And now the thrilling conclusion of yesterday’s tip by my first guest tipster, Chris Buono! Within the confines of Ableton Live there’s more to the name game than just track identification. As you may already know, the Master track contains Scene Launchers. These slots can be renamed easily with the same steps used for track naming. Naming […]
ABLETON LIVE: NOT SO MUCH
Occasionally people ask me questions about how to set up Ableton Live to work more like a conventional DJ program: how to play a musically diverse set where you don’t want to beat match anything (turn Warp off for all clips), how to launch clips instantaneously (set Quantize to None), and how to deal with […]
LOOP IT LIVE
If you look at the Clip View for any clip in my current Hobotech set, you’ll see that I have several controls MIDI mapped: The Loop switch is used to enable or disable the clip’s loop points, while the Set buttons are used to set loop points interactively while the clip is playing back. […]
THE BIG NUDGE
Even with my tracks broken down into multiple clips, I still want a bit more flexibility in terms of getting around a clip on the gig. For example, I might want to mix in a song from a position other than the four that I’ve already picked out. This is where the clip nudge controls […]
THE LITTLE NUDGE
Nudging can be done in small values as well – not just by the bar like I mentioned yesterday. The advantage of working with smaller quantize values (try 1/16), is that you can intentionally offset clips from each other by launching them at different points in the bar. If your new to this, its well […]
SEND TO CUE
From time to time, you may encounter a situation where it’s more practical to cue tracks by using a send instead of Live’s built-in Cue feature. The setup looks like this: In the above example, return track A is set up as a cue track. Check out it’s Audio To routing – anything sent to […]
THE (UN)LIMITER
Folks often discuss whether or not to use any compression or limiting on the Master track of a set used for performance. (There’s no one right answer to this.) For a set where some of the material is already fully mixed and mastered, the answer is mostly no. For my current hybrid DJ set, I […]
CROSSFADE WHAT?
I’m not a crossfader guy: mixing with the volume faders has always made the most sense to me. However, over the last year, I’ve come up with some fun uses for the crossfader on my VCM-600. I use it to switch between my main channels and my effect returns. Today, I’ll show you a basic […]
INSTANT BEAT JUGGLE
One simple and incredibly fun way to use return tracks with the crossfader is for simple beat juggling. To do this, throw a Simple Delay on the return track set up like this: All you’re doing is using the delay as an 1/8 note offset, so every time you flip the crossfader, the signal is […]
SHIFT THE BEAT, KILL THE KICK
The beat juggle trick described yesterday works well for all sorts of music, but not all types – it’s often problematic for house, techno, or any sort of groove based around a straight quarter note kick drum. The straight kick rhythm is so dominant, that turning it around even briefly can really upset the flow […]
