Ableton Forum

I'm interested in getting Live, but I'm curious if it can do what I want it to because they never show it in the videos or even mention it.

Basically, I want to be able to use it like loop pedal.....Boomerang, Boss Loop, station, echoplex, etc. I don't want to be locked to a preset tempo/click. I basically want to be able to hit a midi foot pedal to start looping and when I hit stop I want it to loop what i just played. So, I guess I want to be able to set the tempo of the project from a live loop.

Could I do this? Thanks.

Yes

Its as simple as start and stop...without a click or tempo?

Another question if somebody can answer it, can Live do any kind of live bounce of a single track while everything is playing? For instance, if I played a guitar loop in amongst other things like a beat, could I then export that guitar loop while the song is playing? The purpose would be to transfer to torq so I could scratch something shortly after playing it. While we're at it does anybody know if you can have an external hard drive connected to two computers at once to avoid networking the computers? Sorry...a lot of questions for one thread.

No, you can't connect a USB or firewire drive that is just an ATAPI or SCSI bridge to two computers to avoid networking. It has to be a full disk host, with it's own locking mechanism, and you'd have to use an exotic filesystem to do it. That stuff is all in the realm of high-reliability computing, way out of the reach of general purpose computing.

I'm really interested in this too. I'd like to just hear the tempo click, hit a foot pedal and record a guitar bit. Then hit the foot pedal again and it starts playing my loop, so i can then record or play something else.

can you really do this?
Feel free to shout "read the manual" but I don't know where to start looking!

Then look here:
http://www.ableton.com/kid-beyond

Or wach the video:
http://www.ableton.com/_common/download ... beyond.mov

toddlans wrote:While we're at it does anybody know if you can have an external hard drive connected to two computers at once to avoid networking the computers?

No, but once they're networked [£10 for a switch and two short cables] you can add a NAS [Network Attached Storage] device to your network switch for about £65 + Disks.

DJ VAKIS wrote:Then look here:
http://www.ableton.com/kid-beyond

that is no proof at all. kb uses several mapping tools to realize it.

and though there is some loopers as free vst on the net who can do the job, none of those i tried seems to fit very well. could be a nice option for ableton to fix that hole in the future with something built-in...

live will not easily do what you want (in particular, having the length of the first loop fix the length of subsequent loops, absent quantize). it also doesn't really do unlimited overdup or easily do undo, though there are workarounds. if you're on PC, try mobius (which you can run in live). others speak highly of loopylama, and angstrolooper is great for a number of things though not really a trad looper.

btw, if you're willing to work with a click, and thus quantize, you can easily set up live to record multiple tracks (effectively, overdub) all quantized via footpedal or other controller. live's very good as a live multitracker (e.g., if you can do without unlimited overdub, feedback control, easy undo, etc.).

If you're on a Mac this may help you get part of the way home - its made to sample and loop without looking at your computer and its pretty interesting:

http://plasq.com/musolomo

Just MIDI map a pedal to clip launch (with record enabled track) and you can then hit the pedal once to start recording and again to stop (obeying the global quantisation setting). You can also get Undo/Delete etc. via MackieControl emulation on the same foot pedal.

fatrabbit wrote:Just MIDI map a pedal to clip launch (with record enabled track) and you can then hit the pedal once to start recording and again to stop (obeying the global quantisation setting). You can also get Undo/Delete etc. via MackieControl emulation on the same foot pedal.

this may work when you do just a few loops, but it´s a pure configuration horror when you really want to dive into the thing and play around. this way is just using up an unnecessary lot of clip-slots and tracks and you don´t have always the motivation for complication when a nice idea comes around.