Hey Keyboard players, how are you using Live on a conventional gig?
Conventional = you're playing with a live drummer and bass player (and whoever else) and nobody is hooked into a click. AND the drummer is awesome.
Genre - whatever you're into. I'm into Jazz and progressive jazz meets electronica - like St. Germain on steroids.
Are you using tap tempo delays? Samples? Killer VSTs? B4, Akoustic Piano?
Lets talk gear, too. Qwerty keyboard? Foot pedal? How many controllers and/or keyboards are you using? WHAT IS YOUR ROUTING? Does everything go through Live, including your boards?
I'll show you mine if you show me yours.
Dan
Keyboard Players, how R U using Live on a conventional gig?
The most conventional group i'm playing with is ambient up-tempo pop with a drummer, bassist, guitarist, a killer singer and an organ player. Think Minus The Bear with balls.
My computer is a UB Mac, 2.4 Duo Core 2 and i'm never ever up over 20% for this setup since i upgraded to 4GB Ram.
And yeah, i use NI stuff alot, but if you've bought Komplete, why the hell not? If i didn't have Komplete, no worries, i'd just use GURU instead of Battery and SampleTank or something instead of Kontakt.
That set-up is definently interesting and it has probably taken 10 times more time to make than my other ones.
1. Midi - Leads - Kontakt 3. Multitimbral, has 32 lead sounds made from sampling a synth, weather it's one from my collection or a soft synth, and then mangling it with plugins and then tweaked in Kontakt.
2. Midi - Pads - Kontakt 3 - Same as first but with what sounds like Pad Sounds but really aren't because i hate pads. It's essentially huge Synth Leads with mad chorus, beefed up and rhytmically gated using CamelAudio CamelSpace and maybe AudioDamage BigSeq with one or two layers of Absynth. The internal Kontakt effects are also used alot with this because they're simply stellar, wish i'd figured that one out earlier!
3. Midi - Drums - Battery 3 - A jampacked battery kit full with mangled drum samples. Most are chopped breaks, old rhytmboxes or Vengeance samples, some were mangeled with plug-ins before going into Battery but all are also mangled internally with battery. All kick drums are sent out to a special Kick Bus. All mapped out to a PadKontrol with knob 1 controlling overall delay, knob 2 controlling a AudioDamage Reverence Reverb and the x/y pad controlling the Live X/Y pad for a OhmForce Ohmicide multi-band distortion-unit.
4. Midi -Electric Pianos - Lounge Lizard 3 - Great Electric Piano sounds beefed up by a PSP MixSaturator and i recently replaced the PSP 608 delay with a AudioDamage DubStation for a more authentic vibe.
5. Midi - Huge Sounds - Kontakt 3 - These are huge sounds made into splits so that i can play bass and lead on my KeyStation at the same time. There's four different sounds: "80's #1, "80's #2", "Orchestral" and "Evolve". They're all pretty self-explanatory. Just play some chords with the left hand and leads with the right and it's going to sound absolutley HUGE. There's alot of layers on this one, main synths used were Nexus, Absynth, Rob Papen Predator & Albino, Cakewalk Rapture and Automat1.
6. Midi - FM - An FM8 with billions of my own presets. There's a bunch of effects on this one, mapped out to a few qwerty keys, including but not limited to DFX Buffer Override, DFX Transverb, Guitar Rig 3, TheSoundGuy FX Machine and PSP Nitro. This track is the one who convinces fellow keyboard players to go digital.
7. Audio - Glitch Track - A 18 minute Audio Track with LiveCut, PSP 608 and CamelSpace mapped out to a BCF2000 and WiiMote for crazy real-time mangling.
8. Audio - Loops - These are sequenced stuff you can't really play live, taken from our recordings and bit of extra sprinkling added for effect. These are what you'd call "interludes" and are 8 clips mapped out to the qwerty keyboard for trigging.
Every single track also has a Wave Arts TrackPlug 5, for exact tweaking.
