ABLETON:

Ableton Live Suite handles our live audio. We were running into issues reading and writing to the internal 1 TB Flash Drive in the MacBook Pro fast enough.

We decided to give the suggested multiple hard drive setup a shot. It seems to have worked quite well so far. Ableton suggests in this article using up to 3 separate SSD Hard Drives for optimal performance.

A lack of daisy chain options with our Thunderbolt gear (one of two ports dedicated to the MOTU, the other to the external SSD) has kept us to a 2 SSD hard drive setup.

We’ll keep testing, but so far this seems to have done the trick for our set, which is admittedly complicated.

We’re asking a lot of Ableton. We want to be able to trigger stems or loops from our album at will. We also want to be able to Loop live audio as we perform. We use Session mode as we want to record our performance in Arrangement view.

We exported our album Stems into Ableton to allow us to utilize them however much or little we would like to on stage.

Naming conventions are used to set the global BPM and Time Signature. “103 BPM: 4/4 SIG”

ClyphX Triggers

Scenes trigger ClyphX Pro clips that can do a number of different things. We have them setup to change the global BPM of the project, assign the Scale on our Push 2 controller for the song, and display a message on the Push 2 display: Tell Me You Love Me (G)

[] PUSH MSG "Tell Me You Love Me (G)" ; PUSH SCL ROOT G ; PUSH SCL TYPE MAJOR

Colors are displayed on Push 2’s main pad area. Using consistent colors can help keep track of progress through tracks.

Scene Colors

We use Yellow for Count-In sections. These can be extended to give us time to build loops before Stems are played.

  • Solo = Orange

  • End = Red

  • Chorus = Blue (Coral Blue)

  • Verse = Green (Verde)

  • Bridge = Brown

We break up our inputs into folders. This makes Looping way easier and more flexible. Audio can be added to loopers or removed from Loopers on the fly, just by re-arranging foddering structures.

Inputs

Channels are color coded

Guitar = Yellow

Lead = Orange

Piano = Pink

Vocals = Green

Bass = Blue

Drums = Red

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