James Zabiela + Live?

Piett · Post by **Piett** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 4:18 pm

Hi all,
I was lucky enough to be able to catch Zabiela at Myst here in Montreal a few weeks ago. It was a great show, but the entire night, i was trying my best to understand how he was doing things and it left me abit puzled. Hopefully with your help we can shed some light on the situation.

Now he arived at Myst whyle the opener was just winding down his set, and he sets up all his kit on the spot, so there is no way i missed any gear.
The club has a djm 800 with 3 cdjs and 2 1200 mk2's hooked up to it. James pulls out an EFX 1000, a Firewire 410 and an iBook.
Now heres what i dont get, all night hes playing tunes off of the cdjs and triggering loops + samples off of the iBook.
Hes not matching the tempo in Ableton manualy as i would have expected because he has no interface and doing that just with a lappy while 2 tunes are going on the cdjs is a bitch even for a human metronome like James.
He did not use a seperate midi clock ither as i would have seen him set it up.
My question to you is, how was he trigering in ableton with such presision without manualy matching the tempo or using a seperate midi clock?
Does the EFX have that capability, to match midi tempo to bpm?

robtronik · Post by **robtronik** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 4:39 pm

the DJM-800 is a MIDI controller as well.

I saw the same set up as you did here in LA. My guess is that he starts out with ableton live then mixes things in and out of that as needed. Once you have a BPM established its not hard to slightly adjust Live to be in sync. You can also have a knob dedicated to BPM on the mixer so you can adjust that way or use the BPM sync out of the 800 (which is less reliable, in my opinion).

rob.

vertigo · Post by **vertigo** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 4:41 pm

He came to Montreal, and I missed it? now im sad... but anyway, I believe both the EFX and DJM send Midi clock. He could have even had his Live set mapped to the DJM for triggering.

dCross · Post by **dCross** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 5:39 pm

from what I've seen, he does quite a bit of back-and-forth, incorporating the MIDI clock signal from either the DJM800 or EFX1000.

Piett · Post by **Piett** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 6:10 pm

the thing is, i didint see him maping any of the 800's midi controles to Ableton, and i would say his set was more cdj oriented with only a few samples triggered here and there.
Im starting to think the efx is the culprit here, having never used one myself, how reliable is it at reading bpm and transfering that to a midi tempo clock?

dCross · Post by **dCross** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 6:25 pm

Piett wrote:the thing is, i didint see him maping any of the 800's midi controles to Ableton, and i would say his set was more cdj oriented with only a few samples triggered here and there.
Im starting to think the efx is the culprit here, having never used one myself, how reliable is it at reading bpm and transfering that to a midi tempo clock?

Well, I think he has an 800 in his rider, and I think every single 800 sends the same exact MIDI messages, so he doesn't have to do any mapping - he just has to open up the same (pre-mapped) set every time.

I've seen him play with knobs on the 800 to tweak FX in Live.

freshdrumma · Post by **freshdrumma** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 6:28 pm

i've seen he uses final scratch, probably with cdjs i suppose, and sends a midi time coed from finalscratch to ableton

tokyojoe69 · Post by **tokyojoe69** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 7:49 pm

I dont know about him using final scratch, it has never been mentioned before. Also one possibility, although I agree that just opening his live set already mapped to the 800 would work, is that it is actually HIS 800 which was pre-installed in the club earlier prior to opening.

DJSK · Post by **DJSK** » Tue Aug 15, 2006 11:36 pm

He brings his own DJM 800 with him on gigs. He uses the 800's midi control to operate Ableton Live. I am not sure how or even if he does (the guy really is a human metronome) sync live and the CDJ's together. That's probably a question to ask him personally. It would actually be pretty simple to assign a controller or fader on the DJM 800 to control Live's pitch so he could be doing it that way though.

nesvarbu · Post by **nesvarbu** » Wed Aug 16, 2006 10:13 am

freshdrumma wrote:i've seen he uses final scratch, probably with cdjs i suppose, and sends a midi time coed from finalscratch to ableton

JZ with Final scratch?

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