How to fade away and insert new loops while playing guitar

pangea2006 · Post by **pangea2006** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 1:24 am

Hello there,

I'm just quite new with Ableton and I'm trying to improvise while playing guitar
The thing is that I haven't found the way to fade out clips and record new ones without the need of my hands... Automation is great on the arrange mode but I'm trying to create transitions while playing and recording new clips with my guitar...
I would like to find a way to fade away clips at any moment basically and insert new recordings by cross-fading clips...

Any ideas out there??

Thanks
Eli

cacti · Post by **cacti** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 1:35 am

sounds like you need a midi foot controller.

pangea2006 · Post by **pangea2006** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 2:54 am

Well, yes I have one!
The thing is that I want to fade out the loop gradually and not stop it suddenly
while still playing and recording a new loop into another track...
It would be nice to know how to press a button and fade the loops gradually

Thanks
E.

Jekblad · Post by **Jekblad** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 3:11 am

it would be wise to use dummy clips.

http://www.covops.org/index.php/The-Cov ... sited.html

there are three videos there, but it goes past what you're looking for as far as complexity. I just did this last friday night at a gig, and it works very nice.

I use two dummy clips, "fade out" and "fade in". The clips are 2 bars long. the First bar has the automation to fade down the channel on the mixer, the second bar loops to keep it the fader where it should stay.

If this concept is new to you, it might take a minute for this to seem like it's not coming out of the mouth of a drunk person. Just watch the videos for the routing and such.

good luck!

pangea2006 · Post by **pangea2006** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 3:45 am

Thanks for the advice but I'm using Ableton Live 5.2.2......

Jekblad · Post by **Jekblad** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 3:56 am

dummy clips are still possible in live 5.2.2 as far as i know.

pangea2006 · Post by **pangea2006** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 4:14 am

I have just tried out and it works to add effects but the volume automation on the dummy clips are not affecting the original loop feed..

Thanks anyway

Jekblad · Post by **Jekblad** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 4:17 am

check to make sure you're automating the MIXER volume, not the CLIP volume. and then you have to send the audio from the loop to the channel with the dummy clips and set the monitoring to in.

You will love it when it gets there!

pangea2006 · Post by **pangea2006** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 4:56 am

I got it!
It works!!!

man, thanks so much!

Also, the dummy clips offer an arsenal of possibilities!
I was starting to think to sell my fcb1010 and my ableton live 5 and by the line 6 dl4 pedal as I'm a guitarrist and I don't use much of the features of Ableton.
I would really like to find the way to simulate the echoplex with sooperlooper and ableton live but the plug in is very unreliable to go live so my main thing was at least to find out a way to decay loops while playing by pressing a button....

Thanks again

thanksthanksthanks!

Eli

Jekblad · Post by **Jekblad** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 5:15 am

i am very glad to help you with this, because i have learned a lot myself from people on this forum.

seriously dude, keep ableton. It puts you in a different class of guitar players. One that has a brain. ZING! I have a Boss DD-20 and it's great but ableton smokes em all. course i don't drag ableton and my macbook to a legit rock and roll gig, but i'm constantly recording click tracks and programming stuff that gets used. For live looping nothing is sweeter than the abes.

check out kidbeyond http://www.ableton.com/_common/download ... beyond.mov

also check this routing scheme

bring guitar into channel one. set monitor to "in"
channel 2 is called "loop 1". set monitor to "off" set the input of that channel to the audio coming from channel 1.
channel 3 is called "loop 2". set monitor to "off" set the input of that channel to the audio coming from channel 1...

and so on...

ONE channel feeds all the loop channels. This saves on CPU.

on the FCB map one button to fire scene, and map some others to the "record enable" of your loop channels. In Live's pref pane, make sure you have "start recording on scene launch" enabled. Now you'll record enable a channel and fire a scene, play your part, and fire the scene again to end the recording. you should here it playin back just the same as you recorded it.

rinse and repeat. get famous, get chicks.

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 5:32 am

nice advice.

still, all the traditional guitar/performance loopers have some basic features. Live lacks some of those features, please feel free to rant and rave about that.

I found a feature request from 2003 on this... BEFORE midi implementation
http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic. ... 767#783767

and that's my 12k post, better looping tools FTW.

Jekblad · Post by **Jekblad** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 5:42 am

yes sir tone, you are correct that it lacks the basic-ness of hardware loopers.

The problem with 2008 is the amount of possibitilies, not limitations. -Henke

That's why it took my 2 years of f*cking with live before i every performed in front of people with a live looping thing.

but the endless possibility part is just SO appealing to us artists....

Tone Deft · Post by **Tone Deft** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 6:00 am

Jekblad wrote:The problem with 2008 is the amount of possibitilies, not limitations. -Henke

omfg someone get Henke really high and tell him about Palin, 'cause he's missed an awful lot about 2008.

That's why it took my 2 years of f*cking with live before i every performed in front of people with a live looping thing.

wouldn't it be nice to skip the 2 year learning curve and loop 'out of the box' just like the stuff that's been out for decades?

but the endless possibility part is just SO appealing to us artists....

I like the possibilities, I did make a max patch to Live loop and put out a .als using the 'round robin' mode of the 'random' plug in in Live to do hands free looping.

I want NATIVE looping tools.

pangea2006 · Post by **pangea2006** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 2:39 pm

Thanks a lot jekblad!
Much appreciated

What is that thing about free hands looping with MAX MSP???

kaffein · Post by **kaffein** » Mon Nov 10, 2008 3:01 pm

Would be cool to have like 8 midi expression controllers to control the volume of tracks.