Jason Halbert: Master of Live

If you hear Jason Halbert tell the story, it was mainly his lack of interest in sports that compelled him to start learning to play music in high school. But it’s not just anyone who can go from playing in high school bands to touring with the biggest names in pop music in only a decade’s time. Immediately after his high school graduation, aspiring keyboardist Halbert moved to Nashville where he lived for eight years, cutting his teeth by playing with local bands. Things took off quickly after he moved to Los Angeles and began working with an up-and-coming Sony artist. One thing led to another, and Halbert has since had the opportunity to tour with the likes of Nick Carter, Clay Aiken, Ruben Studdard, and newly-Grammy-nominated Kelly Clarkson, alternately acting as music director, programmer, and/or keyboardist. Along the way he connected with M-Audio, and now his rig consists of a laptop running Ableton Live, M-Audio’s FireWire 410, and Oxygen8.

Whether Halbert is flying in tracks for Kelly Clarkson’s live shows, or improvising onstage with Indigika artist David Ruis, he knows one tool will work flawlessly in every situation. He discovered his need for a program like Live while touring with Nick Carter. High-profile television appearances and live shows placed intense pressure on Halbert to make sure that everything flowed seamlessly. However, the rigors of the road proved to be too much for the software application he was running.

“Playing live is so unpredictable at all the different venues; sometimes you're inside an arena, sometimes you're outdoors at a state fair, sometimes you end up at horse auctions and boat races and everything in between,” laughs Halbert. “I started having a problem with power supplies. I usually kept a computer on top of the Leslie B3, and somehow the magnetic fields were causing problems with my drives and I was dropping FireWire data. When we did Nick Carter’s first hometown gig, I was running [a certain software program] and it crashed on every song. It was a very embarrassing day for me, so I called up the guys at M-Audio and they told me about Live. I tried it out and realized that even when I dropped power, rather than stop the program it would just drop data for maybe half a second, then it would re-buffer and keep everything going in time. So instead of crashing and dropping a whole song, on a bad power day we’d maybe lose10 milliseconds of audio. It was totally unnoticeable–Live is rock solid.”

Live vs. Hard Disk Recorders

Instead of using a hard disk recorder system, Halbert runs Live on a laptop to provide background vocals and various sounds for Kelly Clarkson’s live performances. To prepare for the live gigs, all the producers on the album sent Halbert their master sessions so he could make basic copies of all the individual files and import them into Live. Then he took Live into the rehearsal studio, where he taught the musicians their parts by soloing out tracks, pulling out the unnecessary ones, and finally arranging the song in linear mode. In the end, Halbert was left running eight channels of audio alongside the band, including two tracks of stereo loops, background vocals, keyboard samples and more–essentially using Live like a hard disc recorder.

“Another great thing about Live is there's no lag time or latency if you’re in a televised situation where a vocalist misses a cue and comes in a bar early on a chorus or something like that,” enthuses Halbert. “If we were locked into hard disc recorders, then we would be stuck; we would have to re-tape. With Live, if I go to the next bar and just click on it, it waits in real time and then drops it in right on the beat.”

As valuable as this functionality is, Halbert recognizes that Live is so much more than just a substitute for a hard disc recorder. In fact, he uses it in a completely different manner when working with Indigika artist David Ruis.

“Ruis and I are about to head out to Germany right now,” explains Halbert. “With him, I'm using Live in loop mode, because all the songs are totally spontaneous; it’s a style of music we're calling Indigika: electronica meets indigenous world music. The songs are semi-structured, but since it's more electronica I'm using Live in loop-based mode. I've got all my scenes set up and I'm using M-Audio’s Oxygen8 to control the different scenes and go from section to section.”

FireWire 410 beats the heat

Running sound for an artist during an award show can be an incredibly stressful undertaking. Bands have to be switched out during commercial breaks–a space of approximately three minutes–leaving almost no margin for error. Halbert found that when he was running his previous system with another manufacturer’s audio hardware, it was crucial that the crew keep his power source continuous. If the power were interrupted, Halbert would be forced to reboot his whole system in order for the laptop to recognize the interface. Fed up with the added stress and frustration, he decided to make a change.

“Now I’m running Live with M-Audio’s FireWire 410,” says Halbert. “And just this last week I asked the crew to keep continuous power during a show, but one of the guys messed up and I lost power. But with the 410 being bus powered, I was able to still get it up and running in time to make the commercial break and not have to worry about re-booting the computer or anything like that. Bus power also means that I don't have to wait for the crew to set up, or run power before I can start getting things going. So I'm already running all the sound loops before they even get things set up. And sonically it’s great. I just used it for this last promotional run with Clay Aiken, when we did Jay Leno and “Good Morning America,” “The View” and AOL Sessions.”

Madonna, if you’re reading this . . .

Despite the tremendous success Halbert has experienced in the last several years, one goal still eludes him. “My golden dream is to play for Madonna,” Halbert laughs. “So Madonna, if you read this article, call me, I’ll be available. Live is so stable, your show will be fantastic!”

Looking toward the future, Halbert will be pursuing more film and television composing opportunities in 2004. He will also be joining Kelly Clarkson on her first world tour, in addition to working on several more award shows and television appearances–including this year’s MTV New Years Eve Bash in Times Square, where he’ll be using Live to ring in the New Year.

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