Ableton Forum

My interest in Live was greatly escalated when I viewed Kid Beyond's video demonstrating Live as a live looping device. I am just curious as to whether or not anyone is using it as a looper for guitar and what type of setup is being used. I would like to use Live 6 as my DAW as well if it fits the bill.

This will require a decent pile of gear, but this ain't no Boomerang. If this works like I want it to, it will be extremely powerful. I do everything from textural soundscape type stuff, to more linear jazz inflected stuff. I also play country! The setup I'm considering is as follows:

The cheapest Laptop that will work
Undecided firewire interface (probably FF400)
Midi foot controller
Axiom 49
Of course, the guitar bits

The basic functions I need are record, overdub, undo, and reverse. The extended functions I would like are switching between multiple loops, tap tempo delay, and input quantize on/off. That is pretty much the core of what I need. I realize that Live can do all of this, but keep in mind, I need all of these features to be available at the press of a switch. I'm assuming Midi Translator is the way to go, no?

Does the setup listed above seem sufficient? I can't really think of anything else that I will need. Migrating from desktop to laptop is a little frightening, but I'll get over it. I have no choice, so that helps soften the blow.

Any comments or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Thanks

no.

ok, yes. search the forum, quandry seems to weigh in on all these guitar looper threads, a number of other people have described their setups, etc., the essential live looping thread, while not guitar specific, will get you much of the way there.

quandry? okay, thanks.

The cheapest Laptop that will work

I think that's your first mistake. Buy the most powerful laptop you can afford. Preferably dual core so you're ready for Live 6's dual core support. Once you start running a lot of audio loops, plugins are the next logical step, and you will be consuming a lot of CPU cycles and RAM.

I'm still pretty green in Live - I have a sense that it's the right app but getting my bearings after years of linear DAWs has been challenging. That said, I'm using Guitar Rig 2 as a plugin in Live and together they are pretty formiddable for looping. Guitar Rig let's you use it's "Loop Machine" to build up loops the way a typical hardware looper would, and then export either the whole mix or each of the layers out to wave files. Live will then let you quickly drag these waves back onto Live tracks as clips, which is a very easy way bridge the gap between typical guitar looping on the fly and more sophisticated layering/ mixing/ editing.

i find that the looper in guitar rig doesn't work very well (that may be my failure to update or somesuch), though it's nice to have the pedal that comes with it, all ready for looping madness. i also don't like the metronome or the way guitar rig handles (e.g.) loops, so i mainly use the guitar rig looper in combination with live, which is kind of silly, because live can be set up to do all the same stuff more conveniently (so that things start out on different tracks, you can adjust loop levels individually (which you can't do with the GR looper until exported), etc.).

do you have any issues with the guitar rig looper or is it just me? (e.g., hard to get looper at end of rack so that you can switch presets so each layer has different sound.) thx.

Glad to see some tips on what to search for. I've been beating my brains out the past few days trying to figure out how to get Live to loop seamless for me. I should probably lay off the experiments for a few weeks and just read up on the forums and the web. I'm frustrated that I can't get loops to retrigger on time [not even sure that's what's happening, to be honest, but that's how it feels].

do you have any issues with the guitar rig looper or is it just me? (e.g., hard to get looper at end of rack so that you can switch presets so each layer has different sound.) thx.

I haven't had any problems with this, but it's not just you - I've read some posts on the Guitar Rig forum by people having the same difficulty. If I insert the Loop Machine in the default spot at the end of the chain, my parts are recorded as "wet" loop layers, and as I change presets I can layer different sounds. (I think this is what you're asking.) The only way I could see this working differently is if some of your effects are positioned after the Loop Machine. (I actually didn't even know this was possible.) Probably worth posting on the NI forum, even though traffic there is very slow.

I agree that working exclusively with Live loops is probably more effective - it's just that I'm not 100% comfortable with real time clip recording yet. The combination of the two is probably a little more complicated than it needs to be, but it gives you a familiar guitar looper type interface which, by way of exporting, you can integrate with Live's functionality pretty easily. Good stuff if you don't necessarily want to be mousing etc.

I'm frustrated that I can't get loops to retrigger on time [not even sure that's what's happening, to be honest, but that's how it feels].

I think I know what you mean. For instance, if one clip is playing, and you trigger another, they are not necessarily time aligned? It just occurred to me that this probably has to do with the clip-specfic quantize/snap to grid setting. Let me know whether we're talking about the same thing - if I figure it out I'll post something more specific.

thx for the GR looper info. and your clips can trigger on time, depends on how you trigger them, what settings you use, etc. could you be more specific about how they're not in time? do you have global quantize set, etc.?