Your first gigs

If you’ve got any documentation from your first shows, let’s see it here!

1 Like

I got started with VJing in late 2001, working mostly with my friend Jack Turner.
Our friends organized a weekly DJ night (Tuesdays at P4) and we did the visuals for a lot of the nights. We tried to come up with a new idea every week, even if there wasn’t enough time to do it properly. We wrote a lot of Max patches using SoftVNS, along with using Final Cut Pro, VDMX2, and various hardware mixers like the WJMX-30 & 50.

I’ll dig up more clips from shows, but my favorites were always our live TV remixes, where one person would record loops from whatever was on and the other would jam out on them. Here is one example of that in action, aka TV in The Year 2003,

2 Likes

Had my first gig in 2015 together with two friends who were performing a live set (sweating balls the first 5mins :smile: ) I only used generative visuals in Resolume for that one but switched over to VDMX just two months later.

Here’s a vid of it:
https://vimeo.com/frameworkvisuals/review/286627732/7e00edc8d7

1 Like

My first show was in a college venue basement in probably spring 2005 or fall 2006. I decided to try to attempt live visuals at a blistering 320x240 resolution AND running a drum machine at the same time while playing with my 2 other band mates. The success of this particular show is definitely questionable. I was using Max/MSP/Jitter at that point and a MacBook Pro and whatever midi controllers I had on hand.

My first like “bar”/“bigger show” was at the same venue Dave mentioned - P4 in Troy NY in probably 2006- I was doing live visuals that went on a bunch of CRT TV screens that were mounted around the bar. I don’t actually remember whose music I was playing along with. Revolution Hall shows for Troy Night Out was another great venue for people just trying to explore live visuals. Troy, NY definitely had something in the water in the 2000-2010 era in terms of live visuals, but maybe thats because Vidvox was based there :slight_smile:

My first “this is starting to go somewhere” show was in like 2008 when I played a like 20-30 person show with Phantogram at Skidmore college in upstate NY. Here is one of the revolution hall shows with them in 2008: https://vimeo.com/2427094 (does not look great to me, these days, but hey, haha)…led to me playing much larger shows with them 4-6 years later.

1 Like

I had my first gig using VDMX set up last month and apart from sweating as if I was in a sauna everything went quite well! I run max 8 pre-recorded patch, syphone max 8, some live feedback and some footage gathered here and there through two old tvs and a projector on the back of the stage but it turned out to be well cool! this is the link of one performer of that night:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ7afXCwRj8&t=1634s.
The very very first gig I have ever done was with a collective of friends in a huge huge venue with big mapping and all the set was floating around Beavis and butthead, Simpsons and random gif from different cartoon of my childhood. This it was likely 2 years ago, unluckily I lost all the footage from that night but still will never forget all the friends that feed me with drinks to make me go through the whole night

2 Likes

My first gig was in June (2018) at a night I run with two friends and have since performed 7 times.
I kept it basic enough for the first one , just using 2 layers (Main visual and an overlay) and playing visuals I created along with others I purchased.
I’ve been using VDMX from the start and recently have been using some basic audio analysis features , my current set up is a Mac Book Pro , Korg Nanokontrol 2 and a Focusrite 2i4 .

1 Like