A Live PA is someone who composes and plays out live
electronic music at
raves,
clubs or smaller more intimate parties. Its a term that can used to describe many methods of performance outside of DJing.
There are many different ways of performing as a Live PA. There is endless amounts of gear (sampler, synth, drum machine, sequencer, effects and even normal instruments!) you can assemble and endless possibilties of how you can wire it all together, it comes down to taste. A big part of Live PAing is making do with non ideal conditions where things don't work out and you have to adapt to the machines not working as they should and to the crowd not reacting they way you imagined when practising your set. Sometimes at bigger parties the person is completely faking it and a CD is playing and they just bob around mysteriuosly turning knobs on samplers and drum machines that are not plugged in.
One type of music that is very condusive to creating live is
Techno and the easiest of all
Acid Techno, these two will rarely be faked because it's not to hard to do and the people who make it are more
purists and less likely to
cheat.
Acid is made with
Roland 808 and
909 drum machines as well Rolands
101,
202 and
303. Techno is normally made with
808 or
909s but the rest of the gear is comprised of random
synths,
effects,drum machines and
samplers.
Creating ambient music live is completely random and up to the composer. When it comes to creating a breakbeat like hip hop, breaks, jungle or drum and bass the odds are the beats have been made (it's almost impossible otherwise) before hand and most of the work live will be done on the effects and mixing desk bringing sounds in and out and tweaking them, this is kinda cheating but not really because its still hard and there is no real alternative. Making beats that make you shake your ass takes time.
Live PAing is hard because you're after and/or before a DJ but you need much more time to prepare, time which is usally not there. Live PAing is no soundcheck on a beach in the dark or in a noisy pulsing club trying not to piss off the DJ who is spinning while you try and get ready.