Main Out: T-RackS because it's the most analouge sounding suite out there, fabolous!
When i'm done tweaking a sound, i usally put it through Guitar Rig 3 with the cabs and mics turned off and push it a bit to get a more analouge vibe and it works wonders, especially with the new units in version 3!
The controllers i use for this setup are a BCF2000, a Keystation 49e and a Korg PadKontrol. These are probably the low-end of my collection, but they all work great as controllers, and CONTROLLING is exactly what this setup is all about. The KeyStation for playing, the BCF2000 for not using the mouse for tweaking and the PadKontrol for drums, that's all i need.
The top of my wishlist is for Reaktor to be more stable and less of a processor-hog! I've used it since the Generator days and it would be amazing to be able to use it completly without hick-ups.
My computer is a UB Mac, 2.4 Duo Core 2 and i'm never ever up over 20% for this setup since i upgraded to 4GB Ram.
And yeah, i use NI stuff alot, but if you've bought Komplete, why the hell not? If i didn't have Komplete, no worries, i'd just use GURU instead of Battery and SampleTank or something instead of Kontakt.
That set-up is definently interesting and it has probably taken 10 times more time to make than my other ones.
1. Midi - Leads - Kontakt 3. Multitimbral, has 32 lead sounds made from sampling a synth, weather it's one from my collection or a soft synth, and then mangling it with plugins and then tweaked in Kontakt.
2. Midi - Pads - Kontakt 3 - Same as first but with what sounds like Pad Sounds but really aren't because i hate pads. It's essentially huge Synth Leads with mad chorus, beefed up and rhytmically gated using CamelAudio CamelSpace and maybe AudioDamage BigSeq with one or two layers of Absynth. The internal Kontakt effects are also used alot with this because they're simply stellar, wish i'd figured that one out earlier!
3. Midi - Drums - Battery 3 - A jampacked battery kit full with mangled drum samples. Most are chopped breaks, old rhytmboxes or Vengeance samples, some were mangeled with plug-ins before going into Battery but all are also mangled internally with battery. All kick drums are sent out to a special Kick Bus. All mapped out to a PadKontrol with knob 1 controlling overall delay, knob 2 controlling a AudioDamage Reverence Reverb and the x/y pad controlling the Live X/Y pad for a OhmForce Ohmicide multi-band distortion-unit.
4. Midi -Electric Pianos - Lounge Lizard 3 - Great Electric Piano sounds beefed up by a PSP MixSaturator and i recently replaced the PSP 608 delay with a AudioDamage DubStation for a more authentic vibe.
5. Midi - Huge Sounds - Kontakt 3 - These are huge sounds made into splits so that i can play bass and lead on my KeyStation at the same time. There's four different sounds: "80's #1, "80's #2", "Orchestral" and "Evolve". They're all pretty self-explanatory. Just play some chords with the left hand and leads with the right and it's going to sound absolutley HUGE. There's alot of layers on this one, main synths used were Nexus, Absynth, Rob Papen Predator & Albino, Cakewalk Rapture and Automat1.
6. Midi - FM - An FM8 with billions of my own presets. There's a bunch of effects on this one, mapped out to a few qwerty keys, including but not limited to DFX Buffer Override, DFX Transverb, Guitar Rig 3, TheSoundGuy FX Machine and PSP Nitro. This track is the one who convinces fellow keyboard players to go digital.
7. Audio - Glitch Track - A 18 minute Audio Track with LiveCut, PSP 608 and CamelSpace mapped out to a BCF2000 and WiiMote for crazy real-time mangling.
8. Audio - Loops - These are sequenced stuff you can't really play live, taken from our recordings and bit of extra sprinkling added for effect. These are what you'd call "interludes" and are 8 clips mapped out to the qwerty keyboard for trigging.
Every single track also has a Wave Arts TrackPlug 5, for exact tweaking.
Main Out: T-RackS because it's the most analouge sounding suite out there, fabolous!
