live performance mode

Share what you’d like to see added to Ableton Live.
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nerveagent
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live performance mode

Post by nerveagent » Tue Jan 06, 2004 11:00 am

here's a little to-do i think would be a killer feature for live. it's a bit of a funny request, because it's about a new set of features for using live in a live context !

I will explain. I am not a dj. I make music in my studio and sometimes perform it on the road using Live 3.0. my recent project involved spending my holidays learning to play dub reggae classics on my bass, transcribing it via keyboard into my desktop as midi. (sometimes straight to the keyboard) and recording the result playing a synthesiser, adding most of the other parts, sometime improvised, sometime original melody (so they really are 'covers' in some cases sans vocals). then i take the recorded audio chunks and use live to arrange the bits that go together.

When I make a track with live, I put all the major elements into a live song as clips, arranged into convienient scenes, with some effects and what have you and I jam the song live with a novation remote25 controller keyboard. so far so conventional.

but i don't want to make one big messy song with all clips in it. i need to make a individual song arrangement.

it comes down to song management. instead of using one big live song for the whole set, I prefer to make each song i do a whole live song by itself. this way i can have individual tempo settings per song and different effects and so on. musical key is important for my music as well, typically.

anyway, what live seems to lack for me, is some way to load one song while another is playing, and transition between the two. i realise this is a very complex request, potentially with conflicts that require effectively two instances of live running at once, or other issues that might be very difficult to resolve.

one idea might be to have a 'clip group'. this is a variable rectangular area of slots with defined clips in each slot. you could drag and drop clip or slot group chunks into the session page. like a spreadsheet copies and pastes groups of cells. there you go, excel-o-music, now i remember what i was reminded of when i first saw that grid interface. ((it should be row and column sizable like spreadsheets too then !!)). or a block of 'core' memory, which i had worked with in the r.a.n., was the other thing i was reminded of but grids are always like that i suppose.

another way to acheive it might be to develop a something which i will call the 'performance' for the sake of my argument. performances contain sets of songs. not their order. you use the

the performance could resolve potential conflicts by having settings that override conflicting settings in songs. such as by overriding insert effects, and storing information on tempo matching and morphing behaviour and quantise and mix settings. e.g. whether to simply cut mix to new song settings or morph the tempo over some x num of bars at what point and for how many bars.

songs clips would each go to dj mix bus thus allowing audio mixing of the songs in dj familiar fashion. this setting overrides song setting. individual clips settings entirely from song or clip. e.g warp, loop,

you could horizontally 'split' the screen to show song 'a' containing a session of clips upper and song 'b' clips session page lower, or horizontally depending on screen layout. ( i have widescreen, so two songs can live for me side-by-side best).

you could have a switch and a fader(s) that controls the settings - a tempo mix slider <--> between the two song regions. the fader controls the % 'mix' of a range of preset mixer parameters via a selectable curve function. same sort of control surface as a dj x-fade.

audio mix controlled separately as simply two stereo channel mixers. double the track capacity (potentially) necessary as just one song though, so therefore songs have a complexity limit of some kind.

performances saved seperately and include the set of directories 1 2 3 - locations where candidate songs are available to drag onto session A or B.

arrangements disabled?

save as self-contained performance copies the lot, clips and songs, to a nominated directory using the performance name, just like self contained songs work. self-contained performance also performs necessary operations to alter the copies of the song copies, which are now each, self-contained.

also interface requires hover/ballon help system. right mouse button needs to be respected. as its familiar interface paradigm and saves keystrokes.

nerveagent
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Post by nerveagent » Sun Jan 11, 2004 1:19 am

so ... nobody here ever tries to use live to load live songs consectutively and wants to be able to do this without live stopping playing each time? i.e seamless continuous mix? hmmm.

Pitch Black
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Post by Pitch Black » Sun Jan 11, 2004 2:20 am

Oh yes indeed we do, Nerveagent. My band has to use long stereo "joiner" samples playing off an S6000 to cover between LIVE song loads. I've tried making up the "mega" one whole set song ln LIVE but its just not feasable with the way we use different fx, channel structures and so forth. A multiple song mode would be great. Along with a more-channels-visible-per-screen-but-you-can-still-see-the-clips mode.

cheers
p
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nerveagent
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Post by nerveagent » Sun Jan 11, 2004 2:27 am

Pitch Black wrote:Oh yes indeed we do, Nerveagent. My band has to use long stereo "joiner" samples playing off an S6000 to cover between LIVE song loads. I've tried making up the "mega" one whole set song ln LIVE but its just not feasable with the way we use different fx, channel structures and so forth. A multiple song mode would be great. Along with a more-channels-visible-per-screen-but-you-can-still-see-the-clips mode.
i started to just ignore it and forget about seamless mix now. its only a second or two to wait for the load. but it would be nice to have the choice.

maybe the euros and the yanks aren't as interested in the matter as us antipodean folk.

