Beat This is a regular show on Don’t Watch That TV that challenges producers to put together a track in ten minutes. They’re all quite varied – some people are clearly assembling things from the depths of their sample libraries; others are starting from somewhere more barebones. (I love the Swindle one for his piano chops.)

Anyhow, they teamed up with Novation to do some promotional content – showing off producers producing on Novation kit. And I completely loved what KiNK then went on to do: he just started playing.

It’s a lovely, ten minute live performance. At the end, you can hear the producer say ‘can you play the track?‘ and he points out that was the track. He didn’t record it.

It’s also amusing to see how little of the equipment he’s using. Mainly, he’s using an old headphone into an audio input, and then feeding that into a variety of effects in Live to variously be a kick, snare, all manner of other percussive sounds, and then at the very end he uses the audio signal to gate or side-chain the Bass Station loops he’s recording.

It feels right: straightforward, relatively improvised, space to layer without having to hit stop or break frame. I’m really into live performance techniques for electronic music; as such, I enjoyed watching someone perform and compose all at once.