'Live' Live: Musicians Performing w/ Live esp. One Man Band

[Mercurian]

'Live' Live
(an easily searchable tag)

'Live' Live: A Focal Point for Sharing Experiences (methods, strategies, backing tracks) Using Ableton Live in Live Performance, especially the One Man Band act
(until we have a forum or site to gather at)

[Concise Statement of Purpose Here]
This thread will hopefully lead to lots of sharing info and experiences becoming a sticky topic, forum (preferred), group, independent website or perpetual something.

I'm returning to performing for money (30 yrs.) as a one man band using some of my gear:

• Ableton Live 8.2.1
• Native Instruments Complete 5 & 6
• Toshiba Satellite A500-6063 i7-920 8 Processor Laptop & Blackberry 9000 tethered modem
• M-Audio Fast Track Ultra USB audio interface, NI Guitar Rig 4 Kontrol Edition
• Logitech trackball (no pad or moving around!) & Saitek lighted keyboard
• Guitars: (incl. Epi '56 Les Paul Gold Top w/P-90's, Squire Vintage Modified Telecaster Thinline in Shoreline Gold w/ Duncan P.U., Fender Deluxe Player's Stratocaster Three-tone Sunburst w/ Vintage Noiseless P.U. & Rosewood Fretboard), 5-String Bass, Mandolin
• Amps: Fender Supersonic 112 - Blond & Oxblood, Fender Limited Edition Blues Junior - Tweed, Fender Hot Rod Deluxe, Epi Valve Junior & 112 Cab
• P.A.: Behringer 1202FX mixer, Roland Street Cube Stereo Battery Operated 'P.A.'/Amp Sim and Behringer 802 battery pwd mixer for street gigs (I'll buy some powered monitors if I find it valuable for non, or poor quality, P.A. gigs v.s. room in the Van or a Motorhome)
• Studio Speakers: Mackie MR-8's, Samson R5a and R8a w/ ribbon tweeters, KRK Rockit 6's
• Roland Ax-Synth and other Keyboards
• Akai EWI-USB Wind Controller
• Alesis Control Pad for my drum performances and for audience participation or a Yamaha DTXplorer electronic drum set
• Shure SM-58, SM-57 mics and Green Bullet mic & harmonicas
• DMX Lighting and AMDJ DMX App & Interface (possibly on a separate, lessor laptop) w/ a Novation Zero-SL controller for fader control, plus...

I'm just starting to create/collect&improve 'backing tracks' and figuring out ways to manage songs and sets while capitalizing on Live's unique performance features and paradigm. I intend to be able to scale from a simple, maybe 2 instrument show to a full blown show w/ lighting so I can get gigs at small places that don't have bands usually, and also be ready for larger, more professional gigs that my reputation for a great show garners me. There will also be lots of opportunities to invite friends to sit in.

I'm doing this because I love the passionate performance experience (cosmic consciousness) and people turn real happy when I'm doing it; and I believe you should do what you love, then the Universe supports you and your efforts and you will be happy - fulfilled.

I'm a Chicago Bluesman with a love of Pop craft, sweetness, energy who used to spin dance vinyl. I'm planning to include the gamut from simple D.J. craft playing entertaining but unmodified commercial records (whole song samples in Live) to my edits and mash-ups, to complete recreations and original songs where I can jump from instrument to instrument as I please and control the song flow with Live, to complete live experimentation and jamming in Session View.

My strengths are my passionate performances - especially vocals, engaging warmth + presence, commanding M.C. skills, adventurous willingness, sense of rhythm, groove, and selecting exciting, danceable, or charmingly witty songs and my multi-instrumental abilities. I believe we all enjoy seeing a job done well and feeling a part of it.

I think that the Multi-instrumental, swap instruments/parts, having FUN, site-to-behold, sound-to-groove-to Performance aspects made possible by the unique design philosophy that is Ableton Live will be extremely entertaining and joy producing and I want to see if I can make this vision happen.

Let me hear what you're doing with 'Live' Live!

Addendum:
I'm going ask for a forum from our host, if we get enough interest. Ableton used to suggest in the Manual (v7) several ways to use Live including Studio Recording, DJ'ing, and with a Band (the last 2 being live performance but essentially different). I propose that there should be a forum for each of these, for any category I've left out (is 'Film' separate from studio?), plus "Other Uses" or "Unusual Uses" (Orchestrating a light show via MIDI and DMX, 'Very' high speed internet 'real time' jamming/collaboration, ?...).