Martyn
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Post by Martyn » Mon Jan 12, 2004 9:46 pm

Not being able to open multiple instances of Live, definately limits it's "liveness" I've not really found a satisfactory way to build a set other than using lots of pre-rendered tunes. A performance mode would be most welcome. BTW I'm in Cornwall England, I think we're classed as european. Though it's looking more like American these days. :wink:

Guest

Post by Guest » Mon Jan 12, 2004 10:11 pm

Pitch Black wrote:Oh yes indeed we do, Nerveagent. My band has to use long stereo "joiner" samples playing off an S6000 to cover between LIVE song loads. I've tried making up the "mega" one whole set song ln LIVE but its just not feasable with the way we use different fx, channel structures and so forth. A multiple song mode would be great. Along with a more-channels-visible-per-screen-but-you-can-still-see-the-clips mode.

cheers
p
Pitchblack, please join my "more-channels-visible-per-screen-but-you-can-still-see-the-clips mode" thread in this forum if you get a chance, the more the merrier, hopefully ableton will respond with the goods!

nerveagent
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Post by nerveagent » Tue Jan 13, 2004 8:07 am

Martyn wrote:Not being able to open multiple instances of Live, definately limits it's "liveness" I've not really found a satisfactory way to build a set other than using lots of pre-rendered tunes. A performance mode would be most welcome. BTW I'm in Cornwall England, I think we're classed as european. Though it's looking more like American these days. :wink:
it does seem to be an oversight ... seems to me that they really intended ppl to use a ton of samples and just drop them onto the session screen as they go along. but like mr.pitchblak i have different setups on a per 'song' basis. another thing i also think it needs and which would go along with this general theme is more arrangements per session, i.e multiple 'jams' per session you set up. but it needs to be extended with the idea of the performance as a performance of number of live songs.

it's a big chunk of work, no doubt about it, but the sooner they start the sooner they finish. ;)

you could even do it as a whole other program which can play multiple live songs, sacrificing editing capabilities in order to do it. that would do the trick as well. a "live performer".

then you could sell the performer seperately and people coule release their 'live sets' for people to 'live dj' off their computers.

eventually you could reduce the performance mode to something that lives in flash ROM in a piece of hardware that looks like a dj mixer or dj-cd decks, with a few extra plugs and sockets of course.

then instead of cds as musicians sell live songs on dvd-rom.

r,
nerv-ajentzzz

ps sorry about the whole 'euro' thing this topic sat there for days and ppl ignored it. i suppose i wrote too much for most people to be bothered reading all the way through.

pps Gone American? you got nothing on Oz mate we've got the wide open space and endless suburbs stuff too. last time i was in old Blighty (2000) it was still looking all very 'sheep may safely graze' so don't fret just yet. i could live in the english countryside very comfortably thank you very much.

ppps Guest, i think the interface should have flexible layout so ppl can make the most (or least) of their screen space as they see fit in their own configuration. kinda like the way the eclipse (java ide) perspectives and views works, but obviously in a way that looks (and behaves) better / more musical than eclipse does.

madlab
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Post by madlab » Tue Jan 13, 2004 8:17 am

Hi antipodeans people :o Maybe the gap you get between loading songs in Live is due to jet lag :wink:
I'm with you to ask for a way to get this "multi-song" thing.
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Guest

Post by Guest » Thu Jan 15, 2004 11:28 am

nerveagent wrote:
Pitch Black wrote:its only a second or two to wait for the load.

I would prefer loading songs, a block of scenes or how you'd like to call it into a playing song as I'd like to mix the songs with each other.

To do it now all my songs have to be in on huge live file. Not comfortable.

podprod
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song sets

Post by podprod » Fri Mar 12, 2004 11:40 pm

Great point here..thoughts?
Pod

nerveagent
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Post by nerveagent » Sat Mar 13, 2004 12:08 am

the more i think about it the more i really want this feature. perhaps the easiest way to implement it is in a second program or performance mode that is dedicated to just the playback and cross fading of multiple songs at the session level.

you would only need two sessions per performance because you could treat them like big clips. i.e. drag and drop the song from the explorer to one of the session slots.

another hassle with loading songs one after another is the inevitable 'do you want to save this song' dialog when you do. at the very least, they could enable a performer mode in 3.1 that allows disabling this dialog.

although I do think my idea for a hardware based performance-mode tool would also work, ableton only need pay me a small royalty. ;-) you could also do it as a dedicated controller for a laptop.

something that occured to me as well that's lacking in live is in regards to sessions and arrangements. a song ought to have multiple arrangements or jams associated to it.

so a song should contain; a session and multiple arrangements

and a performance ought to work on the level of a song's sessions only, and contain multiple songs arranged in a (possibly ordered) list, with only two songs allowed to be active at any one time.


additionally the screen needs more flexible layout, as I am finding with my widescreen laptop, I usually have wasted horizontal space. For example I would like to be able to move and dock things like the effects window to be at the side rather than the bottom, and have the clip edit still open at the bottom. But i'd settle for just a performance mode.

nerveagent
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Post by nerveagent » Sun Jun 06, 2004 12:07 pm

I am interested to hear if this feature request has been addressed in Live 4. It doesn't look like it, directly, but are there any other features to allow you to smoothly switch songs in a set?

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