DJing with Ableton Live

[kent_sandvik]

those issues with the automatic warping of constant-tempo electronic music some people are complaining about are very strange. i've very rarely encountered them in live. since live 8 i've rarely had to go and adjust individual loop markers of a track that doesn't change tempo and has a relatively straight 4/4 beat. tracks with more complicated beat patterns or changing tempo can need some work but in traktor the support for mixing this kind of track is definitely worse.

the issue with cue and loop support is just a different approach. in live you would create various copies of the same audio clip in the set with different loops points set. i guess traktor is simpler in that respect but for me the possibilities that are opened up with clips in session view outweigh this negative for me. like for example letting a drum loop of the same or different track effortlessly run in a separate track alongside the original track playing.

what bugs me is not having a view of two waveforms playing at the same time in live.

in the end i guess if we're looking at traditional djing traktor is simpler and faster to pick up but the creative possibilities opened up with live to go beyond djing are well worth the slight downsides.

this blurring of borders between doing a live set and djing is what is really exciting but i guess that is a personal preference and doesn't strengthen the point of live as a traditional djing platform

I was all for Live as a DJ platform back in the 3.0 days. Was hoping Ableton put in missing things into their app such as a decent browser for finding id3 tag info (not to speak of browsing iTunes collections), saving loop points into .asd, saving cue points and so on. Zip. Nada. No interest. So I lost interest, too.

As for auto-warping, I just can't trust that the warps are done properly from beginning to end, might look good at beginning but if a small deviance is happening, the end point is a train wreck. So I had to constantly go and check the whole track to make sure that is not happening at a live event.

Some might think Traktor is simple but the 2.0 releases forward have lots of really interesting features, far bypassing Live concerning DJ tricks and uses. With 2.5 I could trigger clips as well so there went one of the last reasons Live had a benefit. The only thing left is to warp variated dance tracks like old time funk and frankly speaking strict warping sucks the live out from such productions.

[Donnie]

Personally, I now prefer Ableton over traditional methods but that's mainly because im not really into traditional DJ'ing anymore. In Live I usually only use parts & loops of tracks I like and drive the progression myself scene by scene, while layering parts from other tracks along with live elements from VST instruments and vocals. However if I do decide to play a track I haven't warped thats not a problem...after some practice I can typically quick warp a tempo locked track in approx 20 sec now (give or take). Marker at beginning of first beat, marker 4 bars down, warp from here (depending), marker about 4 bars before beat end, quick algorithm check, maybe a super quick intermediate marker or two in between...and GO. Once you get the hang of it it goes pretty quick!

[kent_sandvik]

Personally, I now prefer Ableton over traditional methods but that's mainly because im not really into traditional DJ'ing anymore. In Live I usually only use parts & loops of tracks I like and drive the progression myself scene by scene, while layering parts from other tracks along with live elements from VST instruments and vocals. However if I do decide to play a track I haven't warped thats not a problem...after some practice I can typically quick warp a tempo locked track in approx 20 sec now (give or take). Marker at beginning of first beat, marker 4 bars down, warp from here (depending), marker about 4 bars before beat end, quick algorithm check, maybe a super quick intermediate marker or two in between...and GO. Once you get the hang of it it goes pretty quick!

I used to like this kind of work but nowadays I like more traditional DJ:ing as clip mixing et rest got into overkill and didn't necessary result at all with people dancing. There's a certain model of DJ:ing that has been refined since the sixties forward where the Traktor UI is more DJ friendly and Ableton forces you to take a leap into clip-centric triggering that is not really needed for most DJ centric gigs. And if you really want clip related work, a combination of Traktor + Maschine is plentiful for such work.

It's just fun to take any arbitrary track from my 25k iTunes library and mix it immediately in with the earlier track. I can't even fathom all the work going to warp 25000 tracks, neither is it exactly something I enjoy doing, anyway. Plus all the maintenance of bringing .asd file from one system to another. No cue:ing, lousy loop support, no thanks.

[kent_sandvik]

Oh here's another thing. With Live and its bad clip support I had to chop tracks into intro, various middle parts, breakdown, ends et rest, adding up more time for preparation work. With Traktor while loading in an unknown track I could just set cue points anywhere I want, jump to those and set variated loop points. Makes life more interesting than sitting and chopping tracks to clips all night long (similar to peeling potatoes me thinks...)

