Ableton Forum

A combination of compression (to make it sustain longer) and volume envelopes (to make it pump/bounce) has worked well for me. Envelopes on EQ boost/cut bands can do amazing things too.

Nope, you can think of clips in the arrange & session views as two separate copies. They still both point to the same underlying audio file, but changing either clip's settings won't change that file. The only way you could do the kind of "damage" you're talking about is to actually open the audio f...

Also, if the laptop is plugged into an external monitor try unplugging that -- the DVI port on laptops often seems to have weird grounding issues.

if any of those systems have an audio input, bring your laptop and experiment with mastering/mix ideas on them (starting w/ raw but loud, maybe clipping even). that's a big reason why I bother to do live shows :)

Yeah, a bit bass-heavy. There's some nice flam-y rhythm stuff in there but it's getting compressed away to almost nothing... maybe try programming some of your "dynamics" w/ volume envelopes instead of running it through a really heavy compressor? Compress only certain rhythm/bass parts as a submix ...

I often silence large chunks of a loop with volume envelopes. You can do subtle (or not so subtle) "call-and-response" arrangements that way.

Well, when I did my load test in max/msp it definitely started glitching well before the CPU got to the 50% mark (I'm not sure if max/msp spreads poly~ instances across CPUs, so maybe 50% is the most I could expect) -- forcing the CPU speed to stay at 2.6ghz in coolbook helped a bit. My backseat-pro...

On a similar note: has anyone done this kind of stress test in other audio apps? I tried making a stress test in max/msp (N instances of a pfft~ patch... with coolbook I was able to get N up to around 40, without it started glitching around 24-32). I'm especially curious how the new Logic performs, ...

I'm experiencing at least some of these problems on a new 2.6ghz macbook pro. It seems like the kind of load Live puts on the CPU is something Leopard has a lot of time adapting the CPU speed to. I'm actually seeing better performance (fewer dropouts and a lower reported CPU use in Live ) if I leave...

I haven't found a magic answer to this question. I've tried a lot of approaches, more or less in this order: - 3-4 songs per set, moderate routing complexity / tweakability, and transition tracks played from another app (max/msp) while the next set loads. This worked out pretty well in less dancey s...

It's hard to tell from the crappy myspace audio, but: Mixdown needs a little work... the bg chords are a bit muddied by the other bass (I don't think they need to be louder, just punch some holes in them) and the piano sounds really dry. Also maybe do a bit more stereo shit in the breakdown around 2...

Hey, at least Daft Punk have something resembling a stage show. From what I've heard Justice basically hit the play button and strike poses. I'm not going to shell out for a show if the performer doesn't give him/herself a chance to fuck up.

yeah, I really feel like I got what I paid for w/ the kmx. it helps that when I pestered them to add some features (sending MIDI CCs when you push down a knob to select a new channel, and a true incremental mode) they were incredibly fast about actually doing so! I do wish it were possible to custom...

Well, feedback via a return is going to add a little bit of latency -- there's no way to avoid that in the digital world (until we figure out how to make signals travel back in time). If you've got a return feeding back to itself, it will process a chunk of audio, then feed that processed chunk back...

There are ways to get a similar effect on live material without "pre-computing" the reverse reverb: one thing I've done is use a reverb with a long decay time (8-15 secs) and use clip automation to make the reverb volume crescendo. (You can do weird "percussive-verb" things this way, too, with more ...