Ableton Forum

So my question for all you abes is:

Considering you have so many songs, how do you combine them all to one set?

Can you do this a few moments before the performance? I find this task tedious and clumsy. I cannot imagine being able to "radically" change/import the songs to my set in one night. Let me know how you manage the effects, samples, and tracks.

Have a couple of shows coming up soon so help is very welcome!

Thanks for the insight Shelluser. I've been using live for a few years so we can advance words here Very tedious!

Yago, whether you are DJing other artists' material or performing a set composed only of your own compositions, or some combination of the two, there is no quick way to assemble your set in the minutes before you perform! It is a time-consuming process, and for good reason. You need to know this material inside and out. Ableton Live is in many ways a musical instrument like any other that requires time, practice and dedication. What you can do with it is a vast range of possibilities, many of which will gradually become apparent the more time you spend practicing, experimenting, and speaking with others who use it.

If you are DJing other artists' songs, you need to spend time practicing mixing from one song to the next. Firstly, Ableton's automated beat detection isn't perfect... it's pretty good, but it seems to especially have difficulty finding the very first beat of a song. Every once in a while I come across a song that it just can't figure out, and I have to manually go through pretty much measure by measure. Not to mention those songs that could be considered 80 BPM or 160 BPM or both in some ways... And just because two songs are beatmatched does not mean they will flow smoothly as far as their keys are concerned, plus other more subjective factors like the energy or mood of the songs. Also, songs that were produced in different times and places will have variations in their perceived loudness that might need to be adjusted with some live EQing. As you become more familiar with the tools at your disposal, your process of preparation will become somewhat quicker and less clumsy-feeling, but it will still take time.

The last thing that comes to my mind about this issue of the time involved in preparing is this, and I don't mean to sound preachy or anything, but this is just my attitude about it: being able to perform for people is an honor and a privilege and they deserve a performance from you that you have invested a lot of preparation in. Learn to enjoy the process of preparing your set, because it will always be time-consuming. The chance to perform is just the icing on the cake, and can be a learning experience in its own way, but preparation and practice is at the heart of the life of the musician.

(This is from limited experience, and also note that I'm talking about tracks that I created in Live's Arrangement view, not as clips in session view. So I really was going from full songs to some kind of live performance.)

This really depends on the kind of music you're making and playing, and how much control you want to have over independent details, and how quick you are with your MIDI controller, etc. For house music, I have tried a few approaches. The quick one is to just DJ with the finished tracks. (I like this method best for speed of preparation, but it's not "live.") But that doesn't sound like what you're looking for.

If you're nimble and can handle 4, 8 or even more channels "at once," here are a couple of methods to try. These take time to prepare. Hard to say how long, but do one track and you can estimate how long it'll take you to do the rest.

Route (or "bus" as they say) your processed and effect-laden tracks to audio in Ableton, grouped logically. For instance, for house music, you might route your kick to an audio track, your primary kit to another, your extra percussion to another, your bass to another, and so on. Arm all these tracks for recording, and hit play. Once your song finished playing, you've got all those tracks as independent audio files which you can import into a new live set. Then you play with those, turning tracks on and off, changing levels, adding effects, etc. You have 4, 8, or however many channels going, their job is strictly to play back the independent groups of sounds from your music.

(In fact, I produce all my house tracks in a common Live template that has these routings already set up so it's easy to transition to a live scenario should I want to... which I haven't lately.)

When you do that, you can of course play the songs as full-length clips, maybe looping the beginning of the track as one scene, the major part of the track as a middle scene, and an outro as your final loop. But that's not super fun either.

So, once you've imported your, say, 8 independent audio tracks (kick, kit, perc, bass, what-have-you), set them up as loops, and break your track into 3, 5, 10, or 100 scenes. (I recommend keeping this number low, as it doesn't seem very musical to micro-manage a song as a bunch of ordered scenes.) There are people whose focus is doing this, and they create intricate sets with follow actions, etc. If you're just transitioning to a live gig, start simple and figure out what works best. Again, it depends on how much "control" you want and how much variety. For tightly arranged material, switching to this kind of setup, dividing your songs into little scenes, may be about quite altering the sound of the track.

OK, so there you have a method where your songs are bounced to a few audio tracks and those are imported into a new set, one kind of track (kick, bass, etc.) per channel. But that's where your effects are already included on the tracks.

You can also try the same method, but route the pre-effects output of your instruments and recordings to these tracks. Now when you import your tracks, they're dry. This gives you the freedom to apply any effects you want, entirely live. But depending on how wild you get, that might be a lot of effects. So here's a suggestion for managing that complexity and also CPU load: Group your effects into a rack, and map the rack's knobs to the effect parameters and the on/off buttons of the effects. That way when you turn an effect knob down, you turn off the "equipment" and save some processing power. Plus if you're managing dozens of effects across multiple tracks, it's nice to have them handily grouped into racks rather than requiring yourself to scan wide panels of dozens of effect UIs. Everything is handily in one rack per channel. YMMV, as you might have more complex needs than can be handled in a single rack grouping. I know it happens.

Anyway, in short, there is more than one way to skin a cat. What you should do depends on what you want in the end. Start by experimenting with what you want, then work backwards to how you should split things up.

For what it's worth, I was able to record-to-8, split into loops, and add effects to about 8 house tracks in a rush in about 12 hours. It took about an hour per song just to record and split, divide into loops, etc. Figuring out the transitions took a couple of hours. The set didn't go as well as it would have had I practiced for much longer and taken my time (several days) to prepare the technical details. But that was what happened when I tried this for the first time.

Good luck.