Ableton Forum

I sometimes put a compressor (more rarely a limiter, i.e., comp with very high ratio) on a synth that has wild dynamics, to keep it a bit under control when playing live. What you want to do is just listen to the sound of the synth as you're playing it -- maybe monitor at moderately high levels as w...

you're welcome!
-Luddy

Your abstractions just need to be in a file that is in your Max search path. In Max 5, I think this was under Preferences (I forget) but in Max 6 it's under Options. Anyway, there is a menu there that lists all the directories that Max searches when looking for a patcher and you can put it in any of...

oh, sure, abstractions are no different whatever than in Max itself. All my M4L devices have dozens of abstractions. So you might create an abstraction called MySampler and invoke it as "MySampler A a" or whatever. The reason why using the device name would nice is that you wouldn't need t...

If I understand correctly, he wants the patch's behavior to be sensitive to the name of the M4L device. I.e., parameters that you would usually put in the arguments to an abstraction would instead be picked out of the name of the device. I don't remember seeing anything in M4L about getting the name...

Hi, No responses here, hmm. I responded to you at gearslutz (synthoid), about playing SMPTE/LTC as an audio track out of Live into the lighting console. Not sure whether you think that's plausible in your case. As an alternative, have you thought of rewiring Logic as a slave to Live and playing arou...

Well, I think you (PFN78) are thinking about this stuff the right way, basically. You need some good quality sound sources above all. From my experience, an Access Virus and Zebra are the two most versatile synths out there, and Zebra is to my mind the easiest synth to program, especially for the fl...

Do you mean assign MIDI controls to the macro knobs and then control the synths that way? You can of course record MIDI cc's into clips and play them back directly to the synth, like in the olden days. Works great.
-Luddy

If you already have Live and haven't already bought Reason, you might rethink that one. You might be able to get the sounds you need via Live or other sources that are less expensive, maybe even better sounds. You can get a long way with the built-in sound card (1) if it's decent and (2) if you don'...

I've had clicks from only two things in Live, I think. One is complex pro warping mode, and the other is automation that I didn't realize was there. You might check to see if either of those things is going on. Otherwise, dunno....
-Luddy

along the lines of what jellycaster said, maybe you can start by laying out on the timeline the whole piece, just a sketch of the sections you want, the breaks and ups and downs and what-not, and then fill them in with something, say a bassline and drums, just to get an overall structure in place. t...

I don't have links to any tutorials about it, offhand, but Tom Cosm certainly does a lot of stuff using chain selectors and I think Richie Hawtin (Plastikman) too, so maybe if you look up their stuff (which is wildly more complicated btw than anything I'd want to use on stage). You can also do this:...

my advice is to stick to Live's own (built-in) instruments if at all possible. they perform well (in terms of CPU and stability) and are much less likely to give you trouble than 3d party vsts. If you decide to go with 3d vsts anyway (gulp) be sure to choose ones that never ever give you trouble. mo...

you either need to use "stop all clips" (at the bottom of the scene list) or else launch entire scenes and put stop buttons in the tracks that you want stopped when you launch a particular scene. what you are describing is a "feature" in the sense that you can launch clips from a...

This one bites me occasionally too. Often, even. But I think it's tricky because if you launch a MIDI clip (from session view) that frobs your controls and changes the sound, do you really want for it to snap back to the original when the clip ends? Maybe an option on a clip (restore MIDI controller...