H20nly wrote: ↑Sat Jun 18, 2022 7:16 pm
Paddy shared that Session view preferences menu option that at least lets me delete plugs from Session view and has saved me immeasurable time during troubleshooting.
which one is that?
And speaking of which, where the hell is that pink haired Kiwi? I sent him that 'glad to see you' message ages ago and he's disappeared again.
I just spent a few days working on a project I imported from Pro Tools of my son's band recorded in the Uni studios. Kind of a novelty to be using Live in that way, as it's always generally been a lot more for electronic music for me.
So as it happens these types of things you describe are fresh in my mind. I only started using PT doing my masters in the uni studios, and having spent so long ITB and electronic I made an explicit point of using it pretty much exclusively on projects recorded there to get to know it and really take advantage of the amazing library of mics and top-line world standard studio gear to record real instruments. I had a blast, just inviting in musicians and groups of all kinds and experimenting with the different mics/placements ... etc. Plus, I started on the Waves bandwagon 20 years ago when I got the Native Power Pack because that's what the little studio I worked in used, and over the years had gradually upgraded it to Horizon + a few extras, but I kind of stopped bothering to use them for the most part because I was happy with the Ableton plug-ins, so it was an excuse to make use of those thousands of $ worth idly gathering virtual dust.
But despite my little 7 YO MBA handling the sessions surprisingly well, I started getting some frustrating show-stopper crashes related to one or two plug-ins, probably exacerbated by the imposition of upgrades all round, not fully embraced because I didn't want to fork out for things like the Waves Update Plan etc.
After messing around a few times with workarounds like starting new sessions + import session data, and not always successfully trying to hold shift and stand on one leg while patting my head and whistling Dixie to load sessions without plug-ins, I actually stopped and thought y'know what, I kind of hate the workflow in PT anyway, and decided to import it all into Live.
Workflow-wise I was immediately glad I did, but there were a few annoying things that got in the way. Firstly, now that Ableton has bitten the bullet and added comping it's opened up the possibility of importing these kinds of projects, so it would be really good if there could be a way of importing PT playlists to the take lanes. But even just being able to drag in a 10 track multi-mic drum session easily so that the names & order are preserved would be a great start, as you kind of have to do it one by one at the moment, which really means it just makes more sense to comp in PT and bounce stems, which defeats half the point if it's for Live's workflow.
Another thing I found myself wanting to do is be able to have return tracks that could go inside group tracks, like PT AUX tracks, so you can have e.g. specific FX/Reverb/Dly etc just for drums where the drums are without having to go and show all the returns then find the relevant ones, as the number of returns can become sizeable in that kind of project. You can do some kind of workaround with audio fx racks, but it would be much nicer and simpler to just decouple a return and add it to the group and use existing send knobs.
Saying that, the convenience of being able to save an audio fx rack definitely helps in the kind of scenario you described. But you could just drag a group track to the browser and use it as a default and achieve the same thing.
And I agree with you about the plugins on multiple-tracks thing, that's something I came up against a lot. I guess it's not really a huge hassle to have a ready made group track to drag in from the browser, and if you've already done a bit first drag the audio clips to the newly dragged in tracks. But it definitely would feel more aligned with industry standards if you could maybe hold CMD or OPT when dragging a plugin to a bunch of selected tracks.
In PT I find myself doing things like that a lot. And the PT groups help a lot when working with multi-mic sessions. But Live does have 'link tracks', and TBH I haven't fully tried to see how many things it applies to. I'd assume it would only affect clip related things, and not mixer/solo etc. And again, Live does that if multiple tracks are selected, so that's not a big deal, but in PT it's another one of those Key Command habit things to enable or disable groups so that if you're doing an edit on 10 drum tracks you can quickly enable the group for solo etc.
And I have to admit I've really never properly taken advantage of default options. I think one of the cool things about Live is that I can load it up just with the original default and it's not usually many steps to get to whatever it is I'm wanting to do. Likewise, after all these years of confusion or frustration with things like "Audio 001.wav", and even going on about it to people I teach, I still usually forget to name tracks before doing a lot of things. It's a lot harder to get away with it in these kinds of larger PT type sessions though. And Ableton has improved the auto-renaming in ways that help a lot.
