Ableton Forum

I need some advices, shared experiences and recommendations.

I am a professional instrumentalist and composer (=13 years university education).
I have improvised a lot in groups, but I would love to alone perform/improvise, and I see a great potential in Live to make a multi-instrumental one-man performance.
I don't use Push one-finger drum-loops or so: just imagine acoustic improvisations layered on top each other, fuelled with some effects. Push is OK to use as a live instrument.

I would play/record one instrument over mic or line or MIDI (Push), than replay it, move to another instrument and add to it, and so on creating a massive musical experience, and yet be able to fully control it. Completely free of pulse and the measure frames. Similar to contemporary free jazz, but a bit different...
Simply said, no pre-recorded sounds and no beats, but all music is done on fly freely.

Now, how to go further.

• What hardware do I need to achieve that? I guess more or less pedal switches for controlling Live. Which & how?
• What kind of Live-setup, I guess Session?
• Any YT tutorials?
• Your experiences?
• Books, sites, people...?
• How to learn? Lessons? Anyone doing that extensively?

THANKS

Have a look @ Jacob Collier work, might be the kind of thing you're looking for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5FqpddnJmc

Hervé wrote:Have a look @ Jacob Collier work, might be the kind of thing you're looking for.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c5FqpddnJmc

Thanks for that, looks very interesting. But.... I can't get Live designed and built at MIT in Boston. Or perhaps yes?

Other thoughts?

Here's how Michael Becker did it:

https://youtu.be/kOEF7f2HGoE

Search YouTube for live looping. There are many people doing it.

Good luck.

Well. The biggest challenge is the free of measure and pulse bit.

Live can't really read your mind. If you do things in certain types of layers where you have 3 bars and 5 bars, the least Live would need to know is your tempo (even in an ambiguous way) in order to ensure that your 3 and 5 bar bits are not going to drift out of sync at each cycle through.

Looping with Live can be done mostly in two ways, possibly a third, each having their own caveats.

There is looping with clips in the session view. This requires for Live to know your timing (with the exception of an existing max hack which just lets you punch in and punch out and it uses those to determine a number of duration like 2 bars 3 beats 2 16ths and a grain of sand, arbitrarily as being 'one bar' and basing further looping off of that.

The advantages are you can maintain key even if you change tempo. You can create tons of channels as blank recording channels. Disadvantages are no real overdub, but it can be done with the additional channels.

Next is the Looper. Looper can set tempo, has a multifunction button and supports overdubbing. Sometimes I use a combination of Looper and the above method. Looper is stuck as being one individual track. But you can have multiple loopers to resolve that. If you change tempo, then your audio will repitch.

Lastly, you can sort of use Delay effects (for instance. If you use 1 bar delay and have two instances, if I recall, you now have two bars and it essentially loops), or beat repeat (not really meant for this) and various things like that. These are messier ideas and more for intermittent background noise etc. probably not something you'll use but thought I'd mention it.

You can also mangle Arrangement View in a way that allows looping but there is a lot of fuvkery involved with switching to new sections etc.

Knowing these strengths and weaknesses can kind of help determine the route to start on. You'll also probably have to adapt your playing style to conform to the limitations. But this also leaves room to challenge those limitations.

Thank you.

Hm... I am thinking.
Can't I get Live somehow controlled?
For instance: I get a pedal switch with numerous knobs, so that when I need one (bulk) parameter to be turned on or off, I just press the knob?
Or just one pedal, so every time when I press it I get "next (bulk) instruction" to be executed from a detailed instruction list?

Not sure which instructions you plan to use. But Clyphx is good for that.

yur2die4 wrote:Not sure which instructions you plan to use. But Clyphx is good for that.

Many thanks for the suggestion. Is there any advanced tutorial or examples how to use Clyphx? Or anyone offering lessons? It would be wonderful to know that tool more profoundly.

Well, "the instructions" would include such as:
- record now form mic 1 on track 1
- stop recording from mic 1 on track
- start loop
- add arpeggiator
- stop effect
- stop loop
etc...
OR as a "package" [loop track 1, add effect track 1, record track 2 input 2].... So that one pedal switch would activate numerous parameters simultaneously...

My primary advice on these is to take it one step at a time. You want to jump to having some complex control, but you first need to learn how to do the most basic of functions, and then combine them.

Learning how to make your set through trial and error will help you understand it's limitations and even how to exploit parts of it in your favor. But also, if something goes wrong it'll give you a good sense of things for troubleshooting.

With clyphx, I first suggest learning two parts and learning how to do them in their absolute most basic form. And then seeing if you can get away with using these in a more complex way. Then test each function individually that you want in its basic form. And then combine those in the complex multi-function manner.

The first part to learn is using clyphx to create clips in Live that perform functions. One function might be mute. Or perhaps arm. Of a specific channel. This is to verify that you can get acquainted with the language of clyphx. All available commands are in the documentation.

The second part (maybe) is to test out the clyphx midi controller part. I think it's called x controls or something. There is documentation on using it. It basically involves editing a text document.

For more advanced clyphx tips, I'm not entirely the best person to talk to. But there is a clyphx tips thread on this forum that is a few pages long. You can ask questions in there and perhaps use the link to this thread to more quickly explain your plans.

I would suggest going to that thread after first learning at least how to make clips that do basic commands on your own. (Makes it easier to interpret what they are referring to)

yur2die4 wrote:My primary advice on these is to take it one step at a time.

Thank you, I really appreciate your advice.

It seems that for what I need it is possible to do in Ableton Live. That is the first concern I wanted to know.
Now, I have far more to learn.

all the best.