ableton live « Sliptide

15Jan/100

Live! Set Work

I've been taking some of my personal studio time and dedicating it to working on my next big step: An Ableton Live! performance.

I don't have a lot of the new fancy equipment that is out there to help with taking Live! and mapping its controls to handy button grids, knobs, and faders. I'm doing this largely through a lot of personal configuration and applying knowledge I've learned myself and by reading or watching tutorials on the internet.

I really don't like the idea of having to swap MIDI channels on my knob/fader board because my knobs are bound to a 0-128 (I can't twist them forever). I certainly need an out-of-studio upgrade to improve the usefulness of hardware.

The padKontrol is going to be an awkward beast while I am on Windows 7. The editor librarian still doesn't let me configure the device appropriately so I must boot into XP soon and re-do my configurations so that I can use the buttons. I don't mind changing channels on that devices in the middle of a performance. I think I will use it as a sample play/stop pad along with some 1-shot sample execution.

My keyboard is going unused at this point since I am taking my house tracks that I've produced in Reason and cutting them up into a bunch of samples I can play/stop and apply effects to in real time. The first iteration of my live shows will be a lot of 'mixing' my own sounds together and knob-twisting effects into the mix. A hybrid-DJ set that is beat mixing my own music together.

I was pleased with a very early dry-run between two new house songs I recently produced. The flow of the tracks and the quality of sound was working well for me. There are a few things I need to iron out quality-wise (routing the mixes to the appropriate channels since I use a lot of ducking in these projects).

Once I get the template down, the sample packs set up per-song, and a good idea of what I'm going to do during these live shows (song progression, remixing, effects, additional samples), I am going to start doing some ustream/youtube recorded performances! I'm super excited.

Tagged as: ableton live, hardware, live performance No Comments

4May/090

Ableton Live! Set Plans

One of my goals is not only to be a producer-- not only to be a dj-- but to be a music performer. I want to perform my electronic music live to audiences. One of the aspects of DJing I want to bring into a live performance is the continual movement, morphing, and transition of music.

Instead of DJing a bunch of records together I would like to mash up my own sounds in Ableton Live! and apply real-time tweaking of FX, mixing, live instrumentation and synthesis to produce the most live performance I can to an audience. In order to achieve this I have to re-think how I am producing music on a day to day level.

While I will continue to produce albums that contain separate songs in the tracklist, I am moving towards another artform that allows me to produce samples that I can then use in an Ableton Live! template to freestyle a production set.

Using the equipment I have now (which is one of the requirements for this exercise, since I don't have much of a budget to work with at the moment), I am coming up with the plans to employ Ableton Live! as the center piece of my operations.

Here's a rough Google Presentation translated from some sketches I made in my notebook over coffee this morning.

I am thinking about using my Korg padKontrol's channels as triggers for samples in Ableton Live!. This will allow me to have start/stop abilities over numerous scenes. Add in my Bitstream PRO's 8 sliders for volume on each lane, and knobs for sends to A/B/C and PAN effects and we have a lovely little set up here. I just realized, though, that I really would like to have my EQ kills available for use... hmmm.

That's all for now.