Hello everyone,

I'm just now reaching the point where I have enough original music to play a one hour "club worthy" set. I have been preforming my stems and loops in a Live PA fashion for awhile but now I want to take my live act a bit further. My goal is to head in a direction similar to that of The Glitch Mob, Daedelus, or Edison.

I want to be able to improv on certain instruments like the drums, lead, etc... and at the same time be able to have the tune that I'm playing drop back into its original format in case I want to stop playing instruments and run effects.

My live setup is two Lemurs, Maschine, and an Apogee Ensemble soundcard.

Here are some links to videos that are along the same lines of what I want to accomplish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maRvva78Pkk

http://www.youtube.com/user/kidwithoutr ... _grcUMZLwE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_zIvFYQWig

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P1W3xjUio8


I appreciate all the help and thanks in advance for any/all advice that you guys give.

-JWreck

No ideas at all?

if you're already doing a live pa set with stems and loops with 2 lemurs and a machine.... it sounds like you just about got it. If you got that far, Im just wondering why you doubt yourself in setting up your live rig? You sound pretty capable of teaching yourself. You''ve got fingers to google with... lol.... im just razzin' ya.

I not sure of the specifics of edit's rig, but i have a very strong hunch that it has to do with the slice to midi function. Just take your audio track or stem you want to improv, pick some meaty 4 bar section, then you cut, paste, and crop the clip to create a 4 bar clip. Use the slice to midi function for like... 1/4 notes. the new midi sequence will play the audio just as it sounded before, but you can now play the sequence in an alternate fashion by slappin the midi ivory.

Daedelus does the same thing, but more emphasis on loop manipulation and step-sequencer skillz.

edison is not rocking a slice to midi arrangement-view style performance, but has individual midi clips in session view with the global quantize set to 1/16 notes.... so he's got like.... the whole song in really small pieces, and he has to then perform the arrangement so to speak.... no safety net.

no idea about egadz. This is the only video ive seen him in. That computer keyboard controller is ftw tho.

I'm most interested in an Edit style performance fashion. Everything I try just seems to not work. With Slice to MIDI, drumming over an arrangement the levels are always different and hard to match. Also I'm no drummer by any means so its hard for me to stay in time. I think even a skilled drummer would have trouble staying in time due to latency issues and what not. Which means whatever I end up doing is going to have to be quantized.

What I'm most fascinated with is how he can improv at any time on any instrument but at the same time have it drop back into the original arrangement for when he just wants to run effects or rock out with the crowd.

So far the best I've come up with is MIDI mapping the back to arrangement button in Ableton and having all the respective samples in session view of the particular track all midi mapped to a pads on my lemur. So when it comes time to do improv, drum fill, riff etc... I just jam it out then hit the back to arrangement button when I'm done with my improv. The only issue with this is that when hitting the back to arrangement button after doing some sort of improv causes some momentary nasty artifacts and clicks.

I've also tried using the Ableton crossfader and having the arranged tracks on the A side and all my improv material on the B side. This almost worked just like the midi mapping the back to arrangement button. But I ran into level issues because its a crossfader.

I appreciate the advice. I was just looking to see how other people go beyond live pa by adding an actual performance element to their sets.

-JWreck

if you're worried about levels, use the built in 0-vel setting in the slice to midi options. Also, when you chop the audio to midi, I think it sets it to -12db by default, so you'll have to change that. Latency is an issue, but if you set the quantize to 1/16 notes and play slightly ahead of the click track (or imaginary click track) on a properly set up sound card, you shouldn't have too much of an issue. Really, in the heat of the club moment, Im not sure there's very many people who are accurate at a level smaller than 1/16 notes.

I think edit arranges his sets too, so it's kindof on the fly with the improv sections, but he's planned for those moments ahead of time. I think when he gets bored of that he swaps to mangling audio with buffer trickery, beat repeats, and other random little things. Iono. Im sure there's more to it. Just, its going to be hard to find info on the specific technical details of anybody's rig... unless you ask them.

I think you aren't getting a response because you didn't really ask anything specific. Not trying to sound like a dick, but your posts essentially read to me "I have this equipment... I want to sound like edIT". Ok that's great. What specifically are you having difficulty with?

