Performing & Switching Between 'Live' Sets

[zz1415926535]

How do you do it when you are on stage?

Do you play music from your iPod while the new set is loading? And no, I don't just want to render out all my tracks and "DJ" them from Ableton.

For those of you who have had the opportunity to perform at a club or festival with Ableton, I'm curious to hear what experiences are like on this subject. What have you tried that didn't work, and what have you tried that worked?

[outershpongolia]

Never played out with Live before.. but your best bet is to consolidate all your set's into one master set.. I know it seem's a little crazy at first, but once I kicked my shit into gear I made sure to lay out my stuff so that it would fit right into my master set. In fact, I write, mix, and jam all of my music in the master set now..

Other than that, I have heard of people using backing tracks on an iPod, just weird atmospheric stuff to fill in the gap while they load up the next set.

I thought it'd be cool to run your main outs to a hardware looper. Then loop the last couple of bars of the song until you can load up the next set.. The only problem then would be fading between the loop and the next set coming in.

Some of the more road-tested act's just use two computer's and load one while they other one is finishing...

[AudioRuso]

Yes you definitely want to have one big liveset..... the way to do this is to first of all follow a similar pattern when making your tracks... for example.... first track drums, second track bass, and then 8 more tracks max for a song....

Then what you should do to make it very stable and easy on cpu is to go through and freeze and then flatten all the tracks.... before you do this make a backup of the set so you can work on it... what I do is I have two folders... one is my main folder and then I have another folder which holds flat liveset ready tracks....

If you don't have long reverbs or delays or anything else with long fx trails then completely flattening the set will work... this is the easiest cause then you just have a blank live set with a bunch of empty audio tracks and you just drag them in from the file browser....

But this is not always the case...
Sometimes you do have long reverbs and delays... in which case flatten that track, but move the reverb or delay to another track... then once flattened, drag it back to the same track....

Here's where it gets tricky though... this time in the live set you are going to have to create audio effects racks.... and the first chain in them is going to be empty.... the second one will have your reverb in the corresponding track... then you want to go into the chain area of the audio rack and drag the second one so it's under the number 2


Then inside the audio clip, change the chain selector envelope to 2.

If the above makes no sense then read the manual about racks.

This method works very well for me I got about 30 full size 4+ minute tracks in my live set. Not so mention two of my effects racks and the whole thing runs below 20% cpu.....

Now you could do this without flattening your clips and make hundreds of racks with the instruments in them.... but you will run very high on cpu, and ram... (if you don't have a 64 bit system, you will only be able to run like 5-8 tracks because you need more then 4 gb of ram). Also your set would take a very long time to load.

Good luck!

[zz1415926535]

@Ruso: can you explain with more detail what you mean by "go through and freeze and then flatten all the tracks"?

Thanks!

[outershpongolia]

If you don't have long reverbs or delays or anything else with long fx trails then completely flattening the set will work... this is the easiest cause then you just have a blank live set with a bunch of empty audio tracks and you just drag them in from the file browser....

At first I didn't realize why you were singling out these 2 effects but then it clicked.
Once you stopped the clip you wouldn't hear the continuing delay and/or reverb.

The coolest thing about a jam buildup dropping back into the main groove is when you put some delay on most (probaly not all) of the tracks then when you drop back to another scene you hear the delay's from the end of the last part of the clips.. This is also really good for ending a song, which reminds me (OT): Is there any way to play just the first beat of a scene at the very end? When a song ends it usually ends on the first beat of the next bar, not the last beat in a measure.

[Kristijonas]

Alternatively you can use two Live applications. I'm not sure about PC, but I've tried this on mac - just make a copy of Live on desktop and run it. Of course, your sets should be very low CPU/HDD, keep in mind, that there will be a moment when two sets will be loaded! And test/practice 100 times your "performance-session switching" before you are on stage!

[outershpongolia]

just make a copy of Live on desktop and run it.

Couldn't you just click on Live in your dock/quickstart twice and it will open up 2 instances? or does it just jump to the set you have open? I'll try it on windows.

[AudioRuso]

@Ruso: can you explain with more detail what you mean by "go through and freeze and then flatten all the tracks"?

Thanks!

Rightclick on the track title, go to freeze.....

Rightclick on the track title again, go to flatten

Good luck!

MAKE SURE TO BACKUP BECAUSE ONCE IT"S FLAT YOU CANNOT GO BACK!

[kingb]

I've been performing for a while and use a completely different approach. Playing rock, classic rock, and originals along similar veins. No electronic sounding stuff other than the odd loop thrown in here or there. Usually perform with a drummer and myself (guitar/voc) - the rest of the band is in Live.

Gear:
FCB1010 midi floor controler
Presonus Firebox (audio / midi intereface)
MacBook Pro (also ran similar setup with HP laptop)
Korg NanoKontrol (quick volume adjustments)
Ableton Live
Bome's Midi Translator Pro (translates midi to keystrokes)
Butler (for mac, assign keystrokes to launch live sets) - AutoHotKey (for PC)

The bottom row of the FCB1010 is assigned to trigger scenes 1-5 which usually translates to
1) intro
2) verse
3) chorus
4) bridge
5) end

The top row is used to launch songs (live sets).
I use Butler to match key stroke combinations to the actions of launching the Live sets. And Bome's to convert the midi commands from the FCB1010 to the OS. Most of my sets are not very CPU intensive and have relatively few tracks - I think the one that has the most is maybe 12 tracks (session drums, latin percussion, operator, bass/sampler, couple background guitar and vocal tracks). This song launches and is ready in under 10 seconds. Which is usually a lot less than the usual "friendly crowd banter"

If you go this route a few hints:
- if you move a fader or make some sort of edit, when you launch a new set, Live will ask you if you want to save the existing set first. You can get around this by including "cmd + s" before your keystroke command, which effectively saves the set before launching the new one. Or, what I've been doing lately, assign one of the pedals to the space bar - use it to stop/start a song or in this case select "save" (default selected option on pop-up screen)

- related to the above scenario, disable system sounds before going onstage. There's nothing worse than a giant "boing" coming out of the PA.

- if you want to do a medley or segue right into another song, you'll need to have both song within the same set.

- as stated below, practice the switching (no matter what you do).

- if something bad happens and you need a few minutes (e.g. reboot) - it happened to me once ... you're best bet = drum solo! Take a deep breath and get the problem sorted.

- if it's still broke... have some tracks on you iPod = iPod Karaoke baby!