Building a live set for a band problems,

[locksg]

I have been using ableton for a year and a half and love producing music on it. However, the band I am in are to go on tour shortly and need to build our live set. We recreate everything live except we don't use a drummer, or pre-recorded loops. I have been watching tutorial after tutorial about building a live set but it all incorporates loops and things whereas we use 3 different midi controllers to play the sounds and use sounds in Ableton itself. Also, quite often in a song the sounds that a controller is required to play has to change to a completely different sound within ablteon for a chorus and/or a bridge, how is this accomplished? And also, is it possible to have one channel dedicated in the live set for a korg synth and another for a PadKontrol with preloaded samples in Drum Rack?

Sorry for the many many questions but time is ticking and am starting to panic.

Thank you,

Simon

[darkenedsoul]

I don't use live for band purposes but for the latter two (Korg synth and padKontrol) I would think putting them on their own MIDI channels should take care of that. Not sure about switching out from one sound to the next other than maybe through Max4Live if you aren't in front of the computer running Live where you can do a HotSwap out of an instruments options sounds. I just don't know how well that would go over live due to lag on loading on PC/Latency issues (just guessing here).

And I think most of the tutorials you were viewing were probably for DJ-type shows/sets? I don't do that either so again, can't be of much help. I would have been looking into what you want to do awhile ago (depending how long you've been in the band) instead of having to sweat this due to going on tour shortly.

For padKontrol you should be able to set up all your samples in the drumrack and save it off to the library so you can just load them up as you need to if you have more than 16 sounds per song/track/etc. Or look into one of the ways to cycle through different samples via knob on a controller to select different sounds. But again, this appears to be too late in the game for that for you. There has been some recent updates to this on the forum, can't help you with the threads though.

For the Korg synth, you didn't state whether you are using its stock sounds or just as a controller for a Live instrument. If the latter, you could set up some sort of hot-swap perhaps via MIDI control but never done that, always in front of either laptop or dekstop.

Sorry couldn't help more.
Mike

[locksg]

I've gotten as far as you've said, as far as midi channels and what not but the swapping of instruments etc is my biggest concern and from each new track do I have to add another channel for the next instrument? There must be a way to time it in the song so the sounds can change out. We had a very crude set up of this before and it wasn't efficient. We have 23 days til tour so we thought we'd do it right.

Thanks anyways

Simon

[darkenedsoul]

Well, other than someone on PC/MAC doing the hotswaps for the instruments or being able to do it via MIDI mapping somehow is all I can think of. Or set up instruments in a drumrank and go through the motions of configuring them up in there. It can get convoluted just thinking about that, and I'm no *pro* at the rack stuff.

So it may help if you lay out the following:

1) How many people be connected to Live via MIDI instruments/instruments (Korg, padKontrol/etc)
2) Who is planning on using what instruments and sounds from that instrument (different patches)
3) How many instruments are you going to be using? If you have 3, one of which obviously would be on the padKontrol most, if not all the time, leaves two (if three total) = 1 instrument apiece for their respective controllers all (of you) on different MIDI channels (say, 1, 2 and 3).
4) Are you just using Live instruments (drum rack, operator, collision, sampler/simpler, electric, tension, etc..) or other 3rd party VSTi's (Kontakt, Absynth, Sylenth, etc...)?

All this may help someone get you configured/set up to test out in shorter order if you can provide some (preferably all) of the details. So you have 23 days, you now have 22 days 23 hrs to get this info to the forum so some folks may be of better help than I am

[darkenedsoul]

Well either he ironed things out or got tossed out of the band! Just kidding lol. Hope it's all worked out and ready to rock on the tour.

[Piplodocus]

So basically you just want to use ableton live as a massive soft synth?

You can use device chains to change sounds using the same "instrument" track in live? Otherwise use a number of tracks set to different midi channels and change your controller's channel. You can automate changes if you use device chains but I guess that's not much good to you since you're doing everything in free-time as it were and not running to a click/timeline. Would still work for changing sounds manually though.

[nathannn]

like said above^ the only way to switch an instruments presets in live is to create an instrument rack, and create a new effect or instrument for every single preset, from there you click the chain button in the instrument rack and assign each instrument to a zone. after that you map the zones to your controller and you are done.
pretty complicated and time consuming but live does not do program changes yet.

btw above poster you are combining two of my passions in your sig
1. gear list
2. big banners

[booksofbokonon]

If your songs are already planned out, look into "midi clip automation." You can create a midi clip the length of the song, midi map all the parameters you use during the song, and then go back to the midi clip and enter midi info at the right time. My band works very well this way. All sorts of instruments are constantly being turned on/off and tweaked, without me worrying about them. All I do is play the instruments/controllers.