How do you use Ableton at gigs?
last set i did with live was a live pa with my friend jbible. we had several controllers each. mine were devoted to a drum machine that we built using ableton 6's racks. it had several different drum kits that could be switched around with the maudio trigger finger pads. had some other tricks with the pads too. a uc-33 to control effects and other parameters of the drum machine, delay, reverb, pitch, time, many others. buttons on the uc-33 for mutes on the drum kits. jbible had a synth he had built using racks with a novation x-station and a uc-33 to control it. then one uc-16 in the middle to control volumes on our tracks and a few tracks that had audio clips. but most of our clips were midi clips used to trigger each of our rack instruments. we also each had custom painted qwery keyboards used to trigger our midi clips. it was the most live live pa he or i have ever done. it was like an improv techno jam. we had to practice daily for about a month before we started sounding good and catching each others queues.
I do the same decon/recon process - wav loops of each individual sound from my songs all lined up in Ableton ready to go. Gives a massive amount of live remix option but takes a lot of labour to get it all prepared for the performance. Negative point of this though, is that you lose all the tweakability from the synths. Sometimes I have whole sections of tracks (each sound individually loaded however) as well as the loops for a bit of safety or careful non-live arrangement. But then, using and tweaking the effects within ableton - delays/beat repeat/reverb - keeps things live and exciting also.forcesupreme wrote:I de-construct all my tracks before loading them in to Live (because i use other software to create my music). So i have separate bassdrums, percussion elements, melodic elements etc. Then i re-construct live on stage using 2 midi controllers and effects.
I must say, I am always disappointed with people who simply load in full tracks or even full loops and then simply dj between them. This for me is not playing live - and it must be boring. You could just pre-sequence that and then hit play.