LOOPERS PARADISE!!!!

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Guest

LOOPERS PARADISE!!!!

Post by Guest » Wed Apr 02, 2003 8:49 pm

I figured it out!!!!!! Live 2.0.1 must've had some sort of clip quantization bug, I spent hours trying to get clips recording and looping in the session view with no acceptable results. Then I tried the same thing in 2.0.3 and it is PARTY TIME. I had a dandy of a time getting to this point, but now I'm super-stoked--Live rules, I take back any criticisms. I don't want anyone repeating my heinous journey to discovering how to loop live in Live. Listen up all of you Loop Station, Echoplex, Boomerang owners, and anyone considering buying live for looping, or having trouble getting loops happening in Live (using live instruments like guitar, bass, keys...):

First of all, get 2.0.3 NOT 2.0.1.

Next, go to the session view, route the audio approriately on a track, arm it for recording and turn on the monitor. You'll need to get the tempo where you want it (internally, expternally, tap--doesn't matter). Then you should assing a key or midi command to a slot of the track in the session view. This key/midi command is your start and stop/loop button. For ultimate flexibility, go to Options> preferences>defaults>
You want Launch mode-trigger/ Loop/warp mode-auto/quantiztion global.
Go to preferences>misc.>clip update rate-1/32. Then I like to set my quantization in the control panel to "bar". What this means is that recording of the clip will always start and stop at the bar between measures--therefore your clips will always be perfect, filling full bars. How this works is like this--you are listening to the metronome or pre-recorded qudio in the set with a time signature and tempo, and you hit the key/midi command to start recording of the clip. With control panel quantization at "bar", the recording will start at the next bar AFTER you hit the pedal. This is very convient to me, as you can hit the pedal in the middle of a measure, a few beats before recording begins, and not have to focus on hitting the pedal at just the right time--makes it easier to focus on the music. Same thing at the end of a loop, just hit the key/midi command during the last measure of the loop, and it will flip back to playback at the beginning of the loop at the next bar. NOTICE that the control panel quantization is different that the clip quantization. By setting the clip quantization to global, it allows you to record clips (loops) of any length--so you can get a long 16 measure clip (loop) going on one track, then get a 1 measure going on another, and an 8 measure on another track and so on.

Each clip (loop) has to have its own track to play simultaneously, so you need to set up as many tracks as you need to get the desired number of clips/loops. I use a behringer FCB 1010 midi foot controler and set up each of the 10 pedals to trigger seperate clips on seperated channels. In a live situation, I use headphones to monitor the tempo on sets (songs)that start out "blank", or if I've got pre-recorded material on a song, I just play along to that. Then its looping time.

Live is much more powerful than hardware loopers in that you can add and manipulate effects live, do any type of pan/fade/stop/start etc. to any clip at any time. Some people see it as a limitation, but I find the fact that Live can't "overdub" like a loop station or boomerang is actually good--that way I can always bring clips in and out, each is totally independant. And how many times have you hardware loopers had something special happening, only to totally screw it all up on an overdub pass.

I guess depending on your computer and soundcard, the fact that each loop needs a seperate track could start to bog things down, but not on a toshiba satellite laptop P4 2.4 g, 1 gig RAM, external 120 gig WD FW hardrive 7,200 RPM 8 Mb cache with RME Mulitface soundcard with PCMCIA adapter. I can bring at least 8 channels into Live with effects at once with 1 ms latency into Live and 2 ms out through lives (and vst) effects--no glitches or pops. Some people might read this post and say "duh, jackass", but even with the manual and this forum I had troubles for a few weeks, granted a buggy 2.0.1 version didn't help much. Anyway, just wanted to share my experiences and newfound love of Live with everyone, in hopes of enlightening at least a few people out there, and encouraging those from the hardware looping sect to GO LIVE!!!!!!!!!!!

ryan

Guest

yup

Post by Guest » Wed Apr 02, 2003 11:16 pm

duh, jackass

Pitch Black
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Post by Pitch Black » Thu Apr 03, 2003 12:50 am

Oh Guest, be nice to Ryan!

Guest

Sorry

Post by Guest » Thu Apr 03, 2003 1:37 am

No harm intended. Just thought it would be funny since he thought thats what would be said.

:oops:

my bizzad

Pitch Black
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Post by Pitch Black » Thu Apr 03, 2003 3:28 am

A thousand pardons Guest, I only skim-read Ryans post, came to "love of Live" and came over all mushy and protective, like.

:P
Paddy

Igor

Post by Igor » Tue Apr 15, 2003 5:43 pm

Hey Ryan!
Thanks for your post , it helps me a lot.
Could you tell me:
is it possible to control the pitch of the loop with your Beringer 10 10 foot controller?
It is very useful possibilies.
I have a midi keyboard with some controlers (it is called MIDICONTROL)
and live doesnt allow me to control the pitch with it :(

Thanks
Igor

Ryan

Post by Ryan » Wed Apr 16, 2003 8:25 pm

Haven't thoroughly tried yet, but it seems to NOT be possible to assign midi commands to the different settings in the clip view at the bottom of the page. This is strange, as most everything else in live (effects...) can be controled by midi--hopefully clip midi control will be incorporated soon. It would be easiest to control the pitch of the sample from there (with sample settings>transpose or detune).

