Loading Sets From Hardware

[Pandamonium]

How do you guys load set's on stage? Here's the scenario:- Planning on doing a series of gigs with myself playing guitar (through NI Guitar rig in Live) and most songs will be different tempos and sounds etc. I will also be making tweaks to synth sounds/filters/ and changing arrangements live in each song. I do not want to look like I am checking my email on stage when loading each song. From what I read, Push is'nt going to be able to load sets/projects from the hardware. I don't mind doing it from one of my midi controllers, just don't really want the computer obvious on stage. Any useful advice greatly appreciated.

[snugsound]

I personally approach this using Instrument Racks, Chain Selectors and Scenes:

• One or more instrument racks with a chain for each song. Each chain is mapped to its own "selector value" (i.e. song 1's part = chain 1, song 2 = chain 2, etc.)
• One scene per track, with tempo and time sig in the scene name, i.e. "120 BPM 4/4 <song name>" (Live will pick this up and automatically change tempo and time sig - neat little trick)
• I use clip envelopes to control chain selection (1% = chain 1, 2% = chain 2, etc.)

I then map the "Next scene" ("Scene down") to a MIDI controller so I don't need to touch the laptop.

The only trick will be automating your Guitar Rig patch changes, but I'm sure these can be mapped to either MIDI notes or program changes and triggered via a clip.

If you want to get fancy and have multiple instrument or patch changes per song then you can simply split your song up across multiple scenes and use Scene Actions to automatically jump to the next scene.

Thoughts? Questions? Does this make sense to you? I could send you one of my projects as a sample if you want to see how I've done it.

[oddstep]

I do something similar. The main idea is to only have one set which is loaded up before you start playing. Once thats done the set should be designed so that midi messages alone can get you through the live performance stored in the set.

[Pandamonium]

Snugsound:- Thanks for the reply, some good tips there (I didn't know the time sig/temp in name trick.. cool!), guitar rig will indeed respond to program changes. I will have a play around with this approach and see if it can work for me.

Ideally what I really want to do is load whole ableton sets/projects from hardware, not have lots of songs playing in one set. I like to have samples loaded in ram, so I can see your approach making my machine run out of ram by the 3rd 4th song. Each song will have around 8 tracks (So for example I can say mute the bass track if a Live bass player is doing gig), with completely different instruments and sounds for each song. I don't mind if there is 30 secs or so between songs for me to blah blah to crowd while song is loading, just don't want to look like I am checking my email while doing it!

Abletons:- Would love the option to load sets from Push!

[snugsound]

Ideally what I really want to do is load whole ableton sets/projects from hardware, not have lots of songs playing in one set. I like to have samples loaded in ram, so I can see your approach making my machine run out of ram by the 3rd 4th song. Each song will have around 8 tracks (So for example I can say mute the bass track if a Live bass player is doing gig), with completely different instruments and sounds for each song. I don't mind if there is 30 secs or so between songs for me to blah blah to crowd while song is loading, just don't want to look like I am checking my email while doing it!

I've never had a problem, although my sets usually consist of either a single bounce per track or a collection of many short loops.

If you're dealing with 8 full-length stems per track then you would definitely want to avoid loading them all into RAM, yeah. What about loading the project onto a USB flash drive or external solid state drive?

If you really want to load each song as a set then I would suggest something like Bome's Midi Translator to convert MIDI messages to key macros (i.e. CTRL + O, "project.als", <enter>): http://www.bome.com/products/miditranslator

I don't know if I would personally trust this approach in a Live situation, but it may do the trick for you!

[littlepig]

Sorry, put reply on wrong thread

[Pandamonium]

[*]One scene per track, with tempo and time sig in the scene name, i.e. "120 BPM 4/4 <song name>" (Live will pick this up and automatically change tempo and time sig - neat little trick)
[*]I use clip envelopes to control chain selection (1% = chain 1, 2% = chain 2, etc.)[/list]

Snugsound:- The tempo/time sig change tip was GOLD! I have been playing around the last few days and utilising this I think I can get it to work now all in one set (Goodbye Maschine (which btw you can load songs from hardware with, but it's too fiddly getting material in and out of). With Ableton I should be able to load a track with my foot controller now, looking at getting one of these:- http://www.rjmmusic.com/mastermind-gt.php so I can see the names of tracks on foot controller. Thanks

Hope they don't remove the song tempo/time sig trick in live 9 now!

[snugsound]

Hope they don't remove the song tempo/time sig trick in live 9 now!

It's still there in Live 9 beta 59 so it's probably sticking around