Ableton Forum

Hey there!

I have an unresolved issue just 5 days before playing live! I need some ideas....

I used to play with a DJ, mixing my own tracks with vinyls. This is the first time I gig by myself. The issue is I don't want to interrupt sound at all during my set, however I need to load about 15 different tracks. This means the audio should be stopped.
When I played with the DJ this was solved because I was loading the next track while the DJ played his vinyls, and then I was beatmatching my track and mixing it back in.

When I play with my laptop's built-in soundcard I can open two different instances of Live and mix their output, however this is impossibible with my external soundcard (Audiophile Firewire). The software needs exclusivity over the soundcard and a second instance of Live does not recognise the Audiophile. Of course playing with the built-in soundcard is not an option because of bad quality and enoooormous latency.

A short-term solution I have come up with is firing some background sounds, textures and ambiences with an external player while I am loading the next track, but this is obviously not very professional.

Any ideas would be welcome....

Schizophonix

you shouldnt need to add 15 files at the same time.

either plan your set out and have a BIG file and keep an extra track empty so that if you decide to load something you hadnt planned on using up you have somewhere to put it at any point.


i do not understand why you would need two instances of live (and therefore two live files) open at the same time during a set.


are you doing live PA or a dj set?

it sounds like you need to decide. if you are doing live PA then it should be ok to pause in between "songs" to load. if you dont want complete silence use a hardware delay (or cd player or tape player, anything else you can have something going while you load).

Thanks for replying...

I need to make clear I am not doing a DJ set with live, I am playing simplified versions of my tunes, that however have at least 6-8 tracks each. There are about 15 files, each file has about 50 samples, 20 scenes, and each of the 8 tracks has 2-3 effects. If you do the maths this comes to a huge amount of information. All this is controlled live by a Behringer BCN2000 that has 8 raws of knobs/buttons. I tried unifing everything in a BIG file but it becomes so BIG it gets out of control. For example if I put all "beat" samples of the 15 tunes in track 1, then I need to put there also 2-3 effects per track, say about 40 effects in just one track, or else load less effects but be able to load the different presets on time... And what about mapping all this to the controller? So activating and desactivating effects, panning, adjusting volume and sends, loading presets, and all this on time when the tunes start, becomes a nightmare. I am afraid that reducing the complexity of my tunes is not an option either.
Do you get my point? When I fire a scene in the session view, I cannot at the same time automatically activate/deactivate effects, automation is only possible in arrangement view.
So the solution I have for this is to use 15 different live sets, each with its effects and presets... Only I don't like the pause of about 10 seconds while Live is loading a track, and unfortunately Live cannot pre-load a track, or load it in the background.
The hardware delay or cd player is definitely an option, but does not sound right. Ideally I would like to be able to smoothly mix between the two sets, and that is why I was talking about two instances of Live running at the same time, ejectorset.
Anyone else faced this problem and came up with any ideas? Your input is appreciated.

Schizophonix

if a band played 15 different songs, they would pause between each one for the most part. maybe have a couple they go right from one to the other, but there would be pauses that last a lot longer than 10 seconds.

if you are performing live the pauses are acceptable.

if you are playing in a situation where they arent, ie. you have to keep a continuous flow of music going for 2+ hours to keep people dancing, then you should bounce/consolidate the effects and "dj" your songs.

ejectorset wrote:if a band played 15 different songs, they would pause between each one for the most part. maybe have a couple they go right from one to the other, but there would be pauses that last a lot longer than 10 seconds.

if you are performing live the pauses are acceptable.

Yeah, but I am not a band, I don't gig in concert halls, I gig in places where people don't like pauses and silence between tunes. And as I explained in the previous post, consolidating the set would be practically having to write everything over again and changing substantially my sound. Which I might have to do in the long run, but I am playing a gig this very Saturday. Anyone else has any ideas?

"Do you get my point? When I fire a scene in the session view, I cannot at the same time automatically activate/deactivate effects, automation is only possible in arrangement view."

Hey budy, you can do individual clip automation, including all effects parameters,
just select a clip and enable evenlope view so you can choose whatever you want
to automate...

L8r,
peace...

what i do when i want to play songs 'live pa' style is just have a copy of itunes with some transitions/banter/whatnot loaded up in the background, maybe even run it out of your built in soundcard if live is being a hog. make sure they don't have any beats or anything that will clash with ableton when you get your song up and running, and then play em in the background while you load stuff.

piece of cake.

it's especially good to have some classic live musician banter loaded in there. like 'how you all feeling tonight?' 'you like the sounds? make some noise!' etc... people find it funnier when it comes from a laptop and not a performer. you can 'lip sync' to the banter too, and then confuse everyone by glitching it out on the recording, so it looks like you are some kind of defective banter-bot on crack.

good times.

if you are having trouble automating stuff from the session view, you should make a midi loop and do it that way. it's like having another set of arms, you can automate any parameter from a single clip. check out my 'live looping with no pedal' thread or any number of other threads about the midi loop. best thing since digital audio.