I guess another workaround would be dialing in a grain delay patch that just effects pitch, then mapping a midi knob (or an fcb 1010 exp pedal) to the pitch. Do this by "edit midi map" and then left click the "pitch" bar in the grain delay, then move your knob/pedal. Exit the "edit midi map". Now that knob pedal will control the pitch of any clip playing on that track while the grain delay is turned on. Assign another key to turn the g.delay on/off then you could always get right back to the original pitch quick without having to dial it in with a pedal or knob by turning off the g.delay. The beauty of the fcb 1010 in this case is you could vary the range of pitch variation relative to the sweep of the exp. pedal. By programming the 1010 the way you want, you could have the full sweep of the pedal move the pitch up as little or as much as you want, so you could set it to go up a whole step, down an octave, whatever. This is very powerful, and for guitarists and bassists using digitech whammy pedals, the possiblities of fcb 1010 and Live far outrange the whammy pedals. The flexibility and programmability of Live software compared to hardware devices makes me really enjoy live, 'cause you can basically tell it what to do, not be limited by it as with hardware.

Guest

Post by Guest » Fri Apr 18, 2003 10:18 am

Hello Ryan ,
Thank you very much for your answer :-)
is it possible to contact you , i am reall interested in music what u do with Live.
If you like this idea , just write me a message to igor@sirodzha.com
Thanks
Igor

socco riffredi

Post by socco riffredi » Mon Dec 29, 2003 2:56 pm

Each clip (loop) has to have its own track to play simultaneously, so you need to set up as many tracks as you need to get the desired number of clips/loops. I use a behringer FCB 1010 midi foot controler and set up each of the 10 pedals to trigger seperate clips on seperated channels. In a live situation, I use headphones to monitor the tempo on sets (songs)that start out "blank", or if I've got pre-recorded material on a song, I just play along to that. Then its looping time.

-> do you set all the prepared tracks to "record" right from the begining ?
if so , how you handle the monitoring then, do you use a hardware mixer in addition to live (cause if you monitor through live all the track monitors will add up i guess)?

thanks..

Per Boysen
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Post by Per Boysen » Mon Dec 29, 2003 7:52 pm

socco riffredi wrote:-> do you set all the prepared tracks to "record" right from the begining ?
Another way is to seet up the midi foot control to call up scenes. If you set a track to record the foot pedal "change scene" will induce recording if there's no clip yet in that scene slot of that track. Althogh this is not as fast as addressing slots directly you can do a lot more live looping on the fly with less midi foot pedal pads.
Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
http://www.perboysen.com

socco riffredi

Post by socco riffredi » Mon Dec 29, 2003 10:06 pm

yeah that's what i figured out too that afternoon...but the problem is, if you go to the next scene, the loop you just recorded will not be played back anymore cause it was recorded in another scene..
is there a way to set up a key or pedal in a way to shift through tracks (moving to the next one and set track status to record) ? if you could set up another button as record switch for the selected track it could work with two buttons.

Per Boysen
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Post by Per Boysen » Mon Dec 29, 2003 11:02 pm

socco riffredi wrote:but the problem is, if you go to the next scene, the loop you just recorded will not be played back anymore cause it was recorded in another scene..
He, he... yes, you can't have everything ;-) But if you record three different clips on a row they will all play back in their own scene when you lay down three more clips on the next track.
socco riffredi wrote:is there a way to set up a key or pedal in a way to shift through tracks (moving to the next one and set track status to record) ? if you could set up another button as record switch for the selected track it could work with two buttons.
Yes, I actually tried that with my Behringer FCB 1010. Every foot pad can be set to send a bunch of different midi commands. I set up one foot pad to send two midi commands, A and B, and then I mapped A to Live's "record enable track" while mapping B to a clip on that very same track. This way you can record loops on the fly and hear them play back together. It's a nice technique as far as you don't want to use many scenes because then you will have to use a lot of midi pedal pads and might turn into a step dancer instead of a musician ;-)

I'd like to see a new feature in Live where you can use the same midi controller clip mapping in just about any scene of choice. This would in praxis mean that you could dedicate foot button 1-5 to Live's tracks 1-5. Track one could be dedicated for bass, with a "one octave pitch down" plug inserted etc etc. This would turn Live much more powerful for live-looping on the fly.
Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
http://www.perboysen.com

longjohns
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Post by longjohns » Tue Dec 30, 2003 6:44 am

just an idea - haven't actually tried it.

what if, beforehand, you did some modifications to the set: remove the play buttons from all clips in track 1 except for scene 1. (highlight the clip slot, then hit ctrl-E) then remove all buttons from clips in track 2 except scene 2. and so forth.

could you then do this progressive recording using the scene up/down buttons, but keep the previous scenes playing, since there would be no clip overriding the playback from the clips which were already triggered?

** after a quick test, this seems to work

socco riffredi

Post by socco riffredi » Tue Dec 30, 2003 10:29 am

that's a good idea, removing the play buttons.. i haven't recognized that the above tracks keep playing if you remove the button, i thought this was only to avoid a track from being recorded.

then again you still have to assign one footswitch per track cause you have to set the next track to record mode (you can't set all the tracks in record mode right from the beginning cause they will all monitor, unless you turn it off )

do you have a way to get around this ?

Per Boysen
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Post by Per Boysen » Tue Dec 30, 2003 11:01 am

What are those "play buttons" you keep talking of? The little green trangle on the left side of a clip?
Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
http://www.perboysen.com

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