Ableton Forum

I'm planning to use Live with a MIDI foot controller, an acoustic guitar and vocals for performance. What I want is to retain the freedom to improvise on stage, but be able to trigger loops, effects changes etc with the foot controller. I also don't want to be stuck with playing the songs in the same order every set. So, what I'm lloking for is either an easy way to chain up songs with different tempos, different effects sets, different time signatures within a set, or a way to quickly load a new set using the foot controller. Any ideas?

Bomes (google it) midi translator to turn midi commands from a pedalboard into keystrokes in Live, it's free.

Midi yoke to send midi commands from Live to Live (it's a virtual midi router, for Mac use the IAC built into the OS), also free.

Play how you like with a mouse, pay attention to the mouse/key strokes you use and use the tools to implement, look for workarounds, Live can do a lot. Leave the HELP BOX open in the lower left corner of Live, it's amazing.

Hit midi learn and anything that changes color can be assigned to a midi command.

Loading sets isn't done with Live, best to just make 1 HUGE set and work with that.

For tempo changes, name a scene "100 bpm", launch the scene and the tempo changes to 100bpm.

Well I've mostly sussed getting the MIDI commands to do what I want in terms of effects and sample triggering, the biggest problem seems to be time sig changes, and the using different effects for each song. I guess I could (for example) set up all the vocal effects I intend to use for the whole set, and group bunches of their on/off button onto different MIDI commands, then effectively use a different bank on the foot controller for each song. One pedal would launch the tempo scene (can something similar be done with time sig?) the other nine would be for effects and general scene launching. It's just gonna limit my number of songs to the number of banks on the pedal board I suppose. That would introduce a new problem though - I already have a few effects etc set up just the way I want them in separate sets, and some are quite complex. Is there going to be a way to copy info from several disparate sets into one?

You want to drag clips and grouped FX (select FX, right click, select GROUP) into the browser, open another set and drag that stuff into the new set.

Sounds like you've got it, a lot of this will work itself out as you set it up, play with it, re-organise, re-think but you've got it.

have fun!

For all your effects from different Live sets, perhaps you could create a Rack with each effect (or multiples) on different chains. Then open the Chain editor, right-click in the area that opens and choose 'Distribute regions equally' (something like that). Then map one of the Macro knobs to the green area that appears above the chain map. You can then use this Macro knob to cycle through the chains and thus your effects. You could even map this to a MIDI controller.

Argh, just revisitng using the MIDI controller, and it seems to crash the hell out of Live for some reason. I think I may be sending dodgy MIDI information though - the user manual for the foot controller is appalling (Behringer FCB1010 - anyone got any tips on THAT? hmm, might head over to Behringer site)

check for midi loops, that's a good pedal board.

Bit late, unless I can get good money for the behringer second hand...
Thanks anyway!

vurtual wrote:Bit late, unless I can get good money for the behringer second hand...
Thanks anyway!

bit late for what? 7 more bits and you have a byte.

sorry, misunderstood what you meant. There isn't a loop, just going from MIDI out to MIDI in, no other MIDI involved, but I'm sending some sort of pitch bend data from a trigger button. I'm guessing as that is cc data, maybe Live doesn't like it being used for one off triggers, so I need to suss outhow to send (say) a note on

download midi ox, it's free and easy to google, great way to monitor midi traffic.


you sure do suss a lot. is that a british term?

No, what you need is an editor application for the FCB 1010... google it.

Trying to follow the manual and editing it by pressing a series of buttons is highly innane.

Tone Deft wrote:download midi ox, it's free and easy to google, great way to monitor midi traffic.


you sure do suss a lot. is that a british term?

Not in Manchester!

In that case I'll figure this. I've figured out how to send note ons, and it all seems fine now Still gotta find the time to suss/figure/work/whateveryoufancy out about time sig changes, but I've read elsewhere you can do it on a per clip basis.

for changing the order of your sets put locators at the start of every song in one large live set and route these to your midicontroller. you should be able to jump back and forth between songs on the fly.