If you want to do live drums and are having latency issues you can:

1. Not run them through live. Run them to your hardware mixer. Get a looper pedal or something for them.
2. Prerecord some, and deal with the latency.

If you want to play prerecorded stuff and also be able to jam, great. Make midi clips for the tracks you want to jam on of a certain loop length. Use the Follow Options to have the midi clip trigger the next one, until you have the whole song in Session view. Kinda like this but with midi clips.

Have you tried jamming on the computer keyboard (keys awsdfghjkl + a few more)? You lose velocity sensitivity (you can set velocity and octave with the keys as well), but there should be much less latency that way and it may be OK for you after time.

If you can't fit your whole show in to one Ableton project, talk on the mic while you switch files. Or have something to play on not rigged through Ableton while it's loading.

Anyway that's all I got off the top of my head. Good luck, let us know how it goes.

I can understand, I have enough equipment to do what I need to. I work as a DJ, engineer and pianist (it's a big one). Sometimes it is difficult to decide what you are trying to achieve. If you want to play live synth, add that channel. If you want to play one shots, add a drum rack. If you want to play clips, map clips. I do a little of all of this but I still haven't figured out the 'best' way to play my tracks live. My advice is to focus on rocking the crowd, in whatever way possible. Another thing is to tag team. Playing with someone else will give you ideas and take the pressure off you so you can experiment more.

There are a bunch of newbies on this forum this year (which is awesome) and everyone is wondering, "how do you do this?"

Don't get me wrong, I've only been on officially since 2009 but I've been making tracks with computers since I was excited to install a CD burner ('98?). The thing that excites me most is that the masses accept a computer as an instrument, and there are more computer based acts than ever. So... if you can play out at all, do that and remember what worked. In the long run, you could be the guy who hit play, won a pack of haters, and then toured with a full production crew... or, the guy who worried about it and stayed home. The minute the crowd sees you do anything on-the-fly they will love you.

@angryrancor I think you must have skipped over the part where I said this:



I think I made my questions and intentions pretty clear.

Anyways its not like I just hopped on the forum and was like "tell me how to do this" I was just looking to see if anyone found a work arounds for the problems I was running into. I have tried many templates that in theory "should work" for instance mapping back to arrangement button in live and hitting that at the end of an improv session that way the track drops back into its original format. The stuff that I've tried and spent hours engineering always ends up producing either:

A) nasty clicky artifacts while I'm preforming
or
B) Issues with latency, staying in time, or levels.

Anyways thanks for pitching some new ideas my way I appreciate the help I think I have a better idea of how I'm going to engineer my next performance template. If it works I'll report back with a post detailing how I did it.

Thanks again,

-JWreck

Nasty clicks and latency mean your CPU is bottle-necking or not configured correctly. That happens on my HP in spite of 2 Gigs of RAM and a dual core processor, because it has an integrated chip set. This means everything (USB audio/control data, video, etc) is running on one buss. No matter how much RAM I have, it's going to spike.

It sounds like you have adjusted the buffer and are unhappy with the latency. Maybe you don't have everything you need.

Don't worry about asking for help.


View active topics:

Preforming and Improvisation in Ableton Live

How The F*ck Do I Mix GlitchHop???!!

Need some help with changing from dj to live pa

I think I just found a solution.

I found out the artifacts and clicks were being produced because of hard disk overload spikes not CPU spikes.

So now what I have done is put the stems into arrangement view and the samples that makeup those stems in the same audio track in session view and MIDI mapping the clips. After that I loaded the stems in arrangement view into RAM and voilà it worked.

I guess the problem was after I was done with an improv bit I would hit the back to arrangement button but my computer was unable to access the stems in arrangement fast enough due to a bottleneck with my hard drive speed. Now with the stems loaded into RAM it can access them quicker and when I hit the back to arrangement button there are no more nasty artifacts.

Good thing I have 8 gigs of RAM, I loaded my whole set into RAM (minus the improv clips in session view) and everything worked like a well oiled machine.

Thanks for all the help guys!

-JWreck

nice one m8. glad you sorted that bit out. you're right, I did miss that Q when first reading the post, or it didn't click or something.

if you need more of a loading boost you may want to look in to getting a solid state drive.

i learned a hell of a lot from this im glad ya asked