (Korg Legacy, CS80, Ivory, Native Instruments etc...) get bussed in internally from within Live. The stereo outputs from the 828 go into a pair of Mackie SRM-450 monitors. From there the Mackie’s have a balanced “through” output that I use to send to the house PA. In each Live file, I also make a separate mono “send” for Gary Novak’s (usually powered) monitor so he can hear whatever he wants on any particular tune. As you can see, we like to set up as close as possible to each other to minimize our reliance on monitors as much as possible. www.clavia.se www.m-audio.com ROLAND