Hey guys I’ve always wondered about this, during the 89/90 tour Ministry had a huge ensemble cast of members playing in the band. for keyboardists they had Al, Chris, Ogre & even Paul (during last song “land of rape & honey”).
Whereas KMFDM was only a four piece unit of Sascha (vox & hitting on some metal contraption thingie), Esch (guitar & vox), Gunter (guitar) & Rudolph (drum).
How did KMFDM trigger their samples & effects during the live performances? I didn’t see any keyboard player on stage either. was all the sound effects tape-based?
K that’s all & hope someone can shed some light into this. [:)]
It must have been tapes because I don’t really remember there being a keyboard on stage unless they were using some of Ministry’s set up which was above and to the side of the two drum sets. Good question, and maybe Chris will pop in if he knows the answer to this.
Sascha had his metal thing he was hitting set up around his microphone, and that was a big part of their show. En Esch played guitar the whole time from what I recall as I was in front of him. I don’t even recall what Gunter looked like at all at all even though I know he was there.
This was WAY before the days of Pro Tools and computer based playback. Back then, everything was tape based. I’m sure they either used a DAT machine(if they were keeping it simple) or some kind of multitrack analog Tape that they played too. Ministry at the time was more into triggering loops off of the fairlight mainly i believe. That was mainly casue by that time Ministry was more guitar than electronic bassed so it wasn’t too difficult to break the backing tracks to loops they could trigger on the sampler.
DAT was the big thing in the '90s.
IIRC, Pig’s setup for when he opened for KMFDM in '97 was Watts, two guitar players, and everything else on tape.
Always seemed like a real cop-out way to do it, if you ask me. I always gave bigger points to bands like Ministry and NIN who made an attempt to have as much live stuff as possible.
Oh now I geddit, if anyone noticed after each song is finished playing, Sascha kept turning around his back & adjusted some kinda equipment. he did it subtly & wasn’t really obvious, since there were smoke & crowd noises all around.
I dunno what it was but it looked like a sampler rack with some other audio equipment stuf. those could be the DAT machine.
and even until '95 they had all adat tapes(kmfdm) NIN,though they had a live keyboardist,used ALOT of tape. take a look at the woodstock '94 show. The keyboardist (james Woolley) is missing,smashing keys,or just off on most songs so you get an idea of what was played and what was not
Actually on this tour with Ministry it was just a metal framework with what looks like springs or coils Sascha is hitting. They must have added the drum pads around the time of the Naive album. See this from the Dallas video:
On Crazy Horses you also have Sean Joyce on backup vocals, and William Tucker on 2nd guitar (with the cap on), and on Godlike it looks like Paul came out to play bass.