I had the opportunity to attend an Ableton Live seminar featuring Kid Beyond at the King King club in Hollywood presented by Dubspot.  I had a front row seat (on the dirty floor of the club) and I brought my handy dandy Olympus LS-10 recorder.

Kid Beyond is a pretty amazing entertainer (and a really nice guy).  My friend Harp DaKnobs is Kid's audio engineer, and that is how I got turned on to Kid's brand of beatboxing.  Now I don't mean to diminish Kid's talents by just referring to him as a beatboxer.  He is that and a lot more, primarily due to his use of Ableton Live.  He uses Live to create sondscapes where he emulates all of the various instruments of a song, including the vocals, Simply amazing.

The photo presented here was taken at the event, and shows some of his bag of tricks.  He is using Ableton Live on his Laptop (not in the picture) but he doesn't really use it while he is performing, it is just running in the background while he uses a foot switch panel on the ground to trigger different parts of the application that he has set up ahead of time.  Live captures his sounds and loops them and processes them and allows him to simply step (literally) through all of the parts of the sequence of the song he is performing.  This audio is sent out to his monitor mixer that he controls on stage, and also up to Harp in the audio booth for the main mix.

Here is a sample of the presentation that Kid gave at the Dubspot Ableton Live Seminar November 8, 2009.

Kid is branching out, working with some other musicians on a new project that should be coming out in 2010, so stay tuned for the next level of evolution from Kid Beyond.