I am in an electro-rock outfit and we are rehearsing our tunes at the moment and working out how we are going to manage things on stage. The one issue that we struggling on is the gap between songs. As everything is coming through live if we are going to change track we need to open the new project on Ableton before we can start playing. This can sometimes take 30 seconds to a 1 min – which is too long to be standing round on stage doing nothing and kills momentum.
Is there a way around this?
I thought about making one massive project with all the tunes in one file but given the amount of MIDI tracks we would need that would not be practical. Is the solution to sync two laptops and have one with the next tune ready to go on it or something like that?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Performing with Live – the transition between songs
Re: Performing with Live – the transition between songs
There are really only two solutions. One is to use two programs (two instances of Live, for example, on the same machine or different machines) and manage starting them at the right time.
The other is the massive uber-live-set. Personally I think the uberset approach is good; I use it for our live show, and ours is indeed a whopper. The way we manage tracks is to use a rack (or multiple, nested racks) in each track with chain selectors selecting the right devices for each song. For example, My Way (you are doing My Way, right?
) could be song #1, and every track would have chain slot #1 allotted to the device chain for that track on My Way. And so on for Tie A Yellow Ribbon etc. All your electro-rock standards. 
Long story short, Live is pretty good about only using CPU where it's actually needed. If you use 3d party plug-ins, you might want to also use the chain selectors to turn off selected plug-ins, but by and large that doesn't seem to be necessary.
-Luddy
The other is the massive uber-live-set. Personally I think the uberset approach is good; I use it for our live show, and ours is indeed a whopper. The way we manage tracks is to use a rack (or multiple, nested racks) in each track with chain selectors selecting the right devices for each song. For example, My Way (you are doing My Way, right?
) could be song #1, and every track would have chain slot #1 allotted to the device chain for that track on My Way. And so on for Tie A Yellow Ribbon etc. All your electro-rock standards. Long story short, Live is pretty good about only using CPU where it's actually needed. If you use 3d party plug-ins, you might want to also use the chain selectors to turn off selected plug-ins, but by and large that doesn't seem to be necessary.
-Luddy
Re: Performing with Live – the transition between songs
Wow! I thought I knew live pretty well but I obviously have much to learn. I reckon the Uber project approach is the way forward as it makes things (theoretically) more manageable. I appreciate that I will have to automate BPM changes in between songs but I am afraid you have lost me with the chain selector stuff. I assume this is a way to automate which tracks are currently armed/active? I aim to play all this stuff with a midi guitar and we were looking to get a midi pedal board to be able to change which tracks is armed (so I can change which part I play from verse to chorus etc) but is there a way to automate this in Live and also to automate whether tracks are on or not?
Re: Performing with Live – the transition between songs
Hi,
Concerning BPM, if you put a bpm indicator into your scene names then they will be taken care of automatically. For example, "My Way 185bpm" will cause My Way to take off at a brisk pace.
The chain thing is very easy once you get your head around it.
Suppose you have two MIDI tracks and an audio track. In each track, insert a rack (Instrument rack for the MIDI tracks, audio effect rack for the audio track). All the instruments/effects you play will be inside those racks.
When all the chain selectors (for all 3 racks) are set to 1, then the instruments/effects for Song1 are selected. When set to 2, then the instruments/effects for Song2 are selected. So you would insert clip automation in a clip on each track at the start of the song to set the chain selector to the right value for that song. After that, just put whatever you want inside the selected chain for each track. Easy squeezy. It's as though you had three separate tracks for each song. I have tracks like "Drums", "Bass", "LeadVox", "LiveKB1", "LiveKB2", etc. and all the songs share these tracks but each one has its own instruments fx etc.
hth,
-Luddy
Concerning BPM, if you put a bpm indicator into your scene names then they will be taken care of automatically. For example, "My Way 185bpm" will cause My Way to take off at a brisk pace.
The chain thing is very easy once you get your head around it.
Suppose you have two MIDI tracks and an audio track. In each track, insert a rack (Instrument rack for the MIDI tracks, audio effect rack for the audio track). All the instruments/effects you play will be inside those racks.
When all the chain selectors (for all 3 racks) are set to 1, then the instruments/effects for Song1 are selected. When set to 2, then the instruments/effects for Song2 are selected. So you would insert clip automation in a clip on each track at the start of the song to set the chain selector to the right value for that song. After that, just put whatever you want inside the selected chain for each track. Easy squeezy. It's as though you had three separate tracks for each song. I have tracks like "Drums", "Bass", "LeadVox", "LiveKB1", "LiveKB2", etc. and all the songs share these tracks but each one has its own instruments fx etc.
hth,
-Luddy
Re: Performing with Live – the transition between songs
This did help but not in the way intended! You ind of spurred me on to think about this properly. I couldn't use the solution you gave as we play though live more as a sequencer rather than launching clips. What I have done instead of what you propose is to arm all the MIDI tracks and then automate when those tracks speakers are actually on! Serves the same purpose so Hurrah!
Thank you so much for your help. You were also most helpful last week when I was blabbering on about the Ipad and touch osc - much appreciated!
Thank you so much for your help. You were also most helpful last week when I was blabbering on about the Ipad and touch osc - much appreciated!
Re: Performing with Live – the transition between songs
There are lots of ways to skin this particular cat. 
Good luck with your show!
-Luddy
Good luck with your show!
-Luddy
Re: Performing with Live – the transition between songs
Thanks for this... it kinda echoes how Tom Cosm sets things up (shout out to Tom!) It helped me clarify my thinking for how we play. Now I'll just map the chain selector to a button on my computer keyboard, and we're golden. Or if I get really fancy, I could create something for Touch OSC.