I have been wondering if it is possible to play an acoustic instrument or sing into LIVE (probably through a FIREWIRE 410 or similar piece of equiptment) and jam in real time while using effects on the acoustic sound and running other clips. Has anyone tried this? What kind of set up did you use? Am I making any sense at all or am I crazy?
Thanks
RJ
LIVE + acoustic instrument in a live situation????
-
SnackDaddy
- Posts: 31
- Joined: Tue Mar 16, 2004 2:01 am
- Location: Philadelphia, PA, USA
- Contact:
Sure, this should be possible, but will depend on how fast your computer is and your audio i/o driver. To put effects on the acoustic input signal, you'll have to enabled "monitor through live" in the Live audio prefs. Use the steps described in the Live manual to set the best possible buffer size to get the best result you can for your system.
cheers,
Michael
cheers,
Michael
-
Guest
should work... if you can find an old motu 828 those things are pretty sweet and as far as playing live your sound won't be any better with a newer system.
410 will also work.
if you plan on using distortion buy a podxt or a stompbox and run that in to the motu... good distortion will kill your CPU way faster than delays and such
410 will also work.
if you plan on using distortion buy a podxt or a stompbox and run that in to the motu... good distortion will kill your CPU way faster than delays and such
-
Guest
yes. easy. This is what Live is all about. I use Live on an xp pc 2.4, 1 gig RAM, RME multiface to gig almost weekly. I do all-live looping--no pre-recorded loops or samples. My live set has 12 tracks, at least 30 effects, 3 sends. I play and loop bass, keys, and guitar in real time using an FCB 1010 midi foot controller. I play and record live drum loops using a drumkat and FL studio (until Live 4 comes out, and FL gets kicked to the curb!!!). Bottom line, you should be totally fine using Live this way. A midi foot device is crucial, and I find so are other midi controllers (I'm using a DM2 and uc33e). Use and external fw hardrive 7,200 RPM for you audio folders and files for increased performance and more tracks/effects.
Since you are on a mac, you will not get anywhere near this number of tracks and effects without bogging down and having all kinds of latency and glictching. Thus, if a new pc is not in your future, drop some serious bread on your soundcard, at least get firewire, and preferably pcmcia soas to keep you fw port open for the hard drive (plus pcmcia is just faster). RME multiface is the ultimate, but the 410 should do (however you are limited to 2 inputs, right?)
Ryan
Since you are on a mac, you will not get anywhere near this number of tracks and effects without bogging down and having all kinds of latency and glictching. Thus, if a new pc is not in your future, drop some serious bread on your soundcard, at least get firewire, and preferably pcmcia soas to keep you fw port open for the hard drive (plus pcmcia is just faster). RME multiface is the ultimate, but the 410 should do (however you are limited to 2 inputs, right?)
Ryan
heres how i do it, then a word of warning...i apologize for the length of this but as this stuff was really hard for me to figure out i figured it might save others some time. plus i always get really pissed off at how unhelpful these supposed "rare insight"articles really are...see swa videos tutorial on live to see what i mean. ill try to give you somethign concrete you can use.
my cpu is actually kind of old and slow. p3 750, less than 200mb of ram. i have to be very creative about how i organize the sets, believe me. anyway, heres some tips for doing this live thing with a guitar.
if youre going to use an electric-acoustic..well..kind of a no brainer. plug it straight into something..preferably its got good converters and a preamp like say the ozone, otherwise buy something like a presonus bluetube and plug it into your existing sound unit. on track one set the input to live in, go to the far bottom right corner and pick the pus icon and make sure you decide whether or not the input bus needs to be linbked or not. im using the ozone a lot of the time so i have to unlink mine in order to pick the right device. then go back to the track, pick the right input device, then turn on the monitor switch. as was mentioned before this only works if you can monitor with live. now just drop an eq 4 and maybe a compressor and tweak to taste
if youre going to try this with an electric guitar, particularly using distortion, this is a whole different ballgame....
theres 4 methods of doing this: pluggign straight in and using software <i.e. amplitube or guitar rig>, plugging into a POD or a guitar port then into the interface, plugging into a sansamp and into the interface, or miking a cab.