[Donnie]

Which is all fine and dandy. For me though traditional DJ'ing has become kinda boring. It was more fun when people actually cared about DJ skills but nobody really cares now, they just want to hear the hottest track and really don't care about the blend these days. Ive been back n forth between Ableton and Vinyl/CD/Traktor numerous times but I find this is the best way for me to get creative in today's culture.

As far as the prep work I dont find it anymore intensive than the prep work I used to do before DJ sets, getting to know my tracks and transitions, and actually that's more fun now. I REALLY know my tracks now because I dissect them at a producer level plus I can pretty much do anything else I want live-wise. If I was using Traktor I just be doing the same thing setting up cue points. Of course lots of people just like to wing it but that's probably why most DJ's sound like shit to me lol. In the end I guess it depends what you want to do...I used to bust my ass DJing before so its no problem busting my ass in Live now. Either way im going to put in a lot of time to do what I want to do.

But hey...that's just me! Everyone has to do what works for them, these are just my reasons for using Live over other methods.

[kent_sandvik]

Which is all fine and dandy. For me though traditional DJ'ing has become kinda boring. It was more fun when people actually cared about DJ skills but nobody really cares now, they just want to hear the hottest track and really don't care about the blend these days. Ive been back n forth between Ableton and Vinyl/CD/Traktor numerous times but I find this is the best way for me to get creative in today's culture.

As far as the prep work I dont find it anymore intensive than the prep work I used to do before DJ sets, getting to know my tracks and transitions, and actually that's more fun now. I REALLY know my tracks now because I dissect them at a producer level plus I can pretty much do anything else I want live-wise. If I was using Traktor I just be doing the same thing setting up cue points. Of course lots of people just like to wing it but that's probably why most DJ's sound like shit to me lol. In the end I guess it depends what you want to do...I used to bust my ass DJing before so its no problem busting my ass in Live now. Either way im going to put in a lot of time to do what I want to do.

But hey...that's just me! Everyone has to do what works for them, these are just my reasons for using Live over other methods.

Yes, everyone has a different approach. For me, as a musician, DJ:ing is more like a jazz improvisation, you have good enough tools to pull off any kind of improvisational piece of work without the need to do a lot of preparation work. Or like Miles Davis did, he fired a musician he caught practicing solos in the hotel room before a gig.

As such Traktor gives me a similar approach as a saxophone. For me Live as a DJ tool is more like putting together a complicated instrument set that might or might not be used.

[Donnie]

True true. I personally like to define the meat first and improvise over it. Kinda like writing a song and doing improvisation at a live show. That way I get the best of both worlds, I have a structure I can depend on which frees my mind up to do other stuff. The best is when that 'other stuff' ends up creating foundations for future live sets and track production.

[kent_sandvik]

True true. I personally like to define the meat first and improvise over it. Kinda like writing a song and doing improvisation at a live show. That way I get the best of both worlds, I have a structure I can depend on which frees my mind up to do other stuff. The best is when that 'other stuff' ends up creating foundations for future live sets and track production.

Yes, I'm more free form, guess from all the hours I've played at jams, play just any song, even if I never heard it before. So I like to map that approach to DJ:ing as well as it's quite doable. But then again I seldom even use headphones for transition work as I think it's quite doable to do any transition agains any track if you have enough competency to pull of whatever is needed within a fraction of second -- like at a jam.

Or. I don't even know how the final set will sound like so it's for me also something new. Quite doable in Traktor.

[twitterytom]

yeah but also totally doable in live. i dj with live and hardly ever have all my tracks pre-warped. my live set when i start out with is completely empty and i drop in whatever i feel like at the moment. including tracks i just downloaded.

i have some more organic tracks e.g. tom waits pre-warped and can mix them on the fly giving me more versatility.

[Tarekith]

You guys who do't have to prepare your tracks are lucky, I have to do it no matter what app I use it seems. Even Traktor, gets the gridding right, but I'm still going to take the time to get my loops set and ready to use, and that takes almost as long as warping in Live does for me.

[kent_sandvik]

You guys who do't have to prepare your tracks are lucky, I have to do it no matter what app I use it seems. Even Traktor, gets the gridding right, but I'm still going to take the time to get my loops set and ready to use, and that takes almost as long as warping in Live does for me.

For me, about 1 in 20 tracks with Traktor needs gridview prep work (hitting Shift in S4 takes care of 9 of 10 case of those.). For Ableton, I usually don't trust auto-warp so I need to go through it but maybe there's one bad autowarp per 5 tracks.