Ableton Forum

Hi everyone!

we've been using Live for a few months now with my band, but mostly as a creative tool. But now we wanna use it on stage, to play additional tracks such as 3rd guitar parts, keys and stuff. But we don't know HOW concretely...
Should we bounce every song and then play them as a one track stereo thingy? What controller would you recomand? Fot pedals? Midi keys?
I'd need to get in touch with someone who has experiented this. Pease help us!!!

Thanx in advance

Maxim

if you're not mixing between songs (i.e. more like a band set) then probably easier to have a separate live set for each song.

if it was me, i'd almost certainly have to take my tempo off the set. maybe by feeding a click track to your drummer (the live metronome can do this) or making a custom click track and routing it to a different set of outputs.

then you can just trigger clips to play in time whenever you want... you don't even need a controller unless you want fancier stuff like effects. though controllers look cooler than checking email of course.

if you ARE mixing between songs, then you'll probably want your entire performance in a single live set.

hth

We do this weekly and found it best to have instruments separated, especially the bass. The low end always changes room to room and we needed that separate to reEQ all the time. Keys, strings, guitar, etc are all mixed and could be run mixed down as one. Lastly we use horns here and there and keep those separate to have more control over volume. Some people accept the horn tracks, some love em, some rougher places don't :O(

We then use a FCB1010 to start the clicks to the drummer, who then starts us off and I rehit the FCB1010 to start the music.

A basic idea of what we do. All midi into external sound modules and mixer. Never a glitch in over a year, knock on wood, either :O)

I disagree with ciw... having multiple live sets just complicates matters, cause either you have to have multiple live sets open, or your have to reload a set after every song... not cool in a band environment

I perform in a more band type environment (though we don't have a drummer and I use live to host VSTi's and stuff too... so more is going on than a simple extra track thing, but we use that kinda thing for our drum tracks)

The simplest way we've found to do it is to set up one big set with all the stuff that you want live to play bounced into one track. Put all of that either sequentially in the arrangement view, with tempos automated. Send the metronome to your drummer (and anyone else if you have in ear monitoring).

Now put locators 4 counts (or however many counts you want) before the start of each mixed down 'song' (ie the stuff live is going to play - make sure it is the length of the actual song, even if it is just a minute of silence or something until Live starts making noise... it'll make sequencing easier).

In terms of controlling it - you can just put the laptop next to the drummer, with keyboard mapping to each of the locators (this is why they're there)... then on your set list write what key maps to what song.

Now all the drummer has to do is, at the start of each song, hit that key and the the spacebar, wait the four counts and then start playing, and then hit spacebar to stop at the end of each song.

Like i said... this is the simplest method (and more importantly the cheapest - as it doesn't require any extra midi gear).

It does have limitations though - most importantly, that either the drummer has to start playing at the beginning of each song or he has to at least click his sticks to given the tempo to everyone else.

If I were to try do this in a "rock style" band now, I'd probably get the drummer to get an alesis controlpad, and set up one of the pads to control tap tempo, then the rest of them to launch sections of the mixed down 'songs' from the session view, with all the sections as short as possible without making them too much of a mission to launch. This lowers the risk of the band going out of time with the samples. It is however, a more complex and expensive method of doing things, so try the first method to see if it works for you (cause it doesn't cost anything...) and if it isn't working go to the second method (which is ultimately cooler if you can get it right cause you can hide the computer away)

One last thing... if you're using the first method, to save on ram, disable all the sections of the songs that are silent and consolidate the rest. If there are looped sections, use the same clip however many times it is needed rather than using one long clip... it's not a necessity if you've got a lot of ram (we're on a 2gb system and we often forget to do this and it handle it fine), but its good practice and will lower your system overhead.

We use Live live in my band.

I play guitar and have the laptop near me to cue songs / check things.

I have a FCB1010 foot controller to trigger the main play button and one button for stop and then i assign different pedals to different clips i may have 2 clips per song (Verse parts and chorus parts) this way we can play the verse longer or whatever and gives us more freedom.

my midid cable goes into our interface which sits next to the drummer and he receives the master click. We also just run a mono out to the FOH guy and he fucks it up for us ?

Thats how our gigs usually go. Im going to start experimenting with feeding my guitar into live as well and back to my amp.

Thanx you all for answering that fast. I will try tomorrow to see how things works. But what bothers me is the little details. Like one time I managed to get 2 outing tracks, one with the click and all the tracks for the drumer and the other without the click, for the PA. But I'm having a hard time doing that again...

that will have to be done with your interface mixing software:

Audio out - 1/2
Click/Cur - 3

Drummer recieves tracks 1/2 + 3

PA / FOH just receives the cable from outputs 1/2.