ZUCO 103 ABOUT 'LIVE VS LAPTOP/LIVE'

Zuco 103 consists of drummer Stefan Kruger, keyboard player Stefan Schmid and Brazilian singer Lilian Vieira. The Dutch trio easily blends samba, bossa nova, jazz, funk and latin with dance music elements.

When playing live the above trio is supported by percussionist Claus Toft, Alwin Lewis on guitar, Lesley Kühr on bass and guest DJ Sjam. Zuco 103 is just one big happy dance fiësta. The band played 12 successful shows in Japan some time ago, was nominated for a 'BBC Radio 3 Award' and recently worked with legendary reggae producer Lee 'Scratch' Perry.

We talked to Stefan Schmid (right) about some tech-stuff because he's a big fan of Ableton Live and known as the band's "laptop magician"!

A laptop magician... how cool is that! Tell something about yourself and how you use your skills for Zuco 103.
"Actually, I really don't like working with a laptop on stage. For me, as a musician, the computer kills my freedom and creativity when I am playing live. In a Zuco live situation with software like Ableton Live there's no need for me to even look at the computer screen so I try to use the laptop more as a MPC combined with a giant synth/sampling sound module.

"I guess that's a very conservative approach, but I just don't like staring at a computer screen in front of a bunch of people. Having loads of functions on controllers I can just play the plug-in Instruments almost (!) like my dear MS20. Having done also a few "laptop-gigs" with Zuco and on my own, I always felt like sucked in the computer after a while, although I love freaking out on our own material purely digital."

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