Mercurian

Current Project(s):
Recording Little Feat's "Old Folk's Boogie" for performance and w/ video for a Family Christmas Card E-Mail. Trying an idea or two by starting w/ the original track (from the CD "Waiting for Columbus", the 2002 Rhino/WB reissue) and replacing all the parts one at a time. I can think of several ways to attempt this and chose to try to construct a tempo map from Warp Markers first and if that doesn't produce adequate results, I'll try to Slice the song sample (MP3 source file) and extract a tempo map from the MIDI events created. Anyone with experience doing this please tell. If I can't get a tempo map I'll just record each verse slice and ignore any metrical ties. This is core of the process I was planning to use to develop my catalog of Performances/Songs.

[Gaetano CAPUANO]

Also some youtube clips with run downs of your set up

[FuzzyKeys]

Very cool! I'd love to hear what some of your routing and performance strategies are.

Ableton 8.2.1
Macbook Pro (heavily tricked out)
Novation Remote SL MkII 61
Novation Launchpad
Behringer FCB-1010 w/ UNO
Fender P-Bass
Custom 3-way bass cabinet (optimized for full range frequency response, low end extension, and off-axis high end dispersion)
Boss OC-2
Zvex Wooly Mammoth Clone (it's just a Fuzz Face mod anyway)
Electrix Filter Factory
Expression Pedals
M-Audio Profire 2626
Behringer EPX3000 Power Amp
A pair of active PA speakers
MIDI Drum trigger setup (not mine)

I'm not technically doing this as a one-man-band as I'm playing with a drummer as well, but we route his triggers and converter through my laptop nonetheless. This is a relatively newish project for me but so far so good. Our music is almost always completely improvised and we play our sets straight through as if they were DJ sets. The focus is on improvised arranging and just playing in the pocket no matter what happens.

That being said, we do a lot of live looping, overdubbing, and what I guess I'd call on-the-fly "remixing" in the sense that we'll frequently introducing a riff/motif with a house feel, build things up and then collapse into a dub section that retains at least 50% of what we were doing before, bring up a wobble bass on the SL and do manual cutoff modulation with the mod wheel and have aftertouch assigned to LFO depth so that I can get at a 16th or 16th triplet LFO, etc... Then keep that tempo, get the drums happening in double time and turn that into a drum and bass idea, switch to bass guitar, really whatever feels good at the moment and gets a rise out of our audience.

The LaunchPad and nativeKontrol MIDI scripts really make a huge difference with this setup and have enabled me to strip it down a lot and solve a lot of the MIDI looping headaches that I'd sort of been perpetually investigating and tweaking previously. The bass pedals and analog filter are there for turning my bass guitar into what is essentially an analog mono synth. I haven't been using amp simulators much lately as I've found I can much better results without, especially with the cab I'm using. I use Nomad Factory's PulseTeq EQ as my "amp" along with different compressors depending on whether I'm playing clean or doing the synth thing. I have modulation and glitch effects on a rack for the bass that I can trigger with the FCB as well as dedicated bass guitar looping send.

For software instruments I use..
- Spectrasonics Omnisphere/Trilian (as one plugin)
- Applied Acoustics Lounge Lizard (possibly my favorite plugin ever)
- Native Instruments Massive
- Kontakt 4

I can safely run that at 64 buffers and I don't really need anything else. I have two internal SSD's and plenty of RAM which REALLY makes Kontakt 4 an incredible tool on stage as well as clear up a lot of resources.

[Gaetano CAPUANO]

Nice Fuzzy keys. Got any clips, thjat sounds really awesome, I am a bassist, so this really peaks my intrests!

[AceLuby]

I've been bouncing between the one man band thing and a duo w/ a drummer for over a year now. Here's my setup:

- Live 8.2
- Asus 2.8 Ghz Core Duo w/ 4GB Ram
- All native instruments and effects
- Novation SL25
- MPD18
- APC40
- Firewire Solo
- FCB1010
- Zoom G9.2tt (guitar processing)
- Squier P-Bass
- Gibson LP
- Kaoss Pad Mini

I just tweaked my setup in a major way. I was running 60+ tracks w/ each instrument getting its own track. I've condensed that by putting my instruments into instrument racks and then using the selector to switch between the different sounds. So instead of going to track 15 for one of my bass sounds, then track 30 for another, I can go to my bass synth tracks and then select which sound I want from there. I then bounce that audio to dedicated audio tracks to loop live. The audio tracks are used from there to create the song structures I want. I just did a solo gig a couple weekends ago w/ this setup and it worked surprisingly well. I've got another one comin' up for a house party in Jan. When I get some clips I'll show you guys.