ok the software method i havent really done much of and seems pretty obvious to me so im going o skip it. if you are using a pod or a guitar port then everything depends on the settings built into the pod. now im guessing that because these things are midi tweakable you should be able to use unlinked clip envelopes to tweak the midi parameters for it if you so desire...
miking the cab is simple enough. get a dynamic mic, stick it an inch away from the cone of a speaker, run it into a port on your interface that can handle a mic signal, pick out the proper input channel, then eq 4 and compress to account for room dynamics, add effects to taste.
now heres the hard one...using a sansamp. this requires some thought and some skillz with your eq. sansamps kick ass, no way around it...but if youre going to plug one straight into a recording interface you have to understand whats actually being picked up by your unit.
the inputs of say a quattro or an ozone or even an 828 are going to be absorbing the FULL RANGE of the audio signal. this is VERY important to remember so you dont start breakign things the first time you plug your rare abd very expensive guitar <like me> into your 24 bit recording device and it sounds like crap. herein lies the difficulty, and i dont know if this applies to the new guitar amp VSTi's or not...again your soundcard picks up a huge range of sound, possibly from like 4hz-30khz or so...the speakers on a guitar amp have a MUCH narrower range of expression...the top end has a brickwall somewhere between 3khz and 6 khz depending on what brand of speakers they are. <for example: celestion vintage 30s are a little dark by nature so their cutoff is in the 3's whereas jensens may be all the way up in the 5s>
so..ill give you something to try and then if you need more help let me know... the fundamentals of the expressed signal coming out of the speakers of say, a marshall amp go like this: throw an eq four <or if youve got it a more powerful eq..i like to use waves' stuff> onto your input track. first do as hard and steep of a roll off as you can on the high end. start right at 3khz, try to cut it by 24khz if you are able. if eq 4 is all you have, then roll it off by 12khz, then immediately open another eq 4, turn off all the eq registers except #4 and apply the EXACT same process to it, which will create a -24db notch. next go back to the first eq, create a small peak at 2khz, boost a couple at 250 which creates the resonance the speaker cab would give you, dip a lil at 750 which creates a certain kind of phase cancellation particular to marshalls. if you so desire you can also go to the 2nd eq and roll off low end around 100 and pull out a little around 500. use your ears.
now heres where the trickery begins, and id recommend this for most direct recording methods: direct signals are a bit, well...dry. you have to now create the illusion of movement that a miked cab would naturally have. so heres what ya do. put on a simple delay, switch both channels to milliseconds, then set them both to 1ms of delay. set feedback to 0. set mix to 50%. what were doing here is creating a comb filter via the delay...sweep your mix knob between 0% and 50% and youll hear the tone changing. get the tone where you like it and leave it. now put a compressor in the front of the chain <if using live3, use a compII and the moderate setting, then play with settings>. at this point i HIGHLY advise you to save the current settings of all your plugins as youre going to use this stuff a lot and its a real pain to have to keep trying to find things...plus itll help us in the next part.
ok now heres where your tone hits god status. go to track 2 and set it up the exact same way as track 1, using the same input channel and all and turn on the monitor switch. pan track 1 hard left and track 2 hard right. now set up fx on track 2 EXACTLY the way they are on track 1. now insert another simple delay on track 2, set to ms, put both channels at 30ms, feedback at 0 and mix at 50. youll like this sound, trust me. basically what this allows you to do is double tracks live and more or less play in stereo. the audience WILL notice. anyway as a finishing touch ad advise you to throw a limiter on the master track so you can more easily keep your guitar and recorded stuff together.
now the warning: i dont know where you live, but in the part of america that i live in people are very resistant to this stuff...ive heard ti referred to as "guitaraoke". be prepared.. if anyone needs clarification lemme know.
sinjin
sparthamir@hotmail.com
aim: tenn0tenn0
my cpu is actually kind of old and slow. p3 750, less than 200mb of ram. i have to be very creative about how i organize the sets, believe me. anyway, heres some tips for doing this live thing with a guitar.
if youre going to use an electric-acoustic..well..kind of a no brainer. plug it straight into something..preferably its got good converters and a preamp like say the ozone, otherwise buy something like a presonus bluetube and plug it into your existing sound unit. on track one set the input to live in, go to the far bottom right corner and pick the pus icon and make sure you decide whether or not the input bus needs to be linbked or not. im using the ozone a lot of the time so i have to unlink mine in order to pick the right device. then go back to the track, pick the right input device, then turn on the monitor switch. as was mentioned before this only works if you can monitor with live. now just drop an eq 4 and maybe a compressor and tweak to taste
if youre going to try this with an electric guitar, particularly using distortion, this is a whole different ballgame....
