by Serguey Shinder
In November 2023 we played a fortieth birthday party in a cricket club near Chester. Four of us, plus a laptop. Three songs in our set used backing tracks for the string and synth parts we could not play live, and our keyboard player ran them from his own laptop, the same one he used for work and emails, sitting on a stool beside his amp.
In the second chorus of the second of those songs, the strings stopped. Then everything from the laptop stopped, including the click in our drummer's earphones. On the screen, the laptop had decided that this was a convenient moment to install an update and restart. It took four minutes to come back, and then wanted a password and a second update.
We finished the song badly and played the rest of the night without the other two tracks. Nobody at the party minded much. We minded a great deal, because the two songs we dropped were the ones the birthday girl had asked for.
What I had not thought about was what that laptop was. To us it was a part of the band, as much as the bass amp. To the laptop, it was an office computer that happened to be on a stool, connected to the internet through the cricket club's Wi-Fi, which our keyboard player had joined at soundcheck to check a setlist. It was doing exactly what an office computer is supposed to do: keeping itself up to date, on its own schedule, without asking.
Everything else on our stage is dedicated to the job. A guitar does not check for messages. We had added one piece of equipment that served two masters, and we had never asked which one it would obey in the middle of a song.
We bought a second hand laptop that does nothing but play our tracks. It never joins a network at a gig. Updates, notifications, sleep and screen savers are all switched off, and it is updated once a quarter, at rehearsal, followed by a full run through of every song that uses it. It runs from the mains with a charged battery as a backup, and a copy of the session lives on a phone that can take over with one cable. And we rehearsed every one of those songs once without any tracks at all, so that if the laptop stops, we know which of us covers which part and how to finish the song.
We have used the phone once since then, at a wedding, for one chorus. Nobody in the room noticed.
Anything on stage that can decide for itself when to stop will eventually choose the middle of a song. Give it one job, and know how to finish without it.
– Serguey Asael Shinder
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