I’ve been experimenting with Ableton Live after all these years of having it sit in a folder I never touch. I love and hate it; it can do almost everything I want it to, but it can do so much more than I’ll ever care to need. I wish there was a way to turn off all the features that I don’t use and make it look less cluttered. Plus, coming from YEARS of Pro Tools, learning an entirely different interface doesn’t come easily to me.
I’ve been working on using it as both a sampler and a loop station. It is intuitive until it comes to tempo - the looping via a midi control pedal (in this case, my keyboard) involves starting and stopping at “the begining of the next measure” which can kind of screw things up if you’re not playing to a metronome, which I certainly don’t want to live.
I know this program is notorious for its quantizing but I can’t seem to make it work on the fly. I think I need to just spend more time with it. I tried playing “Once in a While” and just laying down the initial acoustic track was a bit of a pain in the ass because if you stop playing the stop is included in the loop, and if you play too long it overlaps in the real-time audio as the loop starts over.
There’s also no auto-start that I’ve figured out yet. That could save me a lot of time.
I’ve been separating songs into what needs loops and what needs triggered sequences. That’s been fun, the songs that need both may very well kill me if I ever perform them.
No matter what, I’m going to have to be extremely tight with what I do. Little or no room for screw ups, which I’m not sure how I feel about. I like being fluid live, not constrained. This method will let me perform the songs as they are meant to be played but at the cost of fun? I’m not sold.
Maybe fuck loops altogether and just trigger Midi shit? Research must has happen.
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