Ableton Forum

Hi I was just wondering if anyone could tell me if there was a chopper style function in live. I mean like in acid pro. I want to be able to go back and edit my live sets. If I dont edit it it wont be good. As of yet live performance is not my strong point. How does live compare to acid when it comes to the sequencer and editing power? I wanna drop in cuts and silences and so on. I wanna make rolls and breaks.. Is this possible in live. Thanks for the help guys.

there's no native chopping device in Live (to my great disappointment), but there are some VST plugins that will do the trick (namely dfx Skidder).
that is if you want to chop online (i mean on the fly).
for off line stuff you can use enveloppe automation, it can be done really quickly with some clever enveloppe loop sizing (you just need to create one break point, and set the loop size to it by unlinking it).

as for the rest of your questions, i've never used acid. sorry (actualy, .not so sorry...).

I'm bumping this, because dfx skidder, excellent plugin that it is, is distorting pretty badly in live4.

Any alternatives?

The gate effect from live does a nice chopping.
Off course it's only chops by peaks or lows, but you can get some nice results depending on what you want to do.

i want on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/on/off/
synched to tha beat. like good ol trippy ambient stuff.
doesn't seem that complicated... are ableton anti-ambient?

i miss this plugin SOOOOO MUCH.
i wrote a post on dfx's forum about skidder not working properly in Live4, marc just answered me, there might be something showing up.

by the way, lucky mac users can use the AU, apparently it works fine.

peeddrroo wrote:i miss this plugin SOOOOO MUCH.
i wrote a post on dfx's forum about skidder not working properly in Live4, marc just answered me, there might be something showing up.

Cool, I was just getting in to it. It seems weird to say this about a chopper effect, but I actually think dfx skidder sounds good?!? Must be some psychological thing, the interface is good, it works well - at least in other hosts

here's another chopperthat's not as good as skidder (no rate knob), but it has a pattern designer, attack and release, and it synchs.
so it's not too bad, waiting for a fix on skidder.

Thanks, I'll give it a try.

the chopper i mentionned is good, but it has a problem: saving the Live project it's in will reset all parameters.

edit: it actually works fine, all you have to do is work in user presets if you want to edit the parameters.
if you stay on the first preset, the changes you make won't be changed.

There's a work around in live to do chopper style audio and you can do it fast.

Let's say you wanna work with 16th note division. Take a 1 bar drum loop, put it in the arrange and just keep the 1 first 16th note. duplicate it 16 times with ctrl-d and when you click each clip, you only have to change the start marker. Instant chopper and goodbye acid.

That's all.

You can also use the clip envelopes to do that gate effects, rearrange breaks. They are pretty powerful functions once you know how to use'em.

yeah, the quickest way to achieve chopping with an enveloppe, is to "unlink" it, set the enveloppe loop to 1/8, and draw a step in that space.

THOUGH.
one of use i intend to make of choppers, is to record some live stuff on the fly (from an instrument into live), and once it's recorded, be able to pley it chopped, without having to dive into the screen, just with one switch already mapped to the on/off button of the chopper that would already be in the track.
so it's not that difficult.
the only problem is to find a good chopper, but the one above is quite ok.
the only problem is that you can't make the rate change, but it's got good points too (like pattern chopping).

it would be very cool to be able to assign a midi-track to an audio-clip and in this way use a midikeyboard to trigger the individial slices, like f.e. the Dr.Rex player in reason.....

Olaf

Don't know if you know this, but you can drag clips directly from the session view into impulse, and do it that way?
But yeah, assigning a midi "instrument" to step through a file in 16ths would be übercool.

another way of doing a comparable thing, is to drag a clip into the simpler, and assign a controler to the 'sample start'. that way, you can trigger the clip and make its start point change. not very accurate, but it gives ineresting results.