djing with ableton

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Jesse Somfay
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Post by Jesse Somfay »

Well...it's true, when I play, I play to make people dance and have a good time. I don't play so people can gawk over what skills I may have. Honestly, when I'm at a party and not playing, I couldn't care less how anything is done if the music is good.
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Post by dunkel »

Jesse Somfay wrote:when I'm at a party and not playing, I couldn't care less how anything is done if the music is good.
TRUE!
lets just keep things without getting all pinky marshmeloes n sh!t... :lol:
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dsat
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Post by dsat »

Jesse Somfay wrote:Well...it's true, when I play, I play to make people dance and have a good time. I don't play so people can gawk over what skills I may have. Honestly, when I'm at a party and not playing, I couldn't care less how anything is done if the music is good.
then why not put a jukebox there instead of a dj or live-act, if it's all about the good music
really, that's a silly way of looking at it
so an artist should not have any artistic or technical challenges when performing? are we just entertainers?
I'd be so bored if I would just be playing records behind my laptop, I'd rather bring my real records and mix them, at least i'm doing something
otherwise, I prefer just staying home, it's more rewarding
the public-artist relationship is not just one-way traffic
Jesse Somfay
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Post by Jesse Somfay »

dsat wrote:then why not put a jukebox there instead of a dj or live-act, if it's all about the good music
really, that's a silly way of looking at it
so an artist should not have any artistic or technical challenges when performing? are we just entertainers?
I'd be so bored if I would just be playing records behind my laptop, I'd rather bring my real records and mix them, at least i'm doing something
otherwise, I prefer just staying home, it's more rewarding
the public-artist relationship is not just one-way traffic
Oh please! Come on! Is it silly?! I didn't imply that there shouldn't be a DJ. That's taking it a little too far. I was just pointing out that a DJ doesn't always have to use one specific method to be called a DJ. And also, this is the business of entertainment. But that doesn't mean we can't be technical or whatever during our performances. It's just that some people prefer to be less technical when DJing. We shouldn't have the stereotype applied to us that we should all have technically amazing skills behind the decks.

When I play, I like to interact with the crowd, I like to feel the mood they have. For me, playing a set is an exchange and interplay of moods. I use vinyl, in case you want to know. But does that make the interplay of moods any more special? Does it make it less boring than a laptop set? I don't know, honestly. I just like to pay a little more attention to the people who are having a good time to my sets rather than pulling off tricks every minute. There is just far far faaar too much analyzing going on these days and my preference is to feel rather than analyze. That is just the way I do things. I'm not suggesting anyone else do it ;)
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Post by leecurtiss »

after much deliberation, i say that what ever floats your boat or twists your noodle is fine by me. djing and producing are both very important to me. i you feel the music and have something innovative to bring to the table please do, and the more i listen the more i see that ppl love djs that stink and artists that are even worse, so i guess just being on this board we are all closer to the same page and i would hope that anyone that's made it this deep into the music would have something to offer. however we all have our own opinions.
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Post by ganik »

Jesse Somfay wrote:It's all about the music, the mood, and the DANCING! So who cares what is used to play the tracks ;)
Agreed !

I sometimes play ableton sets and also use vinyls. But i dont look from where music is comming, im listening whats comming out from speakers .... i dont care for medium.

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Post by sqook »

Here's a few tips from my own experience and some tips passed on to me from adam jay on the ableton boards. This assumes that you already know how to warp tracks and have a "digital crate" set up and ready to match against vinyl.


A very easy way to do rough beatmatching is to use the midi tap button (assign to a keyboard key; don't use the mouse or a midi controller, as they have higher latency and will cause more inaccurate results!). Once you've tapped in the tempo, you can fine-tune it with a midi controller in the following matter. First, assign a fader switch on your midi controller to the global tempo. Then, hop over to arrangement view, and locate the tempo parameter under the "main" track at the bottom. Set the max/min value to something reasonably close to what you're spinning at (I usually go +/- 7BPM); this will decrease the differences of the tempo when it is changed via midi (ie, only differing it by .15BPM instead of like 1.5BPM). Now ableton can use roughly the same interface as a turntable with a reasonable amount of accuracy.

Of course, a disadvantage of this approach is that the midi controller will act more like an upside-down turntable, with higher tempo being "up" and lower being "down". There are a number of utilities you can use to correct this, such as plogue biddule, midipipe, midiox, etc. Personally, I just got used to it being backwards. =)

As others have also pointed out, it's much easier to get ableton roughly aligned to your turntables and then spin the records to match it rather than mucking around with the tempo in live, which will cause a greater degree of audio distortion. However, there are several situations where this is rather undesireable, such as records which contain vocals or synths in the middle frequency bands which will sound drunk when the tempo is changed on the fly. A good way to match live against tables in this situation is to go to the track view, and zoom all the way to the end. Assuming that your track doesn't have tons of warp-marker breaks, you can very carefully grab the last warp marker in the track and nudge it forwards or backwards to make live speed up or slow down. Use caution with this, as doing it too much will cause that nasty warping sound residue (which can be mildly avoided by setting your soundcard to use higher sampling rates, or changing the warp style from within live). If you do this, be sure that live is configured to not automatically write ASD analysis files, or it will screw up all your existing warp markers.

Also, if you have a multi-out soundcard, it really helps to turn on the metronome and pipe that to a cue channel where you can pre-listen it and the record without the actual track live is playing.
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Post by kage »

I agree with jesse.. use what ever you like.. as long as the music is good, it doesn't matter.. Adam Jay is experimenting by DJing with ableton lately, and some of the sh!t I've heard him do with ableton is really cool!

Don't fight technology, work with it..
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