I've started keeping two versions of my tracks.

One version is the 'working' version, the one I started on and built the song up with. This version would also be the one I'd work into an actual studio release of the track.

The other version is one that fits into my live template. I bounce quite a few of the MIDI tracks to audio (keeping a few MIDI tracks on the synths I like to tweak live). Of course, these live template versions aren't as flexible as the working version, but, when I'm creating a live set, I can just drag these sets into my template and they fit right in. Its not %100 perfect as I need to deal with some preset issues and such but it allows me to build a newly ordered, big (hundreds of scenes) live set out of my tracks in a much shorter amount of time.

I think the answer is to expand the set horizontally, eg: you make a group of 5-8 tracks for your first song then insert a blank audio track and insert the next tracks for the next songs with blank tracks to separate each of songs. That way you can even put them in different groups and crossfade between them..
And by all means turn all the effects of the track that are currently "waiting" off. (I don't know if muting the tracks is enough for live to not spend resources on these...)

I've been thinking of making a thread for this exact discussion.

Anyway,Darthen is right,BUT you'll also have to go vertically as well as horizontally in order to avoid triggering tracks that are in the same scene.

Catacorner(? spelling) if you will.Unless you deal with only two songs at a time.In that case use the cross fader.Which is what i'm thinking of doing.Then i could just bring in song's according to crowd mood and whatnot.


I'm on the same path as psilosly.I have my "studio" version and from there i bounce things to individual track's in the session view.Instruments,drums,bass,lead instruments,samples... then drag those tracks onto my ext. HD in folders with song name followed by BPM.
My set is hiphop so most of the songs have been broken down to 2-4 tracks.

i wish there would be an option to automatically deactivate ALL nonused tracks + Effects to help out on the CPU drain.I guess only having two songs at a time would also help with that problem.

Another problem is transitioning between tracks.I'm thinking of having samples from movies or some non-timebased material like a pad drone.
At least for songs that have WAY different BPM's.

The bottom line is PRACTICE i guess.

With SO much shit involved like track volumes,effects send volumes,effects settings i.e sync'ed delay times and on and on.It's a hell of alot to check "on the fly" and still be able to enjoy playing your live show.

It's alot to wrap to my little brain around and there are so many different ways to workaround these issues but at the same time fight other things may pop up.

When i get everything sorted out i will post my work method,I hope others will do the same as this seems to be a major issue according to all the post's i've been seeing.

if you're worried about leaving an effect on or something you can always program the clips to initialize their automation settings when you start them...

I'm so glad this has sparked up some discussion, lotsa good ideas here....

Psilosy: Having a "studio" version and a "live" meta-file of the tunes is definitely the way, however it should be well thought out, and whichever way I look at it I realise I would have to sacrifice a bit of "my sound" in exchange for simplicity....

billmeirelles: Thanks for reminding me about clip automation. "Loading" effect presets through clip automation is not very straightforward but it can be done...

darthen: horizontal expansion is a great idea, however for the purposes of playing live this could be mayhem! We are talking about over 100 tracks in one set!! My controller only has 8 columns of knobs, so I would have to map one different preset to each tune of 5-8 tracks and flick through the presets while I play... But what about functions that are common to all tunes, like Tempo, Master Volume, Clip Transpose? If I flick throught the presets as I go along, I would have to go back to preset no1 or whichever these functions were mapped on. Because there is no straightforward way to map one function (eg "Master Volume") to two or more different controllers (one in each preset). I was told this can be done through advanced MIDI wizzardry, but I have not tried it yet. And going back to using the mouse is obviously not an option.

Anyway, I did my live PA this last Saturday, all went well... In the end I had to recruit a friend in the very last moment, he would throw in some scratches and background noises from the decks while I was loading the next tune... There were some seconds of total and uncomfortable silence, but nothing too bad... Honestly I don´t mind silence, but raved up danceheads do, and they cannot tell the difference between a live PA and a DJ set either... So I have to adapt myself to the rules of the dancefloor... And this includes remixing all my tracks to make them more danceable... Of course I have a "braindance" set up my sleeve, but I save it for someone who can appreciate it... I dont want to sound snubbish, but everytime I stray from the beat for too long people stare blankly at me thinking "what the *%&$ is he doing?"

But this is a topic for a different thread....

if you're worried about leaving an effect on or something you can always program the clips to initialize their automation settings when you start them...

What the hell?!? How do you do this! This sounds funkin' excellent! Does it mean that I can load a clip into a track that has an effect running on it and it will automatically switch the effect off?!?

Please tell me this can be done...!

you can just program the clip to mix the wet/dry to 100% dry.

The Phat Conductor wrote:you can just program the clip to mix the wet/dry to 100% dry.

This only work if the clip knows about the effect though (ie, you created the clip with that particular effect on it already) and even thats sometimes sketchy.

I've noticed that you often loose clip envelopes when moving live clips around.