Live performance and setup

[TomKern]

nevermind

[Machinesworking]

Haven't read through the thread so apologies if some of this has been answered among the bickering:

I have in the past played live sets with Live switching keyboard sounds and even plug ins using Kore. I did this because Racks keep all plug ins used to switch between active, the problem with simple on/off messages to deactivate plug ins is you lose the ability to not trigger a Session clip, otherwise you're likely to have active plug ins etc. Kore is dead, there are other options they aren't cheap. If you happen to use a Mac or OSX etc. MainStage is a solution, it's not a plug in so you're essentially running a separate application, but that's not a big deal with AIC MIDI, you can send program change messages from Live and even use Live to play MainStage.
Another solution is to use a workstation style synth like Omnisphere, if it does program change messages anyway. and have a MIDI track dedicated in each Scene that fire program change messages to that workstation. I at this point mainly play guitar live so I have one that fires PC messages to Amplitube 4.

In regards to drum parts, personally I initially tried running everything in draft form, but once you hit 5+GB of warped samples etc. it taxes your CPU, you want that for the parts you're playing live. At this point I render all drums, and parts I don't play end to end, and don't even warp them. I organize them into tracks mostly down to four, kick, snare, cymbals HH, percussion. This is with the idea that I can boost one if a room is eating bass or high end etc.

Anyway hope that helps.

[drbtz]

I would reccomend:
1) ALWAYS press everything down to audio. Your CPU will be over exerted trying to play back a lot of drum and bass sounds via midi. A computer is much better at handling large clips (via RAM) vs synthesizing thing on the fly (CPU). Check out videos of Mr. Bill and KJ Sawka on their perils of live performance.
(this is just one video in the series, they go very in depth on latency, and ram/cpu usage in other videos.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6rqOGv8380

In terms of instruments you do play live (keys or synths in your case). I find it best to put all these into a rack with 1 knob controlling the chain selector of the instrument rack. This allows you to easily switch synth patches on the fly and still share many (up to parameters across them.
In my productions I have 2 song versions, 1 is the finished album version (which generally has a synth or drum solo in it) and a performance version (in which I render the track with just the solo part removed). In performance, you simply play that version of the track, activate your synth, and jam over top. You can use this method to remove any of the parts you want to have live control over, but still retain some semblance of a song.