Are there "plants" in this forum?

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
nunrgguy
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Post by nunrgguy » Wed Jun 16, 2004 3:19 pm

I tihnk it might be good, even helpful, if people did post about bad experiences with Live - it could help others find solutions to or avoid situations that others have had. I had an experience last night with Live that in God knows how many years playing in clubs was about the most embarrassing and humiliating night of my life. A combination of taking too long to prepare, not having enough time to practice, the music being too complicated to simplify enough, hardware trouble and software trouble led to a club emptying experience of the highest order.

An extremely unhappy bunny

forge
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Post by forge » Wed Jun 16, 2004 3:22 pm

sorry, hate to be the one to say it, but that's more likely to be down to the NU NRG, NuNrgGuy

(someone had to :lol: )

nunrgguy
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Post by nunrgguy » Wed Jun 16, 2004 3:23 pm

Er....FUCK off!

nunrgguy
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Post by nunrgguy » Wed Jun 16, 2004 3:24 pm

I feel bad enough about last night without someone being a smart alek....ALRIGHT

mokomo
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Post by mokomo » Wed Jun 16, 2004 3:45 pm

NUNRGGUY (is that your stage name?) maybe you should take heed from some words from, I think, Dirty Harry - "A man's got to know his limitations"

If you can't cut the cheese live, then go practice and get better. Otherwise humiliation is pretty much to be expected.

If you made an arse of yourself by being way too overambitious for your abilities, it was not Live's fault, it was er, your choice of poor quality Midi cables.

forge
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Post by forge » Wed Jun 16, 2004 3:51 pm

nunrgguy wrote:I feel bad enough about last night without someone being a smart alek....ALRIGHT
aw come on, you'd make that joke if it was a style you weren't into :wink:

nunrgguy
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Post by nunrgguy » Wed Jun 16, 2004 9:07 pm

No...why would I. What's your genre? Experimental electronica and whales farting? If so...cool. I don't know enough about it to know whether it's good, bad or indifferent so I'll keep my big mouth shut.

Anyway...bad mouthing aside. Yes I wasn't practiced enough and there was a lot of pilot error but what I've gleaned from the experience is that I don't think that it's neccesarily totally possible for one person to do it all live - only 2 hands - not with that many tracks running, while trying not just stand there starting at the screen etc etc. I can see that it's feasable to perform music that doesn't have a lot of layers or parts and think that it would be fantastic for doing hip hop etc with, especially using live sampling and looping of MCs but more complicated stuff - the jury is out for me.

Audio glitching and poor response/latency was a big problem - again probably not Live's fault but all of these things have to work in combination...yes? There were latency problems before which I thought had been solved - things went OK on the afternoon of the gig. At the gig it was a different story with controllers not responding properly and hits triggering at indeterminate times after a key had been hit.

In a club situation the audio was lacking too, where's the bottom end? I know a lot of people on here use mastering plugins on the output and maybe that would help. Again, at the moment I'm not sure if the lack of bass and tinnyness is down to the time stretch algorythms or other factors. Yes the stuff is mixed properly, most of it apart from brand new stuff has been released on vinyl blah blah blah.

forge
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Post by forge » Wed Jun 16, 2004 9:17 pm

what's you kit list - mac pc? sound card? also - we've been discovering round here lately how impoortant heat is and keeping the inside or your laptop clean so the air can flow through - wouldn't mind betting the reason it fucked up on the night is to do with heat as it's bound to have been hotter in the club.

Also, I can't see me ever relying just on laptops live - gotta have vinyl or CD too, computers are like hormonal women.

Guest

Post by Guest » Wed Jun 16, 2004 9:32 pm

No low end in Live? That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard bro. Just cause you crashed and burned (we all have and still do, you're not alone) don't mean you can start goin and blaming the tools, especially with . innacurate statements such as the one regarding low end output.

You don't hear of carpenters blaming their shitty hammers when the house caves in do ya?

Guest

Post by Guest » Wed Jun 16, 2004 9:37 pm

btw, on topic, I can't help but think that the guy who started this topic either

a. hasn't really used Live very much

b. Is new to electronic music and is unaware of the radically new and transparent music production archetype Live presented when it first arrived, and continues to present today

c. Is doing a kind of music that doesn't necessarily benefit from Live's approach/functionality

c would be understandable, the rest require you to do more research.

Guest

Post by Guest » Wed Jun 16, 2004 9:40 pm

especially if you go and post posts like this. Unless its a joke and I'm taking it too seriously, if that's the case my apologies...Not a joke, well, my friend kind of like walking into a church picnic and stopping everyone so you can ask them whether the pastor is a child molester.

mokomo
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Post by mokomo » Wed Jun 16, 2004 10:40 pm

Anonymous wrote:especially if you go and post posts like this. Unless its a joke and I'm taking it too seriously, if that's the case my apologies...Not a joke, well, my friend kind of like walking into a church picnic and stopping everyone so you can ask them whether the pastor is a child molester.
Yeah, I'm just being provocative to entertain everyone and keep them distracted. Many probably haven't even opened Live 3 since the Live 4 announcement. Now that they know by definition, for the first time ever, Live 3 is officially inferior product as there is a better one on the way.

You are right, I haven't used Live VERY much, but I have used it quite a lot, and am using it more. It is gradually replacing Acid as a partner to my use of almost everything by NI, Cubase SX, Reason, Project 5 and lots of hardware.

New to electronic music? Hmm, I admit, I didn't manage to pick up Phaedra by Tangerine Dream on the day if its release, but I'd wager I'm not in the newbie category by a decade or two, sonny.

I'm more into programming my own sounds, playing instruments, self-sampling and re-mangling and working with live musicians than just looping alone.