Unfortunately either the same bug causing the PT crashes seemed to follow the session, I think maybe related to Kontakt or Reason Rack, or both, and I had to do a lot of the same kinds of new session & drag tracks in type workarounds, eventually even using an empty session just with the relevant MIDI + Reason Rack tracks to freeze/bounce some stems.
And actually it was a good thing, because it forced me to be more decisive, and made me realise it's actually a better workflow, at least in a session like that, to commit to stems, and especially bounce sub-mixes of group tracks.
E.g. there are LOADS of backing vocals, and I even decided to just load all the various takes that are separate playlists in PT to their own audio tracks and play around with layering a lot of them together. I ended up with a few sub groups, like "high harmony", "falsetto" etc., then in a bigger sub group "BVs", so it's been a good way of going through each part, bouncing a sub-mix of each layered part, then a BV sub mix (the addition of nested group tracks is great BTW), and this has been a good workflow in general. Just going from PT into Live has functioned as a step in the mixing and quality control process that's given me an excuse to nail things down rather than allowing them to kind of linger in Live-Noodle-Land, as can be one of the cons of Live.
I've been playing around with channel strips too, and in this time of insane embarrassment of riches abundance there are so many ways of feline flaying, sometimes an audio FX rack of things like the Kramer HLS + Pie, or for SSL I can either do the same with the NI Solid series, or just use a single Reason rack with their version. For the most part I'm so impressed with Reason these days it seems like a preferred go-to, but the one thing I've always found with Reason is it doesn't always play nicely with others, so sometimes it can be less stable. But that's another argument for being decisive and committing/bouncing (usually I use Freeze, then drag the frozen clips to another audio track as the quickest way to bounce in place in Live), and as I said, I actually think that's a good thing.
Ultimately I've always been pretty sceptical about things like modelled channel strips, and I've usually found once I get into Live the workflow has a more significant effect on getting the sound I'm after more quickly. But for things like vocals and guitars I've finally gotten around to experimenting more and finding an appreciable difference. Especially things like the Kramer HLS/Pie, which have a clearly more noticeable character. And even the old classic LA2a and 1176 CLA models and PuigChild/Tech models are having their moment.
While I was working on the project over several days I had some Youtube playlists of Waves and other videos of the old legends like Pensado, Puig, Rubin, Vig and others on rotation in the background for inspiration, and it was well worthwhile. A lot of the time it was just gratifying to see how often they'd approach things much the same as I do, but I got a lot of ideas along the way too. One of the really interesting things was how often they still use old plugins like the Waves Renaissance EQ/Comp/Channel strip, and RVerb as their go-to, which I have too, and they are the oldest ones I have had for literally 20 years.
That's another thing I've been noticing recently too actually, as one of those 'holy shit, what happened to the last decade?' mind-fucks, is realising a lot of tools I still kind of feel are pretty new are actually 10+ years old. I look at some of the producer videos and it says "9 years old". Even just these big producers making videos kind of feels recent to me, because having made the first Ableton videos for Groove 3, when at the time they only had Kenny Goia doing Pro-Tools, when the other big names started getting into making videos I was very aware of it, because it felt like it was a sign of the way the industry was going. So it spun me out to realise a lot of that happened over a decade ago.
Long TL;DR story short, I actually think all of these are good things. We're at the point now where we don't even have to think about the tools, we can literally put on a blindfold and point in any direction, and whatever you put your hands on is better than anything I could have dreamed of when I started. Even Garageband for free. So it's total freedom to just be creative and not get distracted by GAS.
Oh yeah, I meant to say I think last time when you said something about how few tracks you had in your sessions that it's easy to forget that now one track is doing what used to require maybe multiple tracks & combinations of gear, and in fact that's more a sign of maturity and experience, where you only use what you need for what you're trying to do, and are experienced enough to know what will do the job without wasting time searching. The down side of all this for young people getting into it is they have so many options it makes it that bit harder to know where to leave it the hell alone.
Well I just did a Forge classic and wrote about 80% more than I planned.
icon, and I was tempted to just leave it there