the Deeper side of DJ'ing with Ableton

supster · Post by **supster** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 6:20 pm

vandeloo wrote:
supster wrote:...

yes he has each of his tracks in a folder, pre-cut into sections and loops of varying legths. when he's ready, he drags in the entire folder full of track clips into an ablton channel.

...
drag a folder into a track is not possible, i checked in live 4.1 os x.
does this works under windows ? or has he first selected all clips in a folder and drag them into a track ?

meaning: he selects all the clips in a folder, and drags them over to the track all at once. guess that wasnt clear the way i worded it ...

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supster · Post by **supster** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 6:23 pm

ConneKted wrote:
supster wrote: when he's ready, he drags in the entire folder full of track clips into an ablton channel......

.....
and during transitions he will send the entire channel ('track") right over to the sends .. among other things

WHAT ?

er .. what ..

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supster · Post by **supster** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 6:29 pm

onnomon wrote:
jeskola wrote:
supster wrote: he has some favorite fx in his sends (filters .. something which sounds alot like supatrigga .. reaktor fast fx)?, and during transitions he will send the entire channel ('track") right over to the sends .. among other things.
Sorry i dont understand.

how do you mean send the entire track to the sends... surly he just has to turn that channel up... what and wheres it getting sent to or am i picking htis up worng?
Probably means he has his SEND busses set to PRE so you can bring down the tracks volume fader while simultaneously bringing up the SEND level. Finally, you have the track's fader all the way down and the SEND up most of the way so that the whole track is now in a deep reverb cloud (i.e. no dry signal anymore) - which i've noticed is a crossfade technique he has used in the past. I'm sure one of you smart peoples can probably program Bidule to take a single controller stream and create two controller streams, one of them inverse to the other. That is- turn the controller up and the Bidule-created "shadow" controller goes down, both of these are sent to Live and assigned to track Level/Send. That way, you can use one know to cross-fade to SEND (and back).

I like taking percussion loops, with their channel fader down, and cranking a bit of it into a PRE-FADER SEND channel with delay effects, just for a beat or two, viola! instant percussive accent. Easy...with one knob.

-dz

You're probably right about this. It was hard to figure out exactly how his controller is configured, and what he was doing with it at any given time ...

I definitely did see the volume on the active track go down as the volume on the sends simultaneously went up numerous times during his set during transitions

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supster · Post by **supster** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 6:37 pm

jeskola wrote:this is an intersting thread... i have tried these methods with intersting results. Any one got any further to add...

i notice that sasha has 9 parts (clips) to every track he drags in, so i assume he has some kind of sturcture across all tracks.

well, he is not using scenes from what i can see. that is, he doesnt trigger the entire row from the right hand side - at least during the set i observed.

He uses 3 - 4 tracks, and at some points he had 3 going at once, but for the most part just two ... which was really all he needed to play a stellar set (in my opinion)

once you break down songs into loops, add effects and restructure your set live, you already open up a whole new world ...

... having more tracks active than 3 or 4 at once opens you up to a sonic clusterf*ck unless the other tracks are simple loops that are frequency balanced with the other tracks to not make everything sound like a mess. theres no need for it most of the time ... (for DJing)

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jeskola · Post by **jeskola** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 6:57 pm

thanks.|

you said:

tI definitely did see the volume on the active track go down as the volume on the sends simultaneously went up numerous times during his set during transition

okay i have set up some channels and then some send channels with efx on their - namely supertrigga, reverb and delay. how can i make the channel volume go down as the send comes up - this is really annoying cause you get a flanged/phased sound otherwise, also its almost impossible to do it manually without dips in output volume....

something else i noticed in a few of his sets ive downloaded is when passing to a send with say a filter on there at the right point he slams it all back in, ive fiddled with manual cuts with volume and crossfader, tried turning off the channel (either send or the main channel playing ) and still cant get that effect... any ideas?

maybe a simple eq kill or something?

one thing i will say is though is that he's on that EQ3 filter sweep too much, some of it sounds really rubbish and also isnt pinpoint - its out of time.

[/b]

supster · Post by **supster** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 7:01 pm

jeskola wrote:thanks.|

you said:

tI definitely did see the volume on the active track go down as the volume on the sends simultaneously went up numerous times during his set during transition

okay i have set up some channels and then some send channels with efx on their - namely supertrigga, reverb and delay. how can i make the channel volume go down as the send comes up - this is really annoying cause you get a flanged/phased sound otherwise, also its almost impossible to do it manually without dips in output volume....

something else i noticed in a few of his sets ive downloaded is when passing to a send with say a filter on there at the right point he slams it all back in, ive fiddled with manual cuts with volume and crossfader, tried turning off the channel (either send or the main channel playing ) and still cant get that effect... any ideas?

maybe a simple eq kill or something?

one thing i will say is though is that he's on that EQ3 filter sweep too much, some of it sounds really rubbish and also isnt pinpoint - its out of time.

[/b]

see onnomon's post above, i think he's probably on the right track

also: I've been using reaktor FastFX module recently, judging by the effects you can get with it thats a good bet as to what he has in the sends for a lot of the special fx he is getting

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jeskola · Post by **jeskola** » Sun Mar 20, 2005 7:19 pm

ahh. ive not used bidule yet, ill have a look...
would it be possible to do this with clip envelopes... i.e in an envelope turn up the send channel whilst turning down the channel voume... though then i guess its not user controlled ... hmm. oh well... if anyone has any thoughts it would be a VERY handy thing to be able to do.

MrYellow · Post by **MrYellow** » Mon Mar 21, 2005 12:57 am

I really wish Live and other programs made it simple to reverse the
direction of a CC control and allow you to set bounds. Soon as you assign
the same CC to multiple things you can never get what you want. It's
always a case of hacking it up in bidule.

-Ben

jeskola · Post by **jeskola** » Mon Mar 21, 2005 10:25 am

Has anyone done this?
is it easy too do, can someone talk me through it if i get bidule?

jeskola · Post by **jeskola** » Mon Mar 21, 2005 5:00 pm

For anyone interested - heres how you do it with Bidule:

http://www.plogue.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=975

dj metronome · Post by **dj metronome** » Mon Mar 21, 2005 11:15 pm

The videos over at swa video on line tutorials explain everything needed for this very well.

dj metronome

mettkea · Post by **mettkea** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 5:03 am

jeskola wrote:For anyone interested - heres how you do it with Bidule:

http://www.plogue.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=975

Thanks got it to work!!

pax · Post by **pax** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 6:42 pm

Just out of curiosity, how do you change the tempo during a set?

If you have things set to say 130 bpm... are you stuck there all night?
You can't really use envelopes with the song tempo track, can you?

Especially if a track contains vocals that can't be warped very much at all... Usually in a real mixing situation I'd use a song that has an abrupt ending to suddenly flip in to something new, or maybe eq and just have hi-hats of the new track and move over fast enough that you can't hear the change... but how do you break out of that tempo while still keeping things in Live?

Just curious if anyone has any suggestions.

kennerb · Post by **kennerb** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 8:43 pm

You can rename scene clips as # bpm (# being the tempo that you want) and it will play at that bpm. This is great for breakdowns and such.

pax · Post by **pax** » Wed Mar 23, 2005 8:55 pm

-Click-

Nice... page 85 of the manual (I had to look it up after you said it).
I wasn't aware of this feature, a large dj mix is starting to make sense!