How to set things up for a live show

[Orion Satori]

Is it just me, or is Live ironically not designed properly for doing live shows? I've read the entire manual, messed around with it, and looked in the forums, and I just don't see it. How exactly do you set things up to transition from one song to the next, using different synthesizers and audio fx on your tracks? It looks to me like you either have to take the time to close one set and load another or you have to stick it all in one big set, lined up one after another on the time line, with a clusterf.... of audio tracks, midi tracks, and all of your vst's loaded. Either way, you don't have a good set up. In the former, you have to take the time to close one set and load another. In the latter, you are going to be using a TON of cpu power if you use a lot of different vst's.

Am I missing something here? How do you guys do this? I have so many different presets and vst's that I use, I'd have to go crazy with automation, switching things from one thing to the next, and I don't know if there's a way to turn off/on vst's with automation.

[amigo]

I gave a lot of thought into how I could perform my tracks live and this is what I came up with...

My live setup is very basic and consists of a laptop and midi keyboard, laptop and soundcard.

There is usually only one part of the track that I can play live at any one time so when I am preparing the track I mute those parts for the duration that I am playing and render the backing track. The VSTi's that I use are sampled and loaded into an instrument rack where they can be played live over the backing track.

Then each backing track and instrument rack is organised in one big set where they are grouped and colour coded to make navigation that bit easier.

The instrument racks are set up to receive midi input from a different midi channel and when performing I change the midi output channel on my midi keyboard controller to correspond with the track that I am playing.

I also split the keyboard for certain tracks should they require more than one instrument to be played. i.e. bass and synth sounds.

I am always open to other ideas but this has served me well to date.

[Tarekith]

Probably easier to just post a screenshot of one of my live sets:




Very easy to drop out instruments from one song (scene) and trigger new sounds from the next song. Each clip is 32 bars long btw.

[amigo]

I will post a screen shot of mine when I get home from work.

[LithiuMind]

Welcome to the long and borderline mad scientist road of performing live electronic music...

Everyone has their own way of approaching it, but as you've no doubt discovered, you can't just load up a bajillion projects and hope to transition through them in one huge set.

The trick is becoming efficient, because realistically you want your liveset as streamlined as possible. If you're dead set on using live synths/samplers/drum machines then I would suggest learning how the Racks work. This will allow you to have multiple instruments on one midi track, and using the chain selecter control in creative ways will let you choose from different instruments/fx. You can also try playing around with SysEx messages, which will let you change patches in a synth when you launch a specific midi clip.

Honestly, most artists I have seen who perform "live" with live are just using it to play back mastered stereo WAV files DJ style, with a few addded effects and maybe some loops. A halfway approach I've started seeing more often is bouncing tracks down to stems and playing those stems. (Tom Cosm has a great video about that btw...http://www.vimeo.com/1701545)

For me, I'm really focusing on the ability of live to save clips to be reused later. My goal is to create a format that I can bounce all of my tracks down to which is compatible with a "live" template that I'm designing. That way I can go to the clips folder and pick and choose from say...leads, basses, drums, percussions, fx, etc. from each of my older tracks. It also means I can take loose odds and ends from unfinished tracks and throw them into a live set easily.

So long story short, there's no fixed way to do it but there's lots of really interesting ways of doing it. And remember there's no wrong way.

[Orion Satori]

Thanks for the replies, guys. Keep em comin'. You would think a company that makes a program called "live" would come up with a more efficient and easy way of doing live shows with it.

[pepezabala]

That's what my liveset looks like. 8 audio channels, one midi channel.

first channel is also input for microphone, second channel input for guitar.



I use a multi efx rack in each channel:


You can download it here: http://institutfatima.org/paulrose/launchrack%202.0.adg

Shelluser made me a max for live patch that will reset the macros of all efx-racks to 0 with the press of one button. So I can tweak my liveset into crazyness and then return to default (e.g. to start with a new song).

I use the launchpad to trigger clips and scenes and a nanokontrol to tweak the efx and volumes. I barely need to look at the computer screen.

[Tarekith]

Thanks for the replies, guys. Keep em comin'. You would think a company that makes a program called "live" would come up with a more efficient and easy way of doing live shows with it.