[weakchild]

My band's drummer left to go back to his hometown so now it's just me and my bassist...Instead of putting up an ad to find another drummer we decided to adjust our sound and incorporate electronic beats and synths instead. We're still in the early stages of learning all this electronic music stuff but we view it as a creative challenge instead.

Our current setup besides our electric guitars and bass are:

Ableton Live 8
Komplete 7 (just installed yesterday...that took 8 hours! whew!)
Novation Launchpad
Axiom 25
Presonus FireStudio Project
Yamaha Digital Piano


I'm looking to add more controllers as we go along; like the FCB1010 and the APC40...but the main thing right now is reformatting our current songs to the new format and learning how to do all this stuff you guys are masters of...

BTW...if you guys are interested where our sound is coming from (ie indie rock band type) you can check us out here: http://www.myspace.com/andalusiandogband

Hoping to learn from ya'll!!

[FuzzyKeys]

Nice Fuzzy keys. Got any clips, thjat sounds really awesome, I am a bassist, so this really peaks my intrests!

We haven't really seriously recorded anything yet largely due to the fact that we're not quite sure what to record at the moment and we've been pretty focused on performance. We're not sure if we want to have songs or not and if we do, would be play them at the gig? Probably yeah we'd have to but that's not how we're doing it currently. So where this goes remains to be seen. We don't want to be snobbish and we don't think this is performance art before music or anything like that so we're trying to figure it out.

On the topic of bass though... there is a lot of really creative things that you can do to a bass guitar especially when you make use of Live. I use software effects as my preamp like I said but I also use Ableton as sort of the central command station for my bass guitar "synth" rig. The signal chain for that is basically the following:
Bass -> Boss OC-2 w/ no dry signal -> Wooly Mammoth Fuzz set for crazy gain but w/ the pinch (bias) adjusted so that I don't get any residual fuzziness and can mute my strings really cleanly and precisely. That basically constitutes the "oscillator" section of the rig. Then that signal is sent to the Electrix Filter Factory, which is a rackmounted analog filter that you can control with MIDI. So, I send MIDI to LIVE w/ the FCB-1010 and then have LIVE send the Filter Factory all kinds of insanity. I can use clip envelopes to modulate filter LFO's in weird patterns, for example, and trigger those modulation clips with my feet. I can set up follow actions when I need to as well that way. I have one of the expression pedals on the FCB-1010 mapped to cutoff at all times as well. So I send the filter MIDI and it sends LIVE audio in return, which I can further process however I want to and I can of course "automate" the processing as well with envelopes.

So to give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here's a short and stupid clip I recorded a while ago with this setup while I was practicing and experimenting with LFO modulation via clips. This is bass->oc-2->wooly mammoth->filter factory->effectrix. I'm controlling the filter factory with clip envelopes and toggling between a few different effectrix sequences I made as well as a "bypassed" blank sequence with MIDI notes from the FCB-1010.

http://www11.zippyshare.com/v/62784016/file.html

[affuman]

I'm very glad this thread is started, since I just jumped on the Live bandwagon after years of SONAR...to do this very thing.

For any of you out there actually doing it...do you find that you spend most of your time playing your instrument, or playing Live? I ask 'cause I'm a sax player, and I'm still working through controlling tracks and switching between songs while playing a horn (feets, don't fail me now!)

Also...if you are using Live live, are all of your songs in a set the same tempo? Do you go from dance tunes to ballads? If so, how?

Looks like a great forum, please forgive the newbie questions!

thanks!
-A

[Mercurian]

Great Start! This is what I was looking for. Next, besides more joining us, we will get more details and good questions.

I've edited my initial post to make the subject wider in scope and explain the idea I'm trying to pull together here. Any new stuff will be new posts in the thread or eventually in a FAQ.

Gearwise I see the Behringer FCB-1010 is popular for getting the feet into control. For those who haven't heard, the Native Instruments Guitar Rig Kontrol 3 (paired with the Guitar Rig 4 software release) acts as a MIDI Controller with NI's new Controller Editor and driver. I have yet to try it out. I'm not clear on how it switches Guitar Rig and MIDI funtionality or mention of some limitation on changing the mapping live (without the controller editor running).

[naburo]

Nice thread. I am a guitar player.
In the past I used Live for jamming and recording.
But for about a year I wanted to use Live at my gigs.

