How I manage many live sets on stage

[Alberto877]

What is your way of doing live sets?[

quote="Tarekith"]Very interesting way of doing live sets, thanks for sharing such a detailed explanation of how you work. I love reading stuff like this, so totally different from mine but works just as well.[/quote]

[mothergarage]

you're welcome

[Tarekith]

What is your way of doing live sets?[

quote="Tarekith"]Very interesting way of doing live sets, thanks for sharing such a detailed explanation of how you work. I love reading stuff like this, so totally different from mine but works just as well.

[/quote]

http://tarekith.com/ableton-live-apc40-live-pa-set-up/

[Alberto877]

Thanks Tarekith!

Your blog is killer I'm gonna check it out in more detail latter!

[djesa]

this is a very similar setup to what i use, but this midi loop back thing i did not know about before. i tried different routing techniques and using dummy clips to get around it, but now i have some new ideas to try out

ive also had another setup where i was routing various midi/audio tracks, one after another, with dummy clips triggering different instruments, midi loops, midi effects, and audio effects; in a way where you create any type of song from any type of combination of clips. it is kind of hard to explain, but i will see if i can make a presentation of it like you and post it here as well. routing in general is usually very confusing, but if you get it right, it can be a lot of fun

[patrickstinson]

I am continuing to port my existing songs over to this organization and am finding that the performance scales really well with more and more songs.

The only road-block I've run into is a clicking/popping bug related to drum rack and simpler, which is very hard to nail down. I would love to see a good in-depth technical article on how to optimize Ableton sets, with special attention to lots of tracks and Rack chains.

[patrickstinson]

I am currently in a discussion with Ableton support trying to convince them that this is a bug that shouldn't be fixed by increasing buffer size. It doesn't stop happening for me until the latency is too much for live instruments.

[Zone_Ghost]

Thanks! I've been working out a way of dealing with this in our live sets. I'm the "synth/dj" guy in a live band with 3 others (drums/bass/vocals) and I've been trying to work out how to get everything routed and running in a single session without murdering my CPU. I need to have DIVA be midi controlled on a couple tracks as well, which was causing some headaches before this!

[TomSwirly]

Utterly brilliant. I knew some of these techniques - if you use Max For Live to control things, you just HAVE to use the Loopback technique all the time - but it's amazing how integrated your technique is. I'm going to start using that for my very next show!

That said, it's a crying shame that we have to spend so, so, so much time and brainpower to do something so utterly trivial as a set list...

We should be able to simply specify a list of songs on-the-fly.

This is hardly unreasonable. I was able to do this perfectly well when I first started MIDI sequencing back in the 80s - my footpedal let me create and edit setlists on-the-fly, and then the sequencer would just respond to its program changes. And I honestly used this in shows... "Oh, friendly musician X showed up, let's do these songs he knows!"

I chatted to some people when I was in Berlin... one of the things that I learned was that the "single document" structure of Live is built-in at all levels, so Ableton apparently believes that it's always going to be impossible to have more than one document open at once.

This however shouldn't prevent them from creating a higher level document structure that allows you to hold multiple songs at one time. But, well, I got the impression that the code was a nightmare...

DISCLAIMER: "All friend of friend stuff. Rumors, rumors, rumors!"

That said, this summer, I actually took my commercial cross-platform digital audio application and made it multi-document. It wasn't easy - it took me a couple of months, part-time - but I was able make the change gradually without any regressions ("oops, that didn't work"!), by having a mechanism to pass around a document - or retrieve "the frontmost document" - and slowly moving to that, while only having one document actually existing at all times. Finally, when everything was "document-aware", I switched to two document, debugged the resulting bugs (which were actually surprisingly few) and there we are. I'm writing in C++, same as Ableton is...

So it isn't impossible - and really, Ableton should do it. People have been asking for this feature on this forum for over five years now...

[Jekblad]

nice work! Nothing like getting prepared for a gig using live.

[craftycurate]

Yeah this is great stuff chaps ... thanks for sharing.