Nah, you're looking at it the wrong way. They are giving people a flexible set of tools so people can use it in different ways according to their needs. While you'll see some similarities, most people use Live very differently from each other. We're lucky it's so flexible.

[MacGuffin]

Before Ableton Live these were common ways electronic music was performed:

-Having all the set pre-sequenced in midi and tweaking knobs on the hardware synths.
-Playback of a pre-mixed audio file from a laptop.
-Midi triggering from pattern based sequencers (which is similar to Ableton Live in some ways)

Ableton changed the linear time software paradigm by allowing to trigger clips in any order in realtime. How you use this idea to perform your music is entirely up to you.
Tom Cosm's video on this is a good starting point if you do EDM, Tarekith's screenshot seems to use a similar technique of grouping similar parts in their respective channels.
Some who also play instruments may use the Looper or process their sound with the software, etc.

Follow actions, racks, macros... these are all things that make live shows easy with Ableton Live.

[outershpongolia]

Oh just 2 audio tracks and load your wav files in there.. map the cross fader and an EQ and call it a day..






I'm totally joking - not that I care what other people do on stage - but even some of the sickest producers I've had the chance of meeting and sharing a stage with are just pressing play and sipping their drinks.. I can understand DJ's doing this but when its a song that you've produced you gotta take it to the next level and actually perform it in some way or another.

Have some fun, take some chances - if theres no possibility of train-wrecking well then theres no possibility of awesome unexpected shit happening either!

[Tarekith]

Yeah, I've seen too many producers just laying the songs out vertically in sections, and then all they do is trigger the next scene to work their way through te set, Oh well, horses for courses....

[pepezabala]

Yeah, I've seen too many producers just laying the songs out vertically in sections, and then all they do is trigger the next scene to work their way through te set, Oh well, horses for courses....

I sing, play guitar, make jokes, trigger random clips, do drumbreaks by shuffling clips with 1/8th quantization, I do livelooping with both voice and guitar, I use my wiimote to control an efx-rack on a number of channels ... but if I am too stoned for doing all of this I can also just trigger some scenes and play with filter cutoff and a delay-feedbackloop on the drumloop while Osho is praying. Good times.

[outershpongolia]

Yeah, I've seen too many producers just laying the songs out vertically in sections, and then all they do is trigger the next scene to work their way through te set, Oh well, horses for courses....

I'm talking about 8 wav files make up the whole hour long set and all they do is crossfade, beat repeats and filter sweeps.. maybe some lazer one shots here and there

[mbira]

I have a full band and we also trigger clips in ableton live with the drummer wearing headphones for the click. We run Ableton, Reason, and VDMX for video all on a Macbook Pro.

We have 7 midi triggers that are fed into a DIY Megadrum and a Behringer FCB1010 foot controller. those two MIDI devices are agrigated together into their own IEC and then run through Midipipe so I wrote an applescript so I can push a button on the foot controller, and it immediately jumps to a new song in ableton (we are using the "stairstep" method for songs. The applescripts analyzes the button push I did on the foot controller, and based on that changes the output of the 7 midi triggers that are used to step through the scenes of each song.

That way we can use the same 7 midi triggers for each different song-all within the same ableton set. Song changes take about 1 second.

Reason has been really efficient because it seems to only use resources for the devices currently being played. It's a huge freaking rack with probably 20 combinators of synths, etc.

We also run a midi controlled marimba that is fed into ableton. Everything else is outside of Live and straight to the PA.

Yes, everyone here does things very differently from eachother.

Ableton has some problems and difficulties, but it seems that there is always some workaround to achieve what we are trying to do which is cool.

[Orion Satori]

Oh just 2 audio tracks and load your wav files in there.. map the cross fader and an EQ and call it a day..






I'm totally joking - not that I care what other people do on stage - but even some of the sickest producers I've had the chance of meeting and sharing a stage with are just pressing play and sipping their drinks.. I can understand DJ's doing this but when its a song that you've produced you gotta take it to the next level and actually perform it in some way or another.

Have some fun, take some chances - if theres no possibility of train-wrecking well then theres no possibility of awesome unexpected shit happening either!

Ugh, don't get me started on knob twiddlers...


I'll always be singing, playing guitar, or playing the keyboard when I'm on stage and would feel useless and lazy if doing anything less.