So Live, while very good, doesn't quite cover everything in the way that I like - that's a personal preference for complexity in production style; with the goal of making something that sounds very simple yet intricately put-together. (hard to explain that one) Maybe not a clever approach, but it is fun to do.

Having a broad deep interest in a wider range of music than just electronic - I just ain't satisfied to try to emulate what everyone else is doing on the "electronic music" scene you see as the heartland of modernity ;-)

Archetype? Jesus, that isn't an easy word to slip onto the forum un-noticed.

I'd love to have attended NUNRGGUY's gig. I can just imagine him sweating on stage, time- warping Craig David loops and muttering into the mike "this software is shit - come on the bass, you bastard, where are you?" :-D

To be fair, depending on the standards you set for yourself and how much freedom you really need to improvise infront of a crowd, composing on the fly - I'd recommend before you go anywhere with your kit, do a 1 hour set rehearsal and record it from start to finish. Take note of how much you have to concentrate to make it happen. And listen to it afterwards, maybe a day later - are you happy that it is smooth, flowing and "groovey" (or whatever word you use to describe GOOD)?

If it is too much work to produce in rehearsal, then you are mad to take it into a live situation. You really should be just twiddling a few knobs, moving faders, listening to one cup on your headphones and looking like you are enjoying yourself, while being somewhat of an confident expert able to enjoy the music too. The crowd don't want to see someone crucifying themselves on stage with stress.

If you have it down to a fine art, you should need to concentrate no more that a standard DJ. Otherwise you will look like an accountant at a laptop. In opinion, the time for finding loops to drop in, improvising and developing new grooves and structures is in your studio or at home. When playing your machines live, your responsibility is to entertain the crowd. They really don't care if every sound they here is being born fresh from your imagination on the spot, or if it is 400% pre-cooked and you are just rebuilding it with effects control, some basic restructuring and taking random paths through pre-planned territories you are comfortable to fool around with live.

I don't know if the above makes any sense. But I've sweated through a few sets too where I set myself way too high a challenge in terms of needing to focus on about 10 things at once just to hold everything together, and needing to monitor channels to get mystery beats lined up etc. Never again. It is not meant to be like that. So now I put much more time into preparation of 3 to 4 times what I need for a performance and developing compositions with at least 5 possible live directions offline before taking them on the road.

If you are stressed out and not enjoying yourself by trying to do more than you can handle when live, then I don't think you will be able to feel the crowd properly, build up something around their mood and take them places with your music.

The software is definitely not the limiting factor; it is your ability to prepare properly and realistically for what you can achieve with two hands and the goal of entertaining the crowd, while looking cool as a cucumber.

I am sure there are people who do produce everything on the fly using Live live ... I'm just not capable of that. Maybe. Everyone's approach is different. Just make sure you are deeply in the comfort zone as you do it.

forge
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Post by forge » Wed Jun 16, 2004 10:51 pm

[quote="mokomoArchetype? Jesus, that isn't an easy word to slip onto the forum un-noticed.

I'd love to have attended NUNRGGUY's gig. I can just imagine him sweating on stage, time- warping Craig David loops and muttering into the mike "this software is shit - come on the bass, you bastard, where are you?" :-D
[/quote]


:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

Guest

Post by Guest » Wed Jun 16, 2004 11:00 pm

mokomo wrote:Yeah, I'm just being provocative to entertain everyone and keep them distracted.
Gotcha, pardon my potentially overzealous response
mokomo wrote:New to electronic music? Hmm, I admit, I didn't manage to pick up Phaedra by Tangerine Dream on the day if its release, but I'd wager I'm not in the newbie category by a decade or two, sonny.
You presuppose my age?
mokomo wrote: So Live, while very good, doesn't quite cover everything in the way that I like - that's a personal preference for complexity in production style; with the goal of making something that sounds very simple yet intricately put-together. (hard to explain that one) Maybe not a clever approach, but it is fun to do.
I am a little surprised here (in a curious more than antagonistic way) - Live is if anything capable of complexity, and deceptievely simple results would arguably be a result more of the user than the app, though I might be misunderstanding here.
mokomo wrote: Having a broad deep interest in a wider range of music than just electronic - I just ain't satisfied to try to emulate what everyone else is doing on the "electronic music" scene you see as the heartland of modernity ;-)
But you would certainly also agree that the "electronic" music scene, whataver exactly that is, is also filled with fantastic diversity? There's so much out there....And we are are necessarily including Hip Hop/Pop/et al in here as well, no?
mokomo wrote: Archetype? Jesus, that isn't an easy word to slip onto the forum un-noticed.
Next time I guess...

I'm trying to be converstional here, hopr it doesn't come across as argumentative! I'm kind kind of socially mishapen by my pixelated world...

::mic-minimal::
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Post by ::mic-minimal:: » Wed Jun 16, 2004 11:10 pm

hi, i'm sorry about your club experience nobodys happy when that happens so I'm sure we all understand that, but there are alot of people here doing performances by themselves, some of them are even playing guitar and bass while controlling everything else in Live by themselves, I'm not saying this to belittle your experience in any way I don't know you
so I don't know what your experience level is but hopefully my statement
can add some inspiration to what you want to do, simply because if you do
a search you will find all kinds of people doing incredible things with Live, and by themselves as well as with others.

this issue also goes hand in hand with the myth alot of people circulate about live being a 'doit for you music program' it's nothing of the sort, there are many different ways to accomplish a single thing in Live which is what makes it so good for many different types of people cause you can approach its toolmanship in so many different ways. It is not a loop toy, and it takes learning, and definitely practice, and patience as with any instrument, the great thing about Live is that this is the first audio sequencer that you could make that statement about, most of the others are in fact more akin to being just loop players instead of instruments that
you have to become proficient in to use.

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