Live Performance with Ableton Live Prep
I've been researching how to structure my stuff in Ableton for live performance. It seems to me that the projects I write songs and grooves in aren't likely great candidates for jamming in a live context. Mainly because of all the processing and vsti's that are happening. It doesn't really take much of a hiccup in your laptop to really screw up your show - the last thing you want is a silent PA and a crowd completely wondering what A$$ is behind the music stopping. Or anything related! (clicks and pops, audio dropouts etc).
I know that I'm always pushing my computer to it's potential when writing material, so I figure that the live performance has to see this significantly reduced to manageable levels - so as much as possible, I'm exporting to new clips and building new sets for these songs that have almost zero processing. I bring an outboard stereo compressor and a Kaoss Pad 3 to the shows, so I can add a little bit of pump, weight and sugar outside of the laptop, but I try to keep the CPU meter on the low side of things.
One of the things I'm interested in refining is managing song to song, or groove to groove transitions. All of my jams are separately loaded Live projects. Obviously that isn't going to fly really well, so I'm curious about loading everything into one huge project and using scenes to move through the music in Session view, where I can still improv jam with my clips and stuff. I found this AMAZING thread on the Ableton forums talking about exactly this stuff - wow :)
http://forum.ableton.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=160907
So check it out if you're looking into setting up your stuff for live performances. One cool thing I found out about was ClyphX - some kind of scripting that allows you to set a clip to contain all kinds of state modifications, like bpm, send levels, devices on/off, fader levels etc... Wow! It's like a clip to setup a new song. I can't wait to dig into that.
After this week of writing is finished, (I'm working out loads of great material for Ottawa Fashion Week, which I'll then cull the best stuff from and release), I'm going to setup the live rig and start building the show. AxiomPro 61, KP3, Kaossilator, Acoustic Guitar, Monome64. Scratching the Kore 2 - I just don't have time to work out the stability issues.
Keep on banging!
R.
