Playing Live

A live setup for Ableton Live

It just does live gigs

I guess most musicians use Ableton Live live like I use it. Its kind of the standard way of building a live set. This article describes the details in the implementation as I use it.

So there is Session View with the track channels laid out with different instruments and the scene rows with the different songs. Within each song several scenes with the intro, verses, choruses, break and outro. Ableton will follow the bpm mentioned in the description and you can set the Launch Follow Action to let Ableton run the flow of each song. This way Ableton will back your song live with the right scenes with the push of a button. With effects automated or manual as you want it and in the correct tempo. Additionally I use MIDI Program Change commands to instruct the Nord and the Korg to switch to the right instruments for any scene of any song.

Ableton Live live set
Ableton Live live set

In my case I play solo, or with aid of other musicians. I can choose which track to leave out, the backing vocals, the bass or at least one or more keys. On the whole Ableton Live runs the show in my case, so I should be careful not to bore the audience with too much music out of the box. I should keep working on performance, video tracks and light effects all the time. I try to use only Ableton Push, avoiding the use of the laptop to start and stop.

What’s on the monitor?

Lets start cheating a little. Because not every track has drums, I rely on a click that gets routed to the monitor. In the above picture you can see the click track on the left. It just plays and plays and gets send to the Cue out Return Track C. Return Track C works pre-fader so it is in no way linked to the master mix. The cue out goes to a separate output on the audio interface and thus can be mixed to all monitors. For now this suffices.

All live instruments, vocals output and everything from Ableton Live gets mixed in by the audio interface. The audience hears the Master Out mixed and on stage you hear the Cue Out mixed with the click.

Prepare for the worst

My live set contains an instrument rack that is setup to be a playable, plug in based copy of the most important instruments I use live.  Should an instrument break down, I will then have the option to use any MIDI keyboard to replace it. The plug in sounds are not as nice as the Nord and Korg sounds, but I will have something to play instead of nothing.

Live Instrument Rack
Live Instrument Rack

To make sure that I will always have a way to recover in case of emergency the entire live set is stored in the Cloud. This way I can fine tune the Ableton Live live set from home and push it to the Cloud. The moment I open the laptop for a show and there is Internet it will sync up. I use OneDrive but any Cloud product is fine. Should the laptop break down, from any other laptop I should be able to recover the Ableton Live install, a few plugins and packs and any interface and sync the live set again. At the last moment a backup laptop should be ready to swap in on the spot if needed. Lets pray it will never come to this, but if it can happen it will.

 

Published by

TheWim

B2FAB is a solo project of The Wim, straight from a small studio in the attic. The Wim was a songwriter and keyboard player in Iceparty and various projects after that.

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