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How I copped out and why

After two years, I was pretty excited to debut new music onstage for the first time. I'm talking about music that I had never even considered playing live, since I wrote and recorded the latest album in 2020's quarantine, but I think it's relatively strong stuff. Since I had done everything mostly the same way, I started to load MIDI into my Alesis MMT-8 and plug some stuff into it:

Arturia Microbrute for bass (waffled between this, a Behringer TB-3, and a Korg Monologue)
Volca Keys for pads, leads, and some weird sounds
Volca FM to substitute for the huge, clunky, and unreliable Casio CZ-1000
Roland SP-404SX loaded up with one-shots from my drum machines (HR-16 and Volca Beats primarily)
Rackmount Alesis mixer with dbx 266 compressors on the inserts
Line6 M5 multi-pedal and Seymour Duncan Deja Vu delay on the sends

This sounded good, frankly. Pretty solid, but unpolished and just ratchet enough to feel more punk rock and "live." Unfortunately, just as with a lot of setups I have had, it requires a little time at the beginning of each piece to get kind of revved up and going. Mostly this is because the analog synths don't have presets and I have to tweak while listening to get the right sound. Not great because it adds time to the beginning of each track, even if I can make it sound intentional (which itself isn't easy). And all this is before vocals.

So as the date got closer and I got more and more nervous, I started to want to reduce. To the point where I was ready to put whole songs on pads of the SP-404 and hit "play."

Instead, what I did was split the tunes into a mix of longer samples and one-shots and loaded them into a Novation Circuit Rhythm. Then I added the longest sounds into the 404 and hooked an Alesis SamplePad up to it for a little extra "stuff to do with my hands."