This guitarist is using a Steam Deck as his entire live rig – and it’s genuinely impressive
Handheld gaming consoles aren’t exactly designed with live guitar rigs in mind – but that didn’t stop one guitarist from turning Valve’s Steam Deck into his entire live setup.
In a new video, 26-year-old virtuoso Sebastian Garcia, aka Sebastiside, breaks down how he’s been using the handheld console as a fully fledged live guitar rig – running Reaper and Neural DSP – and says it’s already survived real-world shows, including a performance at NAMM.
“It really surprised me how well it worked,” says Sebastiside. “For instance, I am using the lowest buffer size on the Steam Deck, which is 16 samples. And even though it’s so low, it’s not crackling or doing any weird glitches… Everything is functional.”
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To get there, Sebastiside first installed a lightweight, “de-bloated” version of Windows on a small SSD partition, pairing it with Reaper as his DAW of choice.
“This modified Windows version removed all of the bloat and all of the garbage Windows comes with,” he explains. “I think this is very important for the Steam Deck specifically because it’s so limited.”
From there, he loaded Neural DSP – specifically Archetype: Rabea X – along with the same plugins he uses at home.
“So my Steam Deck recognises my audio interface just as any other computer. After you install the drivers, everything works as expected. All of my plugins are here. All of my EQs. So, for example, I have FabFilter… and I can apply FabFilter Pro-Q to my guitar channel,” says the guitarist.
That familiarity, he notes, is what makes the rig feel less like a workaround and more like a genuine replacement: “It’s really interesting because you can’t really do that on a pedal board or anything. Everything is different. So, it felt really comfortable to have my home setup in a live setting.”
Control is handled via the Steam Deck’s touchscreen, trackpads (“It’s basically like a laptop’s trackpad”) and buttons: “The way you control Reaper is by going into Steam itself. Steam lets you configure every single button,” Sebastiside explains. “You can choose whatever you want them to do. It could be as complicated as you want.”
Key Reaper functions – like recording – are mapped directly to buttons, while the touchscreen lets him tweak mix parameters on the fly.
According to the musician, the only real hurdle came with scaling plugins to the small screen. Some guitar plugins are simply too large for the Steam Deck’s screen, making controls hard to access. The solution, says Sebastiside, is enabling high-DPI compatibility, which “lets you resize the plugin however you want”.
Once everything is dialled in, Sebastiside locks the session down completely to prevent accidents mid- live show.
“What I did was very simple,” he says. “I just routed every single part of the mix that was going through front of house to output number one. And then I routed every single part of my in-ears to output number two. So that would be the metronome basically. So, I just have one slider for front of house and one slider for in-ear mix as well. I also made sure to hide all of the other tracks because I didn’t want to accidentally move them or delete them. I’m too paranoid with it.”
As Sebastiside explains, one of the Steam Deck’s biggest advantages is its portability: “I don’t have a laptop. So, this is basically my laptop,” he says. “I can put this inside the guitar case. I don’t even need an extra bag.”
Battery life has proven equally impressive. With a session running at 88% battery, Sebastiside says the console estimates over six hours of use.
Perhaps most surprising, though, is how the handheld stacks up against traditional computers. According to the guitarist, the 1TB Steam Deck he has delivers even lower latency than his desktop system – something he attributes to Reaper’s efficiency and the handheld’s surprising power.
“As I said, I am really impressed with how well this works and I find it extremely reliable,” he says. “I will keep using it and I will keep doing things with it.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
