Ableton Forum

we are planning to make a live set like this:

ableton live running on g4 laptop, 3 people with USB controllers (UC33, Trigger finger, microkontrol) 3 mics feeding live intstruments into ableton to be eq'd and effected as well as all 3 live feeds being recorded for the 2 hour duration to hard disk for later use...

can we expect that this will run smoothly or are we asking too much of the setup?

any advice really appreciated.. thanks.

bill

Sounds like a lot to ask of a g4 - esp. if those midi controllers will be controlling software synths.

probably just one soft synth controlled by the trigger finger... like a basic sampler to trigger one shot fx...

so we will be running 8 tracks audio, 1 soft synth, plus 3 live mics plus recording these mics to hd...and maybe 3 or 4 aux send fx in Live.

maybe we could run it over two laptops?

I'd suck it and see; it depends on which effects and so on... but Live is most certainly the the app you want.

ok so Im guessing that you are saying that it is not impossible, which is great news... i will experiment and see what happens..thanks

the 2 hours of recording will stress your system a bit, believe.

Municipal Void wrote:the 2 hours of recording will stress your system a bit, believe.

a bit maybe, but I've recorded live shows of my bands at 24/48 with two ninety minute sets into one ableton set, with 8 tracks in at the same time. Granted, this was to capture a live band performance, not using Live as part of the performance, just as a portable recording rig, so certainly effects, vsti, etc. would tax the system more. I certainly think what he want could be done, things like a fast external fw hd for recording the audio to will be crucial. It also will help to have a gig of RAM, and might be worth considering using the trigger finger to trigger clips inside of live instead of using a vst sampler, unless you have one that uses minimal cpu inside of Live. One question/thing to consider--what are your 3 sound sources for the mics? If they are things like guitar, bass, or keyboard cabinets, you could run into some issues. The sound from the cabs will certainly be audible on stage, and the stuff coming out of live will be delayed slightly due to latency, and the two sounds mixing will not sound good. If it's vocals or an acoustic instrument (sax, violin, percussion, etc.) into the mics, it should be as much of an issue. You'll definitely want a sweet low latency external soundcard like an RME or motu to get really low latency.

Boy, I just don't see FW handling a load like that. I'd strongly look into a pcmcia card if possible/available.

Your multiple controllers are possible I'd think, I used to gig with a keyboard and a Behringer BCR2000, but one was plugged into a midi jack and the other into a USB slot. Perhaps chaining your controllers might work...

And as far as sound manipulation, I *seriously* doubt it. I can't imagine my lapper handling all that and it's top of the line, although all my softsynths are cpu hogs. Spectrasonics stuff has a low CPU load, and so does Reason (surprisingly) but any of your vst effects are probably going to shred your machine. Especially reverbs -- ouch.

Godspeed, and let us know how you fared if you try it. Sounds very interesting.

Do you HAVE HAVE HAVE to record your gig on the lappie? I would definately get another recording source. On a G4 especially, you are adding a whole 'nother can of worms if you want to write to disk at the same time... for 2 hrs. With 3 controllers jamming, at least take some of the pressure off the G4.

my2c

thanks for all your advice..!

quandry - we have a motu firewire 828, and a lacie ext fw hd... we will be recording 3 max 4 audio tracks at 16bit 44.1... To be honest we're not using any hi end stuff in Ableton apart from one reverb, all our tracks are wriiten in logic and bounced audio so little processing is needed... the live stuff is percussion, wonder how we will get over the latency issue, even with the 828 its gonna be there surely..

Spikee - pcmcia card: will this offer much reduced latency? As for AU's/VSTs... really we will hardly be using any, all our stuff is from audio that we have bounced in Logic. FX running from Live will be minimal... Like 1 reverb, 1 delay, 2 or 3 eqs n a filter...

Pitch Black - Hello guys! We are happy to record on another machine but we do want the mic stuff to be able to be mixed in with the Live & because of size restrictions an external mixer might not be possible. We were hoping to be able to feed these live sources into 3 channels of Live & then we would have mix control over them from the UC33 as well as the Live. If this is too much stress for the G4 how about if we were to run a 2nd copy of live on another machine, could we sync the two and just have this second one playing back and recording 3 audio tracks..?
In fact if the 2nd G4 could handle playing/recording 3 tracks and also the one shots/samples being triggered from the trigger finger this would be great.

By the way at this gig we will be performing the remix we made of your track freefall

Hi Bill,

Nice to see you in here, Welcome! Mike and I both love your remix (as I'm sure you know!) We are about to do a whole bunch of programming for our live set, and are going to bring some of the remix elements back into the set - so round full circle, eh?

Definately splitting the load on to another G4 could be a way to go, as most people said above, its really a case of "suck it and see".We use two Tibooks and two RME Multifaces to spread the load of 16 analog outputs from Live. I don't have any experience of doing long recordings while triggering lots of clips/scenes/fx in Live, though. What audio interface(s) will you be using?

To get the most reliable sync of the two computers I would recommend having them both chase a common external MIDI clock source. It could be a groovebox / an old drum machine / etc. Some people report Live's sync can drift over long periods if using one computer as master and another as slave. We've never had a problem with them both chasing MIDI clock.

Hope I'm not over-complicating things, or putting you off. IMHO the only thing to do is theorise the setup, build it, then torture-test it to destruction!

Hope this helps,
paddy

Pitch Black wrote:Hi Bill,

Nice to see you in here, Welcome! Mike and I both love your remix (as I'm sure you know!) We are about to do a whole bunch of programming for our live set, and are going to bring some of the remix elements back into the set - so round full circle, eh?

hey thanks..and yes full circle indeed..great idea..! if you want any of the audio from our mix just shout

we will be running an 828 off the g4. we want to do all mixing inside ableton via the uc33 so we will just be handing the sound guy a stereo feed... so we just have 2 outs from the g4 but 3 ins: 2 mics for percussion and a guitar... these need to appear on tracks in ableton with eq and fx sends and all run smoothly in time with the clips of course. i know a mixer would get rid of the latency issue as we could feed analogue direct from the mics to the mixer but we want to avoid an external mixer if at all possible.

maybe if its too much hassle we'll just forget the recording for now. but still we will need to get the 3 signals playing through live without noticeable latency...

thanks everyone for your advice, its a huge amount of help!

friendselectric wrote: maybe if its too much hassle we'll just forget the recording for now. but still we will need to get the 3 signals playing through live without noticeable latency...

As other have said, I say hop on it with the one G4 and see what happens. I'm pretty sure the 828 can get down to pretty low latency without cracking up on a mac--set it as low as possible and raise it only if you are getting crackles. If your total latency is under 10 ms (that is in + out of live), you should be doing fine, 5 ms would certainly be more desireable, but 10 ms won't break the bank. As I mentioned earlier, I have recorded long streams of audio using Live as a recording rig. I also use live to do Live looping, and record the master out back into Live. In this set, I have my RME set at 128 samples buffer=4ms total latency. I have 5-6 loops running when a song gets going, FL Studio running with 5 tracks of drums rewired in, literally 30+ effects (live and over 10 vst effects), one Live reverb set to first class on a send channel, and I record the master out back into Live, often at least 45 minute clips as we run songs together. Never any problems, though I'm on a pc with an RME I think if you stream all you audio from a fast 7,200 rpm fw drive like you lacie, and record all of you audio there, you should be able to pull it off with one G4--give it a whirl and see what happens.

ok thanks i think we will just set it all up and see what happens... just wanted to check first to see if it was at all possible because we are very short of time...