My Setup is twofold:
I´ll split the guitar signal: one going into live and the other
going through a conventional chain of FX and Tube amp.

#1
It consists of Live 8.2,Launchpad, Kore2 and a Yamaha Midi Foot Controller
I use Track 1 with Guitar Rig and some FX nested in Kore2 and some M4L patches.
Track 2 with Abletons Looper to get a tempo started.
Track 3 & 4 for recording guitar overdubs on the fly.
Track 5 with a Drum Rack/ or Reaktor Drum Ensemble
Track 6 for some IAC driver templates (Tom Cosm style)
to get FX switched on and off, etc.

I want to use as little prerecorded stuff and samples to get the audience involved in the process of creation.

#2
As an old school guitar player, the processed guitar sounds are a bit sterile for my taste, therefore I use a Fender Tube amp, some FX like Line6 DL4 and Empress Super Delay, and my beloved distortion pedal^^ and a Boss RC20, which I wanted to get rid off, as soon as I get used to looping with live.

My main problem is that my conventional setup feels so much easier to handle as far as looping is concerned.
But I can´t get my Dl4 loop in sync with drum tracks in live.
So I decided to start looping with the Ableton Looper. But working with this device, I have to predetermine if I want to start with 4 Bars or 8 Bars etc. Also, while layering different meters or polyrhythms on tracks 3 & 4 I have to be very careful to start recording in the right moment.
(my global quantization is set to one bar, turning it off feels great, but loops are running out of sync)
Overall this isn´t the most relaxed way of playing, and sometimes I feel stressed having to control so many parameters.

So if anyone has some good advice, how i can create a setup in Live that gives me maximum freedom, and how I can get into a flow, as far as creation is concerned, I ´ll be more than happy.

[coldbuggin]

I have to predetermine if I want to start with 4 Bars or 8 Bars etc. Also, while layering different meters or polyrhythms on tracks 3 & 4 I have to be very careful to start recording in the right moment.
(my global quantization is set to one bar, turning it off feels great, but loops are running out of sync)

Not true, in the Looper select "record x bars" and you can determine the bar length on the fly. You might want to experiment with 1/4 quantization as well.

[naburo]

I have to predetermine if I want to start with 4 Bars or 8 Bars etc. Also, while layering different meters or polyrhythms on tracks 3 & 4 I have to be very careful to start recording in the right moment.
(my global quantization is set to one bar, turning it off feels great, but loops are running out of sync)

Not true, in the Looper select "record x bars" and you can determine the bar length on the fly. You might want to experiment with 1/4 quantization as well.

thx for the tipp. Oops didn´t knew that this was an option.
I´ll try it.

[chris vine]

I am confused by the poll.

Don't we already share techniques of all the above mentioned aspects on this forum?
The last two posts already shared info..........

[Mercurian]

Poll Confusion?


Do we need the additional forums identified in the poll? Don't we already do that?

We do that under three of the current forums:

* Music and Audio Production
* Users' Help Exchange
* Tips & Tricks

It's easy to find threads on these topics but it is often not clear which one a thread belongs in. Creating a forum for a topic helps guide interested members to the topic and adds organization to the information. It also segregates information in an artificial way and makes searches less effective so there are trade-offs. BTW, I'm interested in live performance, specifically, and this thread has demonstrated the utility of having a 'banner' for other interested gigging types to gather under. The other potential forum categories are those I thought would be a natural distribution of interest.

Solutions:

Using the 'Sticky' thread forum feature would be a good first step (perhaps useful in determining if stronger structure is warranted).

A 'Sub-forum' software capability would help organize more naturally. I don't know if that is available.

The browser bookmark attribute 'Tags' could be implemented in software or procedurally - by convention.

An ideal solution would be a cross-posting forum software feature that was elegant and usable.


INTERESTED MEMBERS:
I encourage everyone creating threads for this containing topic to use, in the 'Subject:' line, the key phrase that I used in this thread:

'Live' Live

("by convention.")


Mercurian

[ChrisMack99]

Nice Fuzzy keys. Got any clips, thjat sounds really awesome, I am a bassist, so this really peaks my intrests!

We haven't really seriously recorded anything yet largely due to the fact that we're not quite sure what to record at the moment and we've been pretty focused on performance. We're not sure if we want to have songs or not and if we do, would be play them at the gig? Probably yeah we'd have to but that's not how we're doing it currently. So where this goes remains to be seen. We don't want to be snobbish and we don't think this is performance art before music or anything like that so we're trying to figure it out.

Do you know anything about EOTO?