Ableton Forum

I'm working on setting up a new cover band to run entirely through Ableton Live 11 and I'm just wondering if it is possible to make it sound good.

The band will have a Lead singer, Lead Guitarist, Rhythm Guitarist w/ Back up vocals, Bass with Back up Vocals, Drummer on Electric Drum set (Midi)
That's a total of 6 Inputs and 1 Midi Input. The goal with all the musicians is to have Ableton do all our the amp modeling live so we don't need to bring any amps on stage. Ableton will also handle all the midi inputs from the electric drum set so we can change drum sounds for each song.

Output would be to the PA system and in-ear Monitoring (we are ok with the same sound going to everyone in ear for the time)

Ableton will run all the backing tracks for each song.

Ableton will also run the full light show that will be in time with the songs.

It's possible that my computer is holding us back right now sound good as the CPU usage seems to spike to 54% and above alot.
Even with just 8 backing tracks and Electronic drumset this is happening and the sound doesn't come through very clean through the In-ears

My question is this to much for Ableton to handle live or is it just my computer holding me back. I have latency down to 12.7ms

If I new upgrading to a Macbook M2 or M3 would solve my issue I would buy one today.


Window 10
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700 CPU @ 3.60GHz, 3601 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s)
Ram 48 gigs
All files are on SSD drive

I'm sure I'm missing something, but Let me know if I can provide more information. Anything would be helpful

I'm a bit confused about your setup. In one case it sounds like you're using live instruments and yet you're also then using backing tracks, so are the backing tracks in addition to the live instruments and Ableton is handling all of it?

I currently do backing tracks and synchronized stage automation in my Ableton Live 11 with live singers and some live instruments all direct through the mixing board with no amps on stage using a 4 year old Windows 10 laptop. The live instruments use hardware modelers to reduce the processing load on Ableton. I sometimes have as many as 8 backing tracks going on some songs, but I reduce the load on Ableton by bouncing those instrument tracks down to .WAV files to again keep the processing load low on the laptop and I automate/sync the live instruments and lighting effects by using a MIDI out track. I've been doing this weekly for several years now with no problems. I do think my attention to reducing the processing load is an important factor for keeping the system very stable and bulletproof in all performance over the last 4 years.

I'm not sure a Mac is going to be much of an improvement in a complex, cpu driven application. My son has a relatively new Apple laptop he uses for video editing and streaming which is also a very CPU intensive operation. The thing about the Apple is RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) like the M series works very fast on relatively simple applications, but gets bogged down on complex apps because it's executing many times more operations to do the similar thing that's done by one or two operations in a PC, so it pretty much evens out.