hardware « 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

1Jul/093

Windows 7 64 bit Enters My Studio

When Ableton 8 dropped I instantly had issues cropping up on my old XP computer in the studio. The computer is great on specs, however I've been running 32 bit Windows XP Professional since the get go and have broken one of my old school rules of formatting and installing the OS freshly every 2 years or so. The computer doubles as my main PC, so naturally I have everything under the sun installed to this box that I need to accomplish a multitude of tasks (web dev, coding, photography, movie ripping, games, and more) on top of my audio producing environment. It's no wonder that Ableton Live!, Reason, and my audio hardware sometimes has issues with my system.

I decided that I was going to try Windows 7 64 bit and see if I could configure it to be a dedicated music production environment. Sure enough after an effortless registration, download, burn, and install of the OS, I had Windows 7 up and running. I was already impressed by the breath of life it gave to my computer. Fast, seemily less bloated than both Vista and XP, and thus far pretty stable, I have hope that Windows 7 will be a viable alternative for music production.

Installation and operation of Ableton Live! 8.0.3 and Reason 4 has been smooth sailing. I still encounter the ocassional problem with Ableton Live!, but the memory management and process management in Windows 7 is far superrior to that of XP so I don't lose much time if Live! crashes on me (which has only happened once so far). It seems that Live! still has trouble with my Alesis iO 26 when initializing, but a reset of the iO 26 takes care of that.

It wasn't all peaches and cream when it came to getting my music hardware to work, however. First off, not all of the music hardware vendors have Windows 7 64 bit drivers available. To my absolute dismay, Alesis was the only brand I have in my set up that had a beta Windows 7 driver available. Sure enough, the driver worked along with the software and I haven't had much issue with the unit at all. It works better in Windows 7 than it does in Windows XP (a lot less fussy).

My Korg padKontrol, sadly, it not 100% operational. While I was able to have the driver working in no time at all such that I can use the unit with Live! or Reason, the padKontrol's librarian (which is used for programming the device) does not work. I continually get device communication errors even though the unit responds appropriately in music software.

My Midisport 2x2 by M-Audio does not work at all. I tried to use the Vista or XP compatability modes, as well as manually plucking the driver from the temporary folder during install, but it was all in vein. The device isn't supported in Windows 7 and M-Audio does not appear to be turning out the drivers quickly. It's a shame. Right now I have my old school MIDI keyboard plugged into my padKontrol's MIDI-IN, and the WaveIdea Bitstream PRO is going to have to be plugged into the iO 26's MIDI-IN. Thankfully I don't intend on buying any new controllers or synths soon.

Playing around with some Silver Standard music in Live! has shown me that Windows 7 really does perform very well for my music production so far. It feels smoother, faster, and more stable. Jeff and I will give it a good test tomorrow night in our recording session and I'm crossing my fingers it shines.

I'm trying to leave this installation of Windows 7 alone and separate from a personal OS. XP will reside on the main partition for quite awhile since it has all of my personal stuff (or "clutter") which probably gets in the way of my music production.

I'm not going to lie: I hope that Windows 7 is a viable, stable, stage performance alternative to Apple. As much as I pine for a Macbook PRO like every other 'professional' out there.. I firmly believe there should be alternatives. Besides.. not all of the VSTs I use are available for Mac. ;P