When i'm done tweaking a sound, i usally put it through Guitar Rig 3 with the cabs and mics turned off and push it a bit to get a more analouge vibe and it works wonders, especially with the new units in version 3!
The controllers i use for this setup are a BCF2000, a Keystation 49e and a Korg PadKontrol. These are probably the low-end of my collection, but they all work great as controllers, and CONTROLLING is exactly what this setup is all about. The KeyStation for playing, the BCF2000 for not using the mouse for tweaking and the PadKontrol for drums, that's all i need.
The top of my wishlist is for Reaktor to be more stable and less of a processor-hog! I've used it since the Generator days and it would be amazing to be able to use it completly without hick-ups.
Sounds like a killer setup. Is all this stuff on at the same time, or do you disable instruments you aren't using? I use multiple instances of Reaktor and Automat in a live band setting and my cpu is usually hovering around 50%. But I haven't worked out a good way to enable/disable instruments as I need them. Also, do you have an automated way of changing presets?kraze wrote: My computer is a UB Mac, 2.4 Duo Core 2 and i'm never ever up over 20% for this setup since i upgraded to 4GB Ram.
1. Midi - Leads - Kontakt 3. Multitimbral, has 32 lead sounds made from sampling a synth, weather it's one from my collection or a soft synth, and then mangling it with plugins and then tweaked in Kontakt.
2. Midi - Pads - Kontakt 3 - Same as first but with what sounds like Pad Sounds but really aren't because i hate pads. It's essentially huge Synth Leads with mad chorus, beefed up and rhytmically gated using CamelAudio CamelSpace and maybe AudioDamage BigSeq with one or two layers of Absynth. The internal Kontakt effects are also used alot with this because they're simply stellar, wish i'd figured that one out earlier!
etc
Most of the plugins/effects doesn't hog up much cpu when not used but thanks to the BCF2000, i got disable mapped out just in case i want to do it.
For presets, i got it mapped and locked to the controllers the usual way and i've never had a problem.
It would be awesome if other people posted their setups, i love reading about that stuff. I tried searching but couldn't find, is there a "post your live setup" thread on here with focus on plugins and effects instead of just gear?
For presets, i got it mapped and locked to the controllers the usual way and i've never had a problem.
It would be awesome if other people posted their setups, i love reading about that stuff. I tried searching but couldn't find, is there a "post your live setup" thread on here with focus on plugins and effects instead of just gear?
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samsensual
- Posts: 43
- Joined: Wed Sep 12, 2007 1:28 pm
I am just trying to get a way for using it quite efficiently. Nearly anything I am doing comes out of Live/VST synths, so keeping all soft synths and samplers and drum machines inside Live I would certainly get a slight 
overload when stacking up more than 2 songs. So exporting them to audio/freezing tracks is the only option. Only the instruments I play & some reverb and delay FX are still in there, so the CPU has not too much to do. For switching from one istruments to another (for playing), I arm the other instrument when I change them on the fly (via a midi button).
For the last thing, as already discussed here - are there better ways to switch instruments? The problem with a button-arming is that I could accidentally disable the instrument in case I press the arming key twice. Also, I had it once that although I set it right in the options, even two intruments were armed suddenly. Is there a way to make sure that a) I really get the instrument activated that I want and b) make sure that any other instrument is muted?
Thanks for your help in advance...
overload when stacking up more than 2 songs. So exporting them to audio/freezing tracks is the only option. Only the instruments I play & some reverb and delay FX are still in there, so the CPU has not too much to do. For switching from one istruments to another (for playing), I arm the other instrument when I change them on the fly (via a midi button).For the last thing, as already discussed here - are there better ways to switch instruments? The problem with a button-arming is that I could accidentally disable the instrument in case I press the arming key twice. Also, I had it once that although I set it right in the options, even two intruments were armed suddenly. Is there a way to make sure that a) I really get the instrument activated that I want and b) make sure that any other instrument is muted?
Thanks for your help in advance...