Dynamically change presets and samples live.

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punching_sandwiches
Posts: 78
Joined: Fri Jan 23, 2009 11:27 pm

Dynamically change presets and samples live.

Post by punching_sandwiches » Thu Apr 19, 2012 12:29 am

Hi, I've been compiling a few live sets with a variety of groups I play with and I keep coming into the same problem.
That being, I use a lot of different custom presets live for Operator, Sampler, Henke's Granulator etc. and have to be able to switch between them all seamlessly.
So far I have multiple instances of each instrument loaded in a rack one for each preset sound.
This becomes quite unstable and CPU hungry very quickly though, and as the list of tracks get's longer with each writing session I begin to worry that we will have to start planning ahead exactly what tracks and sounds we want to use per show.

I've also experimented with Liine's Max4Live Kapture but found this unstable and took a long time to load between settings (always resulting in half a minute of beach ball of doom).

Is there a really simple way to do this that I'm missing?
Is there a way I could do this in Max4Live that is more lightweight than Kapture?
Is there a way to dynamically call up samples in Sampler and Granulator in this same way?

Ultimately I want to be able to flow between sounds easily without having to take a minute between each track to set things up thus killing the atmosphere.

luddy
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Re: Dynamically change presets and samples live.

Post by luddy » Thu Apr 19, 2012 1:10 am

I struggled with this for several years, in a very similar situation to yours. To support our live show, I had a Live set with instrument and effect racks with one chain (instance of an instrument or effect) per song, and a single MIDI controller would simultaneously select the chains on multiple tracks. I even went so far as to automate the turning off of devices that were inserted in the racks, to further reduce the load on the machine. But I found that it was a wobbly setup, prone to audio glitches. I also tried Kapture and I wrote a bunch of M4L devices for recalling presets of my own. Long story short, I never got to anything that I really felt was trustworthy on stage. We had too many audio glitches in our show and the computer was obviously working much harder than you'd like, given that straining the machine only adds to the probability of a problem.

We decided to take software and computers out of our show entirely. But if I were to try to do such a thing in Live again, I'd be inclined to use instruments like u-he's Zebra that are light and support patch recall by program change number. It also switches patches without an audio pop. In other words, I'd probably try to recreate the simple patch recalling that you get with a workstation or other good keyboard. Ditto for effects.

I'd probably also seriously consider Mainstage for use in this kind of situation (lots of different patches). MS's model is exactly the call-up-these-patches-now-for-this-song kind of thing that you have to recreate using racks in Live.

hth,

-Luddy

jsb
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Joined: Tue Sep 18, 2007 6:47 am
Location: Bloomington, IND

Re: Dynamically change presets and samples live.

Post by jsb » Wed Jul 18, 2012 1:55 am

Ditto on this. I am actually converting over to Ableton Live from MainStage (was too buggy lately), but the main shortcoming of Live is exactly what you guys are talking about. I would love to be able to save "scenes" or presets so that I could send a program change to Live and have it bring up my preassigned plug-ins, presets, routing, etc.

I notice that this has come up several time in the past (viewtopic.php?f=2&t=126356) but has never been addressed in an update! 8O

Soy Sos
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Sep 04, 2010 1:04 pm

Re: Dynamically change presets and samples live.

Post by Soy Sos » Mon Dec 09, 2013 2:13 am

I just came across this thread searching for some simple way to send a program change to
Granlulator II to load different samples and settings as the set progresses.
No way to do this, really?

nemoy
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Re: Dynamically change presets and samples live.

Post by nemoy » Tue Dec 10, 2013 1:43 pm

Same here...
I had to get rid of any kind of software synth, when on stage
because of that. my computer just couldn't handle it.

I decided to add a Hardwaresynth instead.
(DSI x4 by the way ... nice one) problem solved..

But i still struggle with drumracks... same problem there...

I'd love to have something like Kapture, BUT actually working propperly! :)

alapret
Posts: 8
Joined: Thu Sep 17, 2009 7:49 am

Re: Dynamically change presets and samples live.

Post by alapret » Tue Feb 04, 2014 11:11 pm

nemoy wrote:Same here...
I had to get rid of any kind of software synth, when on stage
because of that. my computer just couldn't handle it.

I decided to add a Hardwaresynth instead.
(DSI x4 by the way ... nice one) problem solved..

But i still struggle with drumracks... same problem there...

I'd love to have something like Kapture, BUT actually working propperly! :)

Kapture was not ok for my use, so I made a device called brain, it is free here : http://www.arnaudlapret.com/software.html

TomViolenz
Posts: 6854
Joined: Mon Dec 13, 2010 6:19 pm

Re: Dynamically change presets and samples live.

Post by TomViolenz » Fri Feb 14, 2014 3:11 pm

Take a look into clyphx and the snap action (I recently made a post explaining it in the clyphx thread in the general section). I think most of what you want to achieve is possible with it.

I'm also making a template for a preset store and recall system for the first 8 tracks in a set at the moment. Recalling them via Launchpad buttons included. As soon as I test drove it enough, I will share it.

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