theres 4 methods of doing this: pluggign straight in and using software <i.e. amplitube or guitar rig>, plugging into a POD or a guitar port then into the interface, plugging into a sansamp and into the interface, or miking a cab.
ok the software method i havent really done much of and seems pretty obvious to me so im going o skip it. if you are using a pod or a guitar port then everything depends on the settings built into the pod. now im guessing that because these things are midi tweakable you should be able to use unlinked clip envelopes to tweak the midi parameters for it if you so desire...
miking the cab is simple enough. get a dynamic mic, stick it an inch away from the cone of a speaker, run it into a port on your interface that can handle a mic signal, pick out the proper input channel, then eq 4 and compress to account for room dynamics, add effects to taste.
now heres the hard one...using a sansamp. this requires some thought and some skillz with your eq. sansamps kick ass, no way around it...but if youre going to plug one straight into a recording interface you have to understand whats actually being picked up by your unit.
the inputs of say a quattro or an ozone or even an 828 are going to be absorbing the FULL RANGE of the audio signal. this is VERY important to remember so you dont start breakign things the first time you plug your rare abd very expensive guitar <like me> into your 24 bit recording device and it sounds like crap. herein lies the difficulty, and i dont know if this applies to the new guitar amp VSTi's or not...again your soundcard picks up a huge range of sound, possibly from like 4hz-30khz or so...the speakers on a guitar amp have a MUCH narrower range of expression...the top end has a brickwall somewhere between 3khz and 6 khz depending on what brand of speakers they are. <for example: celestion vintage 30s are a little dark by nature so their cutoff is in the 3's whereas jensens may be all the way up in the 5s>
so..ill give you something to try and then if you need more help let me know... the fundamentals of the expressed signal coming out of the speakers of say, a marshall amp go like this: throw an eq four <or if youve got it a more powerful eq..i like to use waves' stuff> onto your input track. first do as hard and steep of a roll off as you can on the high end. start right at 3khz, try to cut it by 24khz if you are able. if eq 4 is all you have, then roll it off by 12khz, then immediately open another eq 4, turn off all the eq registers except #4 and apply the EXACT same process to it, which will create a -24db notch. next go back to the first eq, create a small peak at 2khz, boost a couple at 250 which creates the resonance the speaker cab would give you, dip a lil at 750 which creates a certain kind of phase cancellation particular to marshalls. if you so desire you can also go to the 2nd eq and roll off low end around 100 and pull out a little around 500. use your ears.
now heres where the trickery begins, and id recommend this for most direct recording methods: direct signals are a bit, well...dry. you have to now create the illusion of movement that a miked cab would naturally have. so heres what ya do. put on a simple delay, switch both channels to milliseconds, then set them both to 1ms of delay. set feedback to 0. set mix to 50%. what were doing here is creating a comb filter via the delay...sweep your mix knob between 0% and 50% and youll hear the tone changing. get the tone where you like it and leave it. now put a compressor in the front of the chain <if using live3, use a compII and the moderate setting, then play with settings>. at this point i HIGHLY advise you to save the current settings of all your plugins as youre going to use this stuff a lot and its a real pain to have to keep trying to find things...plus itll help us in the next part.
ok now heres where your tone hits god status. go to track 2 and set it up the exact same way as track 1, using the same input channel and all and turn on the monitor switch. pan track 1 hard left and track 2 hard right. now set up fx on track 2 EXACTLY the way they are on track 1. now insert another simple delay on track 2, set to ms, put both channels at 30ms, feedback at 0 and mix at 50. youll like this sound, trust me. basically what this allows you to do is double tracks live and more or less play in stereo. the audience WILL notice. anyway as a finishing touch ad advise you to throw a limiter on the master track so you can more easily keep your guitar and recorded stuff together.
now the warning: i dont know where you live, but in the part of america that i live in people are very resistant to this stuff...ive heard ti referred to as "guitaraoke". be prepared.. if anyone needs clarification lemme know.
sinjin
sparthamir@hotmail.com
aim: tenn0tenn0