I'm fascinated by Joe Hahn's role on stage. This might sound a bit negative, but I don't mean it to be, I just want to understand.
I am practically certain that aside from the occasional record scratch, he does nothing onstage, but effectively mime a performance. If anyone knows different, I'd love to know.
This is what I think the live show is in terms of the parts that are attributed to him. I know he does solos and so on, but I'm talking about in actual songs where the whole band are playing together.
LP definitely play to a click track (band listen to a metronome that they play to so everyone is in time with everything), they have to because they use samples and if the band are going too fast/slow it won't work, nothing will be in sync with the samples. You COULD keep adjusting the tempo during the performance, but I'm confident that isn't happening.
I think the samples are programmed to play automatically, because even if the tempo is entirely correct, if you trigger a sample too late then for the duration of that sample it will be out of time, in the case of something like "Faint" entire verses would sound terrible and there's no way to correct it. So he's not doing that, it's too high risk.
I guess he could be doing a tiny bit of percussion on his midi pads. But other than a bit of record scratching, I don't think he's doing anything.
What goes against that is that if I were him, I'd definitely learn to play piano and play the keyboard parts that Mike Shinoda plays, it'd make loads of sense for that to happen. Shinoda is a front man has a handheld mic when he can. So, maybe Hahn is busy doing something else? But what that might be, I can't work out. I googled it and apparently he posts to the bands social media during performances.
So, is he doing anything? Does anyone know? It'd be a miserable way to make a living. Standing onstage with 5 other musicians all playing instruments while you pretend to.