Ableton Forum

Do you approach a set like a band and stop between tunes or just go start to finish without completely stopping?

The other night I tried stopping completely and it worked quite well. It was a concert oriented crowd so I felt like they needed some silence to clap in between tunes.

depends on the setting, stopping between tunes can definetly work depending on the crowd especially if you're going to interact with them in any way between. something simple like "I made this next track yesturday" or "who the drunkest tonight?" a dumb question like that can get people all worked up

usually my style is just to play through though, I'm not much of a talker and I just plain admire sets that are mixed together more than song stop song stop

I do not. I did the band thing my whole life and like doing a continuous set, but I believe it really depends on the type of music. I don't necessarily play "songs" when performing on my laptop, it's basically improvising with the hundreds and hundreds of musical bits I put in my set. So there is no beginning and no end, I can start and stop anywhere.

All the stuff that I write as "songs", I don't play live, because if I were to do that, then I wouldn't be actually be playing much. It would be like hitting start, letting the song play, then it ending. If I'm not actually performing all of the parts, what's the point of playing them. So to make it feel more like a performance, the challenge for me is making "songs" out of my little music bits, as opposed to the challenge for a band, which is to correctly play their parts of their written songs to make a cohesive tune.

Blah blah blah, do I make any sense here? I have to get back to work.

+1 one for "it depends of which performance it is",sometimes all is mixed,sometimes it's not.
i can remember a great Martin Medeski Wood concert with 3 seconds of silence in the middle of the show only. very intense.
and a concert of Coldcut where they stopped at the end of each (beautiful) tune,even if i loved the concert,theses stops were boring,and broke a litlle the vibe this evening!

i prefer a continuous set, but if you're not playing to an audience that knows what's going on I think a few breaks helps. If you're playing a proper dance club and not a rock club then the expectations are different and you can blast through without stopping.

If an audience doesn't know that they can go nuts when a beat drops then what do you do? Rarely do young audiences cheer even after a great guitar solo when watching a band.

I'm trying to find the best way to bridge that gap between what I want to do and making it easy for the people watching to have fun.

how bout you find a medium, stop the song but have some weird sampled talking playing. you can find all sorts of badly recorded spoken word poetry online.

bukowski has some good stuff for that. throw in a drone sound and keep the volume kinda low and it's kinda like the middle ground between the 2 ideas.

I end every song with a crash cymbal and a sustained guitar power chord even when the rest of the song doesn't feature a guitar. This is followed by a 30 second loop of a crowd going ape shit.

Johnisfaster wrote:how bout you find a medium, stop the song but have some weird sampled talking playing. you can find all sorts of badly recorded spoken word poetry online.

bukowski has some good stuff for that. throw in a drone sound and keep the volume kinda low and it's kinda like the middle ground between the 2 ideas.

+1 but I still think this falls under the category of it being more band oriented.

If I went out to hear house at a "dance club" I almost expect it to be "mixed" all the way from the first artist until 4:00 a.m.... if it's a dancing crowd a fucked up strange, solo Charles Bukowski sample could really throw things off.

It's all about what kind of music you are playing and where you are playing it at. If a "rock club" is having an off night electronic music thing then maybe the solo sample might go over better than it would at the club referenced above.

This is why a "live performance" needs to be performed live. Not half assed, sequenced the night before and all you show up to do is power on and play with effects. You really are doing the crowd a huge diservice if you don''t play to the room...unless you are huge, then the crowd has a good idea what they are there to hear and oftentimes could care less if the songs in question are fucked up a little when they are played live. Weird huh?!


For DJ's there is nothing wrong with picking out your tracks ahead of time and playing; but those that can select tracks that fit the crowd are the ones that usually go over better. For live sets, if everything is synced you are going to come off as rather canned sounding. Why even call it a live PA?

I used to go see this band called will haven a long time ago. really dark moody kinda mid tempo hardcore but really good. they used to make ambient guitar noise between every song and sometimes did the talking poetry sample thing, it really fit the mood and kept the atmosphere going between songs.

I've also seen bands just have the drummer play a simple beat hitting really hard between songs, while you tune your guitar or something (but you can't hear the tuning of course cause that sounds terrible) which oddly enough seems to keep the momentum going. and then from the beat they are playing they can go right into the next song when they wink at each other look lovingly into each others eyes and know that it's time to go!

I subscrbe the philosophy of "just do whatever you wanna do"

We try a mixure of both. Usually we wont have a break during the first and the second song to build up more of an atmosphere. Then after song 2 we give 'em some room for clapping/(dis)approving and use the time to tell them who we are. Depending on how much time the audience claims for themselves we go on rather quickly.

We do at least one more complete silence break after the climax of the set after which we start playing some more laid back songs. This gives the audience a moment of slow down and makes them notice their own chatter/noise floor.

Since we are still building up our set these things are still dynamic and improvised. We have a couple of position/instrument changes during the set which partly may go silent and partly may keep some atmo or beats playing. All still to be fleshed out a bit in the future.