Ableton Forum

Hi,

I'm new to these forums, to ableton live and to music creation in general, cept for some messing around with Rave Ejay back when I was a teenager.

In the meantime, Ive been mixing vinyl tracks on turntables and organizing a shit load of parties, but always knew that some day Id get back to full plain music production.

Some of my friends use cubase, reason and so on. I was also about to try some music production dedicated linux distributions but I got really busy and never really got enough time to try those.. Then for some reason I ended up trying out Ableton and there I kinda fell in love with it, skipping some nights on the way...

So I started making my first tracks about a month and a half ago but it hasnt been a very intensive production as I got married and had to sit for hours at uni preparing and writing tests... (life gets busy sometimes)

feedbacks tips comments reviews and such are welcome : http://www.myspace.com/nairodenlive

Now the reason for why Im coming here and posting this...

Well there it is :
for new years eve, I put a pretty big party together and got all kinds of people and friends to come telling them that me and my friend were going to spin some kickass stuff + Id play for the first time in live and see what it turns out like. I had my brand new Dell vostro laptop ready but unfortunately after a few minutes I went over the 2 gigs limit and the computer didnt handle it. It crashed... in live.

I had to restart it and I mixed some vinyls in the meantime to keep feeding people with music... but it was a terrible experience I kinda feel traumatized lol.

I know that the 2 main reasons for why it crashed are that :

-the laptop runs under vista (and had been running all day doing all kinds of ressource-requiring jobs + I didnt deactivate vista's bullshit visual effects etc)

-Im totally misusing Ableton Live and need some links to live set example videos to see how Im supposed to pass from a set of clips to another.

I figured out a lot of features, probably most of em actually, but the (most?) important one :
If lets say I have 2 sets saved on my hard drive, and Im currently live-playing set #1, how do I get to slowly mix the second one with it to finally end up with only set #2 (as I do with vinyls) ?

The way Ive been doing was that I was grabbing the second set and dragging it south east of set #1 in my window (so that the new clips would land on new midi tracks= east + they wouldnt interfer with the currently playing scene = south), implying endless and dangerous live loading phases where I couldnt touch the computer anymore and the sound would even sometimes cut.

Either that OR

the problem is I have almost 1 midi track for each sound that I add in a set, except for the rythmics (Impulse stuff). So set #1 uses like 20-30 midi tracks and so does set #2 which makes my memory usage increase like crazy and slows down the computer a lot when Im loading stuff.

HELP !

=]

Thanks in advance,

Dorian.

Hehe natural born frenchman or imported american stuff? =]

Well I just started watching some videos I found of people using ableton.

Im starting to think that the way Im using the program is wrong because Im getting it to do stuff that its not really supposed to do.

Ableton is awsome to produce a track. And ableton is awsome to play recorded tracks as a live set. However, Im not sure that Ableton is good to produce directly a live set, which I really was hopping it was, unless you're using a brand new kickass 1000 ish euros quadricore processor with 8 gigs of ram on a 64 bit OS... which im not even sure it would solve the RAM issue since Live seems to be running as a single process.

Anyway, Im eager to hear comments about this.

Is it possible to NOT use recorded audio tracks to play live sets? Can I just import my bunches of scenes into the mixer like I did, but in a different way so that it doesnt overload the memory / processor?

Im still looking for a video or smthg where they'd explain how you can pile up different midi tracks into a single rack. Even tho I wouldnt be able to use a different set of effects for each clip, it'd probably help a lot with the memory problem.

On a side note, I also have a Q6600 with 4gigs of ram running under vista w/ visual effects and a slow hard drive and its smoother than on this laptop that should be running just fine. Live probably just uses multicore processors extremely effichiently.
I guess that to do what I wanna do, Ill have to give up trying to use my laptop and Ill have to bring my desktop tower everytime I play in a bar / discothec / party. =/

Thanks for your message, Rave ! =]

sorry for multiposting but I forgot to mention 2 things :

-I dont use audio tracks.
-This laptop specs are :

DELL Vostro 1400
C2D T7500 (2.2GHz)
2 gigs of ram
7200 rpm hard drive (which is usually 5400 on most laptops) with 160gB

other specs that I dont think should matter in this problem

Geforce 8400 GS 128 MB
vista / ubuntu dual boot.
9 cell battery, I plug it to the sector when playing anyway.

If I remember right, these specs are above most if not all newest Apple laptops. And in the videos, professionals seem to be using Mac Pro's and such, massively.

I guess I should try to get back to Xp pro since it supposedly uses a lot less memory than vista.

Or other solution would be to run Live under linux, is there any release for linux, or has anyone tried to run it with wine?

Any advice?

Oh hi english man =]

Been sick of driving on the wrong side of the road? j/k =]


well yea I was studying that. However, the very one thing that I love doing with live is indeed not to be forced to make a basic mix of 2 or more tracks, even if Live allows pretty advanced mix (with binding of keyboard keys to different "breakpoints" or "locations" of a track) but to be able to display every single detail as in effect, rack and clip of each of the 2 tracks I want to mix and so I can make my own live cooking. I mean, like introducing the first clips of track 2 early in the first one, to finally switch the bass when I think the time has come, know what I mean?

I wanna be able to trigger each clip separately and adjust/modify their effects in live.

I dont just want to mix two tracks that I'd have recorded days before my live performance.

So I guess I was right when I was saying I was misusing Live. And no matter what, I ll end up using a lot of memory ressources. =/

In Live 7 there are CPU issues

For SOME people there are CPU issues. I have Live 6 and 7 and they both run almost equally, maybe 2% more CPU usage for Live 7 in task manager. Considering all the extra features of Live 7 which I use every day, I find that an acceptable trade off. Most people I see having the CPU issues are either using Novation MIDI controllers or new macbooks or running Leopard. Undoubtedly bugs that will eventually be fixed in later editions but as none of this affects me, I am not having any problems at all with Live 7.

As for how to use Live - the tutorials that come with Live are a good place to start, even the videos on ableton.com. People use Live in different ways, so there is no one set way to do things right, that varies depending on your need. I have used all MIDI tracks in session view, or all audio tracks in arrangement view, or a mixture of varying degrees, depending on the project and what I needed at the time.

Thanks for your post leedsquietman =]

I did watch some videos but I havent found one yet that precisely adressed my problem, which comes from the fact that, as you said, there isnt one way to use the program, and the videos mostly show how to use this or that tool, then you're free to make what you want out of them.

I ll keep searching ! =]

By the way, even though thats not my favorite genre, I liked the songs you put on your space, it's pretty interesting. Congratz on that work ! =]