Live performance setup

[Lo-Key Fu]

You're welcome mate. Let us know how you travel with it all.

Good luck!

[barstu]

Really interesting to read this post as I have been thinking about this a lot lately. I'm in a band and we're about to take material on stage. Our music is very dancey so would like the club solution of not having gaps to load new sets.
I think I'm going to try Lo-Key Fu's approach, I love the idea of busing in the studio to speed up moving into live sets. I'm wondering if when performing, you ever have the need to mix clips that are on the same channel and if so how you over come that. (I guess most things on same channel wouldn't mix well, especially bass but there maybe exceptions). I like tricil's solution to this of having everything doubled and then use crossfades. I'd also be interested what midi controllers you guys prefer to trigger and mix stuff.

[Lo-Key Fu]

I don't see why that combination of ideas wouldn't work for you mate.

I do indeed double all my tracks to an "A" and "B" BUS in my live set; this entirely prevents the issue of wanting to trigger tracks from the same BUSes simultaneously (eg. two drum beats).

In terms of controllers, up until today I have been using an Evolution X-Session, a Korg PadKontrol and setup a few key commands on my laptop to cover the shortfall.

Having just received a Faderfox LC2 in the post however, I want to entirely remove my need for both the X-Session and the key commands. Ideally I want to be able to run my entire set from the Faderfox and use the Korg solely for improvisation and triggering additional sounds.

Not quite sure how it will all come together yet, but the Faderfox seems to be right up my alley in terms of flexibility, portability and necessary complexity.

Hope this helps!

[barstu]

Thanks for the info mate, that sure helps.

I think I may start off with this http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/page/shop ... t_id/28398 seems a good price for a motorised one mixer. Do you trigger clips and stop clips with the pad control. I'm trying to work out in my head how I can do this with out using mouse. Say if I have about 8 songs each with about 8 clips that I may want to trigger I'm not sure how to do this without referring to the mouse at some point. I once heard the idea of using an old QWERTY keyboard and assigning 1QAZ columns to channels.

[friend_kami]

my current setup is the following:

A:fx, A:rpt, A: dry, B:fx, B:rpt, B: dry, misc, fx, resample to A cue, resample to B cue.

send the resample tracks back into the fx channel, where i have a pretty big rack which does more or less all i want to do, with the push of some buttons and knob tweakage.

if i just want to make the audio repeat and loop and whatnots, it bypasses the fx channel and goes to the repeat channel only (i know, im working on a way to delete the repeat track completely).

the reample channels are cued to A/B respectively, and when pressing a button i jump from the master track to the respective resample track, start resampling, when i hit the next scene it stop resampling and plays back the resampl track + whatever content i have in that scene. makes for great buildups and incase you find something that both you and people listening really enjoy you can easily incorporate that through out the scenes without even touching the mouse

the thing i like most about my setup is that i can see each channel and whats in it and any given time, sinec it doesnt take up to much screen space + its versatile enough to let you totally mashup things as you go along.

then its just a matter of mapping things like you want them. ive got left/right, up/down mapped aswell as duplicate clip/delete clip/remove or add stop button, incase i end up doing a really nice build-up or whatever while resampling and i want that to follow for several scenes. again, trying to minimize the use of both keyboard as mouse as much as possible.

setups still a work in progress, but it works for me.
also still have enough tracks to launch seveal things at once, although i tend to bounce the basics out and if i want the ability to tweak them i just send them through the fx track.

now if only i can find an easy way to get midi to work the same way as my resample without having to delete any of the two (or in this case: 4).

i dont htink bomes allows that many keystrokes at once heh.

[evilxsystems]

I'm another of those 100 track wide people...if your machine can handle it, it works fine, it's easy to import sets and you don't have to compromise anything....although having 10 or 20 return/sends gets kind of messy, and scrolling can be annoying while you're setting things up, but once it's in there it works great, I have all the controls I'm going to tweak mapped to a controller and the only thing I have visible when I'm playing live are the track level controls and the scene names which I usually make long and descriptive, everything else is hidden.

now if only i can find an easy way to get midi to work the same way as my resample without having to delete any of the two (or in this case: 4).

you should be able to do that with a midi loop back driver, I do this with the IAC driver on the mac, I think midiyoke does it on the PC

[Lo-Key Fu]

I think I may start off with this http://www.dolphinmusic.co.uk/page/shop ... t_id/28398 seems a good price for a motorised one mixer.

I looked at the B-Control Fader a little while back as I like the majority of Behringer gear for live purposes: they seem reasonably priced, reasonably well built (with a few glaring exceptions) and for the most part, they are as fully featured as some of the more expensive brands. I haven't used this particular model before, but speaking for myself, I'm not sure I would want to take to the stage with a unit boasting motorised faders, though a studio setting might be a different matter. Still, it has a little of everything - meaning knobs, sliders and buttons - and my guess is it would be a great way to get the ball rolling for you.

Do you trigger clips and stop clips with the pad control. I'm trying to work out in my head how I can do this with out using mouse.

