A mate of mine is throwing a big party soon and as well as doing a small dj set he asked me if i could do some sort of live drum and bass thing. While i know part of the philosophy behind live is that you can work out your own way to do things but does anyone have any suggestions as to how I could make this work.
Im using a mac mini a midi man 49 key midi keyboard and ableton 5 and some plugins by the way.
Using Ableton live, live
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hacktheplanet
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This is a pretty deep question! There is a lot of stuff to know and different techniques/methods to develop a live set. Maybe I'll give a quick rundown of how I build a Live set:
I have a bunch of sets with a fuckload of little clips that I think of randomly. Sometimes the clips will fit together nicely. The ones that fit together nicely are organized into scenes. If enough scenes fit together nicely, it forms a little 2-3 minute collection of scenes. Eventually, there will be enough scenes to build into an entire set. The set I use when I play live has been through God knows how many incarnations, and countless hours of tweaking since version 4.
After I've got about 1-2 hours worth of material in the set, I start the tweaking process, which as described above, doesn't ever end. There's always something to add, some little automation or routing to adjust. Basically, the idea is to get the skeleton of the set down, then put in the veins and guts.
Finally, I map everything to a MIDI controller and make sure it all works properly with the transitions and stuff. I play it through a lot to see if the set flows and that I can get all my cues right, and search for spots to do some improvisation. That can also take quite a while, but there are some interesting surprises.
Everyone works differently. There are no rules to anything. The best thing you can do is take hints from everyone, and pick and choose which techniques with which you work best. If you're pretty accomplished at writing music and have a bunch of stuff already written, you could definitely hash together a 60 minute set for the party. Just transcribe your existing tracks into your live set, add a few new elements, and tweak tweak tweak until it sounds nice and flows properly.
I have a bunch of sets with a fuckload of little clips that I think of randomly. Sometimes the clips will fit together nicely. The ones that fit together nicely are organized into scenes. If enough scenes fit together nicely, it forms a little 2-3 minute collection of scenes. Eventually, there will be enough scenes to build into an entire set. The set I use when I play live has been through God knows how many incarnations, and countless hours of tweaking since version 4.
After I've got about 1-2 hours worth of material in the set, I start the tweaking process, which as described above, doesn't ever end. There's always something to add, some little automation or routing to adjust. Basically, the idea is to get the skeleton of the set down, then put in the veins and guts.
Finally, I map everything to a MIDI controller and make sure it all works properly with the transitions and stuff. I play it through a lot to see if the set flows and that I can get all my cues right, and search for spots to do some improvisation. That can also take quite a while, but there are some interesting surprises.
Everyone works differently. There are no rules to anything. The best thing you can do is take hints from everyone, and pick and choose which techniques with which you work best. If you're pretty accomplished at writing music and have a bunch of stuff already written, you could definitely hash together a 60 minute set for the party. Just transcribe your existing tracks into your live set, add a few new elements, and tweak tweak tweak until it sounds nice and flows properly.
