Sound effects usage for a play...

[wayne]

We just had our annual Christmas play and I was the sound effects man. I chose to use Live 3 (have since upgraded to Live 5) and it worked out very well, though there were several features I wish I had. I know that Live is music-oriented, so make these suggestions knowing that Ableton will have to make sure that Live is first and foremost a non-bloated audio application.

1. Enable looping controls for non-warped clips. For example, I have the sound of a bus running, or an audience clapping and I simply want to loop it. You can work around this by setting the clip's bpm to be the same as the project's bpm, but you add some grain distortion to the clip and if you need to change the project bpm to re-time musical elements, you mess up the sound effect clips.

2a. Allow a 0.0.0 follow action time. This causes the follow action to trigger when the clip stops. So you can have one clip play from IN to OUT and then trigger something else.

2b. To enhance 2a, when a 0.0.0 follow action time is selected, the follow action triggers when the clip stops, whether because the clip hit its OUT marker or the user stops the clip per the clip's launch mode (toggle, etc).

3. Have a preference to select bolder highlighting of playing scenes/clips.

4. Create a new clip launch mode called "Sampler". It would work like a sampler: when you press the key, it starts the clip at it's IN and as long as you hold the key it will play, looping if there are loop points set. When you release the key, it will jump to the end of the loop and play to the clip's OUT. Just as sampler's do. Also, create a "Sampler toggle" mode which follows Sampler mode's logic, but uses a first click to start and a second to proceed to the end.

5. Create a pre-queue option. When the option is enabled and a scene or clip is selected (not played, just highlighted), Live would make sure to access the audio of all selected clips that are marked "RAM". That is, make sure that the highlighted RAM clips are actually loaded into RAM and not swapped out.


I know Live's primarily a music-creation tool and don't want to see it bloated with "do everything" features. At the same time, it's such a natural tool for running sound effects in a live situation, and a few small changes (removing some tempo-related restrictions, mainly) would make it VERY usable.

Thanks!

[dirtystudios]

1. Enable looping controls for non-warped clips. For example, I have the sound of a bus running, or an audience clapping and I simply want to loop it. You can work around this by setting the clip's bpm to be the same as the project's bpm, but you add some grain distortion to the clip and if you need to change the project bpm to re-time musical elements, you mess up the sound effect clips.

You can use Simpler for this. Just set up a MIDI track with simpler and the file you want to play, then set it to loop and have a rediculously long MIDI track with one note (C4 I think). Presto, unwarped loop.

That said, actually having unwarped looping would be very nice.

2a. Allow a 0.0.0 follow action time. This causes the follow action to trigger when the clip stops. So you can have one clip play from IN to OUT and then trigger something else.

Isn't this acheived by having the follow action set to the original clip length, or am I not understanding?

3. Have a preference to select bolder highlighting of playing scenes/clips.

Have you auditioned the various skins, some are much better at highlighting various elements.

Hope that helps some.

k

[wayne]

Thanks for the good response!

2a. Allow a 0.0.0 follow action time. This causes the follow action to trigger when the clip stops. So you can have one clip play from IN to OUT and then trigger something else.

Isn't this acheived by having the follow action set to the original clip length, or am I not understanding?

You're correct, except that the follow action "time" is relative to a tempo, not real-time. And the clips I want to use this with have no tempo and I want them to work un-warped, so a follow action time of, for example, 1 bar doesn't work properly if the tempo changes. (If you could have a constant, artificial tempo for the entire performance, you can get by with this, though measuring the length of an unwarped clip in tempo-time is a problem.)

Also, I'd say the 0.0.0 idea is simpler if you might adjust a clip's in/out, etc, so you don't have to worry about then going back and changing the time. (If you're working with actual music, a non-0.0.0 follow time would probably be better since you could actualy trim a clip to an uneven length and still have the follow-on clip trigger on beat. Though if you were careful to trim to even lengths, you might still find 0.0.0 to be useful.)

3. Have a preference to select bolder highlighting of playing scenes/clips.

Have you auditioned the various skins, some are much better at highlighting various elements.

Good suggestion. I've always used a brown skin and didn't even think of changing. I'll run through them tonight to see what works.

[dirtystudios]

Ah, I see what you mean now.

Yeah, no real suggestion on that one.

k