I was actually using a combination of keyboard commands before the Faderfox arrived (arrows+return to trigger) which obviously worked, but kept me locked to the screen a little more than I liked. The Faderfox however is living up to my expectations and I can easily control my entire transport system without mouse, keyboard or third-party software now. I love it when a plan comes together...

I'm another of those 100 track wide people...

I am curious, do you really have 100 horizontal tracks to your set or is that just a turn of phrase? Personally I have just expanded to a system with 16 horizontal tracks (plus 4 returns) and find this to be ample for my own needs, but as with everything Ableton, it all comes back to a matter of what works for you.


Thanks to those who have posted their setups so far, it's always interesting to see how others have their sets arranged.

[evilxsystems]

I'm another of those 100 track wide people...

I am curious, do you really have 100 horizontal tracks to your set or is that just a turn of phrase?

actually my current live set only has 69 tracks, but i could see myself getting up to 100 if I had to play more than an hour

[kpa]

i am in exactly te same positionas you are: trying to work the best way to organise a live set. After much thinking and looking on this forum this is the way i have decided ito do it.

Like you i will have about 10 or 12 tracks, so i have a pretty certain running order for the tracks. I will (all channel # and slot # are approx)
put song 1 in channels 1 - 10, slots 1 - 10
song 2 in channels 11 - 20, slots 11-20 etc, etc etc.
This does mean that the whole set will be about 100 channels wide and about 100 or so slots high, but i figure this is the easiest way to do it.

Once i get to the end of a track can mix in the next track live by launching the clips of the new track and ending thc lips of the old tracks. That way it means i can have all the vst's and fx loaded on the correct tracks and waiting to go, but they wont affect cpu as there is nothing going through them until they are needed.

i actually truied out this set up for my first gig, but it got too big and didnt really work. I think the problem was that samples were being loaded into my ram( i think) so that when it had loaded all the vst's and samples, my computer would crash. the file that contained my set wouldnt load in the end, it would just crash my laptop (new and fast, so shouldnt have happened).

Now i have it setup to just have drum channels (7 of them) which process sound from my drum machine (using Live's fx) and a drum midi channel sending the midi notes to drum machine. I also have 5 0r 6 channels containing the other parts of the track, so some bass channels (midi and audio [rendered]), synth etc. Seems to work so far.

[kpa]

I'm another of those 100 track wide people...

I am curious, do you really have 100 horizontal tracks to your set or is that just a turn of phrase?

In the set i had worked on, i had over 110 tracks (wide). But, it turned out to be too much for my laptop, or it was possibly a VST problem, but it wouldnt load.

[synnack]

I do option 1 but leave some things as midi to mess with live.

Several people have pointed out that option 1 is a pain and takes a long time to rebuild your songs in the live set.

I find this a really cool use of the "resample" feature of the ableton mixer tracks.

I set once track to resample, and then solo/mute things i want in one clip, then resample those to a new clip. This way i have pre-mixed subsections and groups of things to bring into my live set. It cuts down on the number of clips i need to arrange but still gives me the flexibility to remix things on the fly.

Not sure how much that makes sense. One day I will make a youtube video of this process.

[friend_kami]

I'm another of those 100 track wide people...if your machine can handle it, it works fine, it's easy to import sets and you don't have to compromise anything....although having 10 or 20 return/sends gets kind of messy, and scrolling can be annoying while you're setting things up, but once it's in there it works great, I have all the controls I'm going to tweak mapped to a controller and the only thing I have visible when I'm playing live are the track level controls and the scene names which I usually make long and descriptive, everything else is hidden.

now if only i can find an easy way to get midi to work the same way as my resample without having to delete any of the two (or in this case: 4).

you should be able to do that with a midi loop back driver, I do this with the IAC driver on the mac, I think midiyoke does it on the PC

thats what im doing for the audio in resamples, but the thing is that if i want to be able to resample mid aswell, i need to add two more tracks, jump from the master to any of these two track, then jump back, which adds up to alot of keyboard translation, and i think that bomes midi translator cant handle that many keyboard presses.

i think i need to read up on the keyboard shortcuts a bit; just yesterday i set up for a master record track - resampling, when just back to the master with using home and end keys. never thought of that, but i had to do it because i couldnt jump back otherwise because i had too many keyboard shortcut translations, so bomes never executed them all.

for the record, why im forced to record this way is that doesnt work properly in the arrangement window anyways (my resample clips wont trigger play when the scene is launching -.-). besides, i dont want to be in the arrangement window at all if i can avoid it. they should just release that separatly tbh :p

[friend_kami]

I'm another of those 100 track wide people...

I am curious, do you really have 100 horizontal tracks to your set or is that just a turn of phrase?

actually my current live set only has 69 tracks, but i could see myself getting up to 100 if I had to play more than an hour

but.. how in the hell do you navigate around in a set that big?
scenes i can understand having 100´s off, but tracks?
for me, i try to keep it so that i dont have to scroll at all so that i have full control on not only whats on every track and what clips are playing, where the A/B cue is for that specific track etc, but also so that i have full controll over the sends and the volume channel, all by just glancing at the screen really quick.