Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Guerilla Warfare: The Battery Powered Rig?

I have always thought about how cool it would be to do a Guerilla style live rig where you just run out some where like in the middle of a park or the corner of a downtown city and do a mobile show for a few minutes and then fly out of there quickly.

The best solution to this little Guerilla show would be to use battery powered gear. Now in a discussion I had with someone once about this they said that you could simply take a car battery with a DC converter and use your regular gear, but the addition of a car battery and converter adds a lot of weight.

So what battery gear could you use, besides a laptop?
A Gameboy with Nanoloop is an obvious choice.

There are also a few other pieces of gear that would work nicely:

Sequencer (if you need one)
Yamaha QY10/100

Sampler
Yamaha SU200
Roland SP-202/303/404

Drum Machine
Boss DR-3/202/670
Zoom RhythmTrak RT-323

Mixer
Behringer UBB1002
Edirol M-10E

Amp.
Crate TX30B
Alesis RoadFire 15

That is about all of the gear I can find off the top of my head and on a quick Google run. I couldn't find any pure synthesizers or any synths without sequencers so if you find one please let me know. Also, please leave a comment if you have any other gear to add, or if you have any experience in this sort of show. I know you won't be winning any sound quality awards with this setup, but think about how cool it would be to run up to the busy corner in your favorite city next to the homeless sax player and then jam about a wicked little livePA set for twenty minutes only to run off? Yeah that would be sweet.

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1 comment:

jim g said...

The original Korg Electribes (EA-1, ES-1, ER-1) can all be run from a 9.6V NiCad or NiMH battery pack, the same type used for many RC cars. Or 8 AA cells in series. See

http://slackers.net/~skoop/Music/Gear/Electribe/batterypack.txt

This hack will probably work for most any piece of gear that requires 9V DC power...