Posted on - February 20, 2007 [at] 10:57 am by Brad
Tagged in - rant, tech
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Setting up all this live show stuff is officially kicking my ass. I am angry and hurt and tired. I’m about ready to put together a live show of me configuring software for an hour and a half and call it “Working-on-a-Performance Art”.
My mind is blown — BLOWN — by how annoying this all is with the tools currently available. I’m jealous of DJs. It’s like nobody designing software wants anyone to change chords mid-song anymore. “You mean you have two SEPARATE chord sequences in a song? That’s unsanity!”
I got some emails from musicians using Live who feel similarly and Peter Kirn from Create Digital Music listened to me cry on the phone. Matt from Flux Minor shared his live Ableton project with me. His approach was to render individual channels (drums, bass, etc) of the entire track instead of recreating it loop-based as I was.
It gives you less flexibility but he assured me they haven’t felt the need to alter arrangements on the fly while performing. So I ran off in that direction as it sounded a lot easier. I was four songs into the rendering and recreating process when I realized Ableton Live can only send program changes to external gear (like my GT-6) at the launch of a new clip. So if you’re not setting it up all crazy like I was before you’re SOL for program changes.
Guess I’ll go kick something.
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3 Comments on this post
craig on Ableton Dead
February 20, 2007 at 1:12 pm
can’t you just split the track clip in arrangement view and set the program for the new clip?
Future Boy on Ableton Dead
February 20, 2007 at 3:19 pm
There’s always karaoke.
ken on Ableton Dead
February 23, 2007 at 2:19 am
Dude, it sounds to me like using an old-school tracker would be more up your alley. I used to do live shows with an Amiga program called OcatMED which had “patterns” of 64 notes which I could switch between at will. Of course, it didn’t really allow for much rhythmic flexibility, but if you are using samples, it could work just fine…