Comments on: Ableton Live: Are You a Dragger, or a Freak?

By: bb

bb — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 00:57:53 +0000

I’m not sure where I stand yet. At this time I’m sequencing in Live, but I’m doing it with stuff that I’ve planned out. I can’t get my head around how to record a midi piece on the fly and then loop it on the fly all live. I’m trying to learn, but I would be open to input from anyone. I want to learn about the live recording of clips both MIDI and audio, and use that in a live setting. Are there any good tutorials on this?

By: pierlu

pierlu — Tue, 08 May 2007 10:07:21 +0000

well
i’m a dragger but also a live sample/midi recorder.
i do drag prearranged sets of drum loops into live, then manipulate them and rerecord them on fly after aplying fx mapped to knobs faders. then i play the keyboard into different channels set up with different instruments (bass, pads, piano) and build everything from scratch… if i am to play former compositions, i just extract loops from them and use them as the basis from the live mangling and recording.
basically i use a 4 octave keyboard whose last octave is marked to arm and record clips.

By: Bill Van Loo

Bill Van Loo — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:06:43 +0000

joe jost: there’s a great community I’m part of that focuses on using electronics in worship settings. Check it out:

http://www.bwacksforum.com

bvl

By: NineTailedFox

NineTailedFox — Mon, 07 May 2007 07:43:52 +0000

Thanks, man.

By: Fabio FZero

Fabio FZero — Mon, 07 May 2007 01:28:45 +0000

The tutorial is now online, as promised! See it here!

By: VanceG

VanceG — Sun, 06 May 2007 23:21:03 +0000

And I gotta admit that I’m exaggerating how very ‘live’ I am with Live: I, too, have a bit of a hard time creating proper Live arrangements in real-time by recording clips of myself playing. I do that to some degree. Mostly, though, I use Live as a really flexible mixing/routing and processing environment. When performing I’m mainly using Live in this way. At home/studio I tend to build Live sessions mainly by dragging individual clips that I have made of myself playing guitar live.

I don’t normally use many loops (per se) in my music….so it’s a little odd for me to create Live sessions in the more ‘traditional’ sense.

By: DJ McManus

DJ McManus — Sun, 06 May 2007 16:31:51 +0000

tricil is a Freak in Drag. :smile:

By: Richard Swelling

Richard Swelling — Sun, 06 May 2007 03:13:37 +0000

We have a duo with drummer and bass…both of us run live and trigger samples. We kind of have to “freak” but we also set up looping sections of songs using the follow actions (which are so dang cool). Sometimes in the looping sections we can drag other samples and tweak effects…but since we are playing other instruments we mostly have to progress through a song step by step. We don’t use the sampler much so opening a new set for each song is not so taxing currently. It’s taken us about 6 months to learn Live but it has been totally worth it.

By: joe jost

joe jost — Sun, 06 May 2007 01:06:04 +0000

I play bass (guitar and synth) with a couple different groups, often for church worship services. I mainly use Ableton and my Motu 828mkII as a fancy multi-track tape system that plays whatever parts we don’t have human musicians for. Depending on the occasion, this could mean drums, extra keyboard parts, backing vocals, and “guitar” parts played in the upper frets of the bass.

Live looping would be the coolest but the songs we play are often tightly structured and any mistake at all would wreck everything (the congregation is singing along!) so we just go with pre-recorded loops. However, these loops are mostly recorded by myself and the other musicians during rehearsal while also throwing the sets together, often an hour or two before we go on.

The sets are usually pretty linear - no time to do more fancy stuff. I don’t do much effects or tweaking either. The bass is a (mostly) two-handed instruments, so once we start playing, all I can do is trigger scenes and maybe do a little mixing.

I’d love to do more experimental electronic stuff, but still it’s amazing what you can throw together even in a ‘traditional’ setting like this.

By: Deer

Deer — Sat, 05 May 2007 22:10:17 +0000

I used to be a freak, but since I got a Monome 40h I’m mainly using Max/MSP rewired into Live, only using Live as a sophisticated FX box for the various Rewire busses, controlling levels and FX via a Remote SL Zero. The plan is to eventually reintroduce some live softsynths and maybe sample on the fly, but for now I’m happy with my setup that completely liberates me from using the laptop keyboard. good times.