Ableton Forum

hi all,

i'm curious about YOUR way of working when performing live

do you use midi tracks with midi clips playing notes to vst's or
ableton's native devices like impulse or sampler. Or do you record finished audio clips and
just trigger them when playing live? Or do you finish a complete song in arrangement view and just hit play on the stage? Or another method?

shoot!

double post...

my feeling is it's best to keep it simple and stupid onstage

to avoid hassle with selecting vsti presets and also save up cpu - i cut&render everything as audio loops. then i open a premade "live" set with midi assignments and cram everything up there. then the clip's view gain comes in use to adjust the clips volume to be in line with the whole set.

but as i've ordered bitstream 3x which has a built in arpeggiator i hope to run some beats on midi tracks through the thing

Don't you get quality loss of the audio you render to audio clips?
or are there other disadvantages regarding recorded audio in live
instead of playing a vst's audio output?

24bit renders are absolutely fine)

what's the default bitrate?

ultrasonyk wrote:hi all,

i'm curious about YOUR way of working when performing live

do you use midi tracks with midi clips playing notes to vst's

this is what I do... cause I tweak synths live.

ultrasonyk wrote:what's the default bitrate?

16 or 24 which you can choose in live's prefs

whats the disadvantage of using 24?

hey, your soundcard converts everything that comes out of it to 24 bits anyway, so there's no difference between any instrument (either vsti or hardware) played through it and rendered audio from that instrument)))

speaking of disadvantages - 24bit audio takes up more harddisk space than 16bit

well speaking of VST's i understand that the quality of the audio should be
the same. but speaking of hardware synth's i can't image the output
quality would be the same as i would record a .wav from that device and play it
in ableton live.

as long as you record it in 24bit - it will be identical!

another story is when you feed your synth midi data from ableton and output the signal from the synth to a hardware mixer. in this case the signal will not be affected by your soundcard converters, and "spoiled" by dithering

but when you plug your synth directly into your soundcard - your signal is within the converters framework. that's 24bit for pro soundcards

and that's not too awful, really
i wouldnt be able to tell the difference

i prefer using midi clips, that gives ou the freedom to tweak things live.
only sometimes i use audioloops mostly for drums, i do that with 16bit.