How stable is Live in a live situation? Please read/respond!

[lolalola]

Ok, so in a synth-band I've used Live for extra sounds on my macbook - sending audio out over 8 outputs. On a second macbook I've synced up videos in Arrangement view and this has been *fairly* stable. (I originally was doing this all on the one macbook, and that was anything but stable).

So, I've sold one of the macbooks, and have invested in a Macbook Pro - it's about a year old, hopefully the specs will improve things for me (2.66ghz, 8GB ram). Seems speedy so far.
Now, what I would like to do would be to us the Macbook Pro to run a vst or two at gigs. I would also like to have around 4 or 5 outputs for backing beats and a bit of ambient stuff. This will all be sent out to my Profire 410 soundcard, and I'll still be running visuals on a second macbook via a Network. But I've never used vst's in a live situation, so am a little nervy about it. Is there anything I can do to make this work for me? Is having a set with around 6 outputs going to be too heavy going?

Advice/tips, etc would be very much appreciated! Thanks....

[timday]

I use the slightly older FW 410 with 5 outs and all manner of VSTs. I also stream live vocals through a VST vocoder. I have had some glitches in the studio mainly when I've been trying to edit things but I have to say that live has NEVER let me down onstage up to now.
Try it out in a rehearsal room first to make sure it all works and get your levels right if you want to set your mind at rest and remember you can freeze tracks in the session view if there are any particular VSTs causing a problem.

[lolalola]

I use the slightly older FW 410 with 5 outs and all manner of VSTs. I also stream live vocals through a VST vocoder. I have had some glitches in the studio mainly when I've been trying to edit things but I have to say that live has NEVER let me down onstage up to now.
Try it out in a rehearsal room first to make sure it all works and get your levels right if you want to set your mind at rest and remember you can freeze tracks in the session view if there are any particular VSTs causing a problem.

What would you so to switch from, say, one vst instrument for one song to another? Just drag in the vst you need to the track, or is there a cleaner way of doing things?

[luddy]

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.

moving from song to song: the usual thing is to set up an instrument rack and use a chain selector to choose the instruments / settings for each song. if the vst you are using has its own patch recall mechanism you might be able to send program changes to it in order to call up the patches.

-Luddy

[lolalola]

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.

moving from song to song: the usual thing is to set up an instrument rack and use a chain selector to choose the instruments / settings for each song. if the vst you are using has its own patch recall mechanism you might be able to send program changes to it in order to call up the patches.

-Luddy

I can deal with sticking with Ableton's instruments for live, yes... I figured that I'd probably have to do that. As for using a chain selector - that's totally new to me. Is there a newbie tutorial for that you know of?

[luddy]

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:

open an empty project
create a MIDI track, arm it for record, make sure your keyboard is routed to it.
drag an Instrument Rack to the track
click on the two lower buttons (chains and devices) at the left edge of the instrument rack
so you can see the empty chain area and the device area
drag an instance of Analog into the rack (creating one chain)
drag an instance of Operator into the rack (creating a second chain)
drag an instance of Electric into the rack (creating a third chain)
click on the "Chain" button
move the chain bar for each instrument to a unique number (1 for Analog, 2 for Operator, etc.)
move the red chain selector around while playing on your MIDI keyboard

That should give the idea very quickly. But a tutorial of some kind is probably a good idea....

hth,

-Luddy

[grunzlaut]

move the red chain selector around while playing on your MIDI keyboard

...then map the chain selector to a macro control so you can switch instruments by turning a knob. or you assign the different chain selector values to notes you probably won`t be using ( for example C-2 to C-1 -way too deep,quite sure you`ll never use those keys) then you take a small 25-key keyboard and set it to that keyrange. now you can play a melody with your right hand on your main keyboard while switching instruments playing the small keyboard with your left hand -lots of fun

[lolalola]

move the red chain selector around while playing on your MIDI keyboard

...then map the chain selector to a macro control so you can switch instruments by turning a knob. or you assign the different chain selector values to notes you probably won`t be using ( for example C-2 to C-1 -way too deep,quite sure you`ll never use those keys) then you take a small 25-key keyboard and set it to that keyrange. now you can play a melody with your right hand on your main keyboard while switching instruments playing the small keyboard with your left hand -lots of fun

Very useful all of this, cheers! Can anyone offer me any advice on what to put it my chain of instruments/effects that would benefit me live? ie - specific Ableton Compressor settings, etc.....? Would it be worth me even putting that stuff in - compressors or limiters?

[luddy]

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 well as low levels -- and make sure the sound of the synth is what you want to have heard when you play. For example maybe if the sound has a fast-closing filter then it puts out some low frequency junk; you might eq that away. Or it's just a little too hot sounding to be comfortable; maybe shelve the high end down a bit. It's really the only chance you'll get to treat the keyboard sounds the way you would if you were mixing them in a recording.

All that said, the best thing is to dial in the right sound on the synth / instrument itself rather than to fix it with eq and comp, but sometimes that's not possible or not enough.

hth,

-Luddy