Live Set for Saturday

So I’m here at work just thinking of some ideas for my live ableton set on saturday.

Really I think a short term deadline is the best option for me. It’s always been that way, when I shut off the inner critic and just start to try to get something done. My skills come out and the constant bickering about what is good, does it fit, just go away.

My basic way of thinking about a live ableton set goes a bit like this:

  1. Avoid unstable plugins, once I had dblue Glitch on a send it decided to mess up so my audio buffer made loud ass noises and I had to end the show. Test plugins with a play around live set for about an hour, or research bugs before comitting them to your set. You can build a nice rack for live buffer jackin’ by stacking some very basic plugins up and have a lot more control. Think a stack of Stretcher, Crusher, Instajungle all rolled into one rack with pertinent parameters assigned, this is live show gold mine, even for atmospheres.
  2. Keep your set simple but infinitely customizable by thinking in sound layers, Drums, Mids, highs.  Use Instrument and Drumracks to make these layers even more complicated. Simplers stacked in an instrument rack with a knob to switch between them is a great solution to this, you can use more complicated devices than simplers but remember keeping the set lean and mean is the ideal.
  3. A good trick is to make some basic midi drum loops and use that channel to drive another channel that actually contains the sounds. Set the drum rack channel to ‘in’ and then make a second drum rack channel that takes midi in from  your drum controller. Now you can have basic loops going and add fills by hand.

Just making some notes now to keep track of what I might do for the party mix when I get home.

March 11, 2009 | Filed Under Audio 

Comments

One Response to “Live Set for Saturday”

  1. Craig on March 12th, 2009 8:45 pm

    http://www.nickstutorials.com/images/sdt_mk/deviceparameters.png

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