Ableton Forum

Hi,

I wonder if someone can offer me advice. We are getting into electronic music and have recorded some music and want to take it out live and play it. I use Ableton Suite 8.1 as the main part, controlling 3 keyboards and nocturn and for the backing (usually drums and sometimes bass/pads) I split the outputs between one stereo for the backing (drums, bass, pads) and one stereo output for the played synths and 2 mono outs for vocals. On the backing track, I have put a limiter and compressor to make it quite even for the sound engineer. Is it a good idea to apply this to the played synths as well? How is the best way to go about this?

Hope this makes sense!

Cheers!

I've been playing live electro music for a little while now, and that while I only send one mono signal from the computer, my first inclination was to bounce all my tracks with compression on them. But recently i realized that it is better for me to NOT compress at all (except just one brick wall limiter in case something goes crazy) and let the tracks keep their dynamics. Real instruments don't have compressors or limiters and that's why live music sounds good, it has all the dynamics that are crushed in the recording, mixing, mastering process.

But do a test, try a couple tracks out on a big sound system and i think you'll agree that the uncompressd, dynamic version will sound more open and poppy and less muddy.

I did a duo gig over the weekend with Live, 3 keyboards and vocals. I'm always scared of computer crashes, so I wanted this bulletproof with no Vsts or FX. Basically a multitrack player.

10 audio tracks from my interface to FOH. Kick and snare in mono, plus 4 stereo tracks. Each of my 8 Live channels is a full audio track of the whole song, broken down to keyboards, backing vocals, etc.

The neat stuff is the 3 scenes at the bottom. One scene is identical sine waves at 0dB to line check. The FOH engineer just sets all his 10 faders at the same level on the meters. I also send a Kick and Snare for him to eq. The third test scene is just patch changes for the external gear.

Super fast setup, and not very taxing on my CPU. Works great! KISS