Can Ableton Live follow a live band?

[pimpleburger]

If you've got a spare foot that can tap in time then let the drummer play drumms and you can tap tempo to him innit. Give the job to the bass player maybe.

[Sage]

While I sort of get the idea of playing to a click track not much fun on stage, if you're using loops, those are much more fun to play to and definitely do not kill the vibe.

For one song in an old band (Wasn't using Live back then, it was somewhat post-rock type stuff), I'd start a little loop using the hold function on the Boss DD3 and we'd play to that, the precision of the loop added a hypnotic edge to it that wouldn't have been there otherwise.

It's daft to draw general conclusions.


Anyway, rather than have the drummer control Live's tempo, why not whoever is controlling Live just tap a button for each beat? Bit tedious, but if you want to avoid clicks and not use straight 4/4 beats, then it's got to be an option?

[madhatter]

While I sort of get the idea of playing to a click track not much fun on stage, if you're using loops, those are much more fun to play to and definitely do not kill the vibe.

For one song in an old band (Wasn't using Live back then, it was somewhat post-rock type stuff), I'd start a little loop using the hold function on the Boss DD3 and we'd play to that, the precision of the loop added a hypnotic edge to it that wouldn't have been there otherwise.

It's daft to draw general conclusions.


Anyway, rather than have the drummer control Live's tempo, why not whoever is controlling Live just tap a button for each beat? Bit tedious, but if you want to avoid clicks and not use straight 4/4 beats, then it's got to be an option?

Playing to loops can really lift the vibe, but I've always found that after a couple of songs like that playing free lifts it again.
We've been playing with InTime today and it definitely seems good. Have to test it a bit more before trying it live but have a gig in London tomorrow so may try a song or 2.

I agree you can't draw general conclusions. All rules are meant to be broken - especially in music. If it feels right to you do it!

[rbmonosylabik]

Not really playing with a band, but for the live MPD drumming tracks I'm working on what I do is set my loops in session view to Quantization: None and map the scenes to free pads on the MPD. That way, if I drift, do a weird fill, want to suddenly shorten a measure or god forbid, fuck up, I can always retrigger the loop on the 1.

http://vimeo.com/102948

The 2 bottom left pads launch parts of the track harmony and bass, the one above launches the chorus (harmony, bass and melody). The 6 pads in the middle are dedicated to drums, with the top left one used to launch part B of the track @ 1:03, and the bottom right pad launches the bass only bridge.



Here's a screenshot of my current Live Session. Track 13 has Drum Racks in it for MPD. Then the loops are in tracks 17, 18 and 19. The white clips are "Stop Clips", empty audios set without Quantization used to stop the track they're in. I do this because I need to keep the Global Quantize to 1 bar to record stuff in other tracks, and if I used the clip or track stop buttons, they'd stop whenever the timeline 1 comes, which might be way off of where my own 1 is.