help - migrating reason-to-live (advice needed)

[mechcon]

I'm still trying to grasp the concepts of how I can migrate my work from Reason to Live..

what i've done is this..




What I've done for EACH track originally (track as in song) is make points in Session where the next instrument is played (at the indicator on the sequencer) i.e. @ 57 (meaning play this loop at the 57th bar till it plays it to the end) so it's not a loop as such..

At first I thought, ah swell, nicely done, made one for every track I've made and saved them all as .als thinking i'd just launch one from the library when I need to play another track (say at a live gig)

lo and behold I then realised I couldn't, so I made a new .als with every track on there, sadly I'd have to go through entirely and re-change the allocations (i.e. @ 57 wont be that anymore, as there's a lot of more stuff before that due to adding more songs to the one ALS)

I think I've successfully confused myself, as well as others here...


Is there any easy way out of this? because for me to go through and re-do all the tracks in Reason to fit to work as it should in Live would take me several months


Would love to expand once somebody asks a question or two

[longjohns]

I admit i'm having a hard time figuring out exactly what you're up to.

One impression, though, is that you appear to be working in Session at 90 degrees from what you should. Meaning shouldn't all those series of clips be running vertically rather than horizontally?

[mechcon]

I expected it'd be hard to explain... and thats no probs to try to explain

basically...

I have songs made in reason (mainly composed in the sequencer) and I have tracks that are all different bpm's, that screenshot is, well if you picture an individual song, what it's meant to do, is i play one layer, and then in the bars I'd activate the next layer and let that play it through (i.e. activate at bar 57)


I'm having a really troublesome time to actuall talk to anyone about this, as it is very hard to explain. but this forum is my last ray of hope.

What i wanted to do in that snapshot, is be able to play the next track (next line) and still be able to read the meter at where the bars are at i.e. 10.3.4 at the top of the screen so I can be able to activate the right "loop".

Maybe i'll have to start scratch on every track and try to make loops out of every instrument that I've made? I dont know, sadly that itself would take several months to at least a year..

[longjohns]

I am starting to get it, a little bit.

I can't say that I've considered all the possibilities, but here's one idea:

Enable the IAC bus if it's not already. Set up a "control" MIDI track which will contain clips that will fire each song's clips at the proper time. Each song will have a series of MIDI clips that have MIDI notes which will fire the corresponding Audio Track clips, with Follow actions to define the timing. This is all sent out and back into Live via the IAC bus.

For more about this, search on Dummy Clips, if you're not already familiar.

So basically, you will MIDI-map notes to all the audio clips there. You should be able to leave everything where it is.

BTW, if you increased your # of Audio and MIDI Control tracks, you could gain the ability to have two or more of these songs playing simultaneously, to crossfade between them... Or not

[longjohns]

Also, that method will solve the problem of not having a bar reference after the first song is over, because everything will be defined relative to the first clip of a song. i.e. Song 2 Clip 2 will just be fired by a 6.0.0 follow action on Clip 1, even though the song counter at that point may be at bar 100 because the first song has played through...

[Lord Kahn]

Have a lok at follow actions. You can set actions on a clip so that it will automatically move on to the next clip in a track (which is up and down). Horizontal lines are scenes in Live-speak, which should have all the elements of a song that could play at the same time (drums bass lead, vocals etc).

[tylenol]

I was wondering if you've done the tutorial titled "improvising with loops"? That shows a conventional song structure laid out in session view. Basically (if I'm understanding the picture correctly, which I'm by no means sure of) I think what you've put in one line/scene (a song) would make more sense and be more flexible with one scene per section of a song, not one scene per song. Then you would use the scene play buttons to move through the different song sections, instead of clip play buttons to add layers. This would also make it much easier to stop clips that you don't need any more, so that the tracks could do more than build (i.e. if a clip in scene 2 of track 3 is playing, and you play scene 3, where there is no clip in track 3, that clip will stop.)

[mechcon]

the reason why i've set it up that way, was that each of those clips, overlap (which can't be done downwards it seems)

either way thanks for the help guys, yeah its starting to make some sense now... looks like I may have to go back to the drawing board if I wanted it done perfectly...

problem is, also, all the songs are at different bpms. is there a way to automatically change that to the next song?

[tylenol]

the reason why i've set it up that way, was that each of those clips, overlap (which can't be done downwards it seems)

That's right, clips that overlap should be in the same scene (or at least, on different tracks). I think maybe it is not 90 degrees off (though that is what I thought when I first looked at it too), but just not making full use of scene structures.

If you do what I had in mind, the way it would look would be something like (for a 3-layer version of what's in your picture):
song 1 scene 1 (x BPM): [clip containing layer 1] [--] [--]
song 1 scene 2: [clip containing layer 1] [clip containing layer 2] [--]
song 1 scene 3: [clip containing layer 1] [clip containing layer 2] [clip containing layer 3]

What would be helpful here is if live had ghost clips, so that you could link layer 1 across scenes, but I usually find myself changing later versions of the layer anyways when I have a situation like this. This method is more flexible than what you do because it makes it much easier to cut out layer 1 in scene 4 if you want to -- just leave that slot blank.

problem is, also, all the songs are at different bpms. is there a way to automatically change that to the next song?

If you put the BPM in the name of the first scene of every song, it should work like the way you are doing it now.

[longjohns]

yes, scratch what i said about the 90 degrees. i see what you're up to now

[mechcon]

If you put the BPM in the name of the first scene of every song, it should work like the way you are doing it now.

I tried that, sadly it only activates the BPM if i press play at the far right for the entire scene :\

[forgie]

Hiya mechcon (I got your PM on MTAU),

Why don't you put each song in it's own .als file? Am I missing something? Wouldn't it be better to have each song as multiple tracks within a single .als? Or maybe just bounce your entire mixes down to AIFF and then make some clips out of that in Live?

I'm not entirely sure what you're trying to achieve, and I'm not sure how to achieve it either!

[mechcon]

Just trying to most importantly, grasp the concept of running tracks in a live situation...

just trying to figure out how im going to play my tracks at a performance/gig, and if it means having the full songs as clips (which then are crossfaded) then so be it?

[longjohns]

If you put the BPM in the name of the first scene of every song, it should work like the way you are doing it now.

I tried that, sadly it only activates the BPM if i press play at the far right for the entire scene :\

That's a reason why the concept of using the MIDI control clips could help - because they could be on their own scenes below the rest, and control the tempo.

Maybe I'm crazy but I can see this working without having to change very much of what's already there.

[longjohns]

Another idea would be to run two instances of the program, so you could alternate between them, and avoid the tempo and song position problems


Another another idea would be to move all this into the arrangement view, where you could have a section for each song, with their own tempos. It wouldn't take that long to drag it all over.