filling the silence between live sets

Share your favorite Ableton Live tips, tricks, and techniques.
julius
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Joined: Tue Nov 11, 2008 11:31 am

filling the silence between live sets

Post by julius » Tue Nov 11, 2008 12:18 pm

I'm putting together a performance involving several quite complicated Live sets (involving bus groups and consistent midi controller mappings).

I'm painfully aware of the 10 seconds on silence that occurs when Live shuts the current set, and loads the new set.

I was wondering if I could play in a "filler" sound file using quicktime or windows media player to cover the silence while the new set loads, but Ableton seems to grab the audio outputs and refuse to share with any other apps.

any suggestions??

thanks

Julius

ollyb303
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Post by ollyb303 » Tue Nov 11, 2008 12:36 pm

How about using an mp3 player as a workaround?
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julius
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Post by julius » Tue Nov 11, 2008 12:39 pm

yes - that's my back-up option but it would be nice if it can all be done under one roof (ie the laptop).

cheers for the suggestion.

J

pepezabala
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Post by pepezabala » Tue Nov 11, 2008 12:43 pm

I am on osx and can use itunes or quicktime on the same external soundcard while using live. On windows you might want to check out asio4all driver (not sure, but I believe this might help).

Patch
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Post by Patch » Tue Nov 11, 2008 12:48 pm

Why not run multiple instances of Live, with 1 as the master and another as the slave. Both Livesets can be tempo sync'd...

julius
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Post by julius » Tue Nov 11, 2008 12:57 pm

I'll give it a go! I'm driving the laptop quite hard when I've got one instance of Live open so I suspect I'll be hearing quite a lot of crackling.

cheers

J

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julius
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Post by julius » Tue Nov 11, 2008 1:52 pm

hmmmm... i'm obviously doing something wrong...

I've opened 2 instances of Live but I get a message - something about Rewire masters and Slaves - one of the sets will play but the other refuses to play audio. Then one of them tends to freeze.

ewww....

J

rbmonosylabik
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Post by rbmonosylabik » Tue Nov 11, 2008 5:27 pm

Is it essential that you have something playing at all times? Why not just embrace the silence or use it to do something more interesting than have an mp3 playing? It really depends on what kind of music you're making and what you want your live show to be like, but in many cases the silence can add to the impact of each track.
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longjohns
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Post by longjohns » Wed Nov 12, 2008 4:45 am

this probably depends on the version you are running. more recent versions (6&7??) can have multiple instances. also as partially noted or hinted at, whether or not you can share outputs between apps is dependent on your sound card.

stonee
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Post by stonee » Wed Nov 12, 2008 4:51 am

tell a fart joke.

emef
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Post by emef » Wed Nov 12, 2008 11:13 am

use 2 laptops

i use a korg es-1 sampler and a nintendo ds running the korg ds-10 software to play tracks on while i'm swapping between ableton and cubase 4 on my laptop during gigs

pepezabala
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Post by pepezabala » Wed Nov 12, 2008 12:24 pm

we talk to the audience between the songs. when a computer crashes or doesn't behave like expected then we have a couple of songs that work with an acoustic guitar. But this probably wouldn't be appropriate in many venues.

Freekster
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Post by Freekster » Wed Nov 12, 2008 3:07 pm

The ten second silence is a new feature in live 7. I've played many sets with live 5-6 and loading times were hundred times faster.

Sometimes it takes long as 30sec to open a new project and that is way too long time. And after opening five songs live usually freezes and needs to be re-booted. Very unstable compared to previous versions.

I'm looking some kind of a solution for this. Maybe to put all songs to one project, but that becomes too big. Or quit using Live live.

Maybe I start to play around with Noise.io between songs or play pac man. :D
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8O
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Post by 8O » Wed Nov 12, 2008 3:20 pm

Fill the silence with the sound of applause and cheers from the audience :wink: or an ipod running into the mixer playing some Monolake soundscapes.
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honsey
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Post by honsey » Thu Nov 13, 2008 8:09 am

what kind of music are you playing live?

if it's techno - get a small sampler, sp303 or something. sync it via midi. and sample 2 bars of the last song and let it repeat, while playing with filters/delays on it. then introduce the new kick ... and so on.

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