We run it hard right, because we are only using a stereo out from the laptop and the click is coming out of the left channel. So, basically it's a mini 1/8th inch stereo out cable from the laptop that goes to 2 mono XLR cables (one is tracks the other is click). You can buy that cable at any Guitar Center. It will run songs continuous if you set it up that way. You would use what's called a "Follow Action" in Ableton. But we just trigger the songs manually usually with a trigger pad.
Thanks for a great run-through of your set up. We had been running a set up a few different ways including using Ableton to trigger our lights sending MIDI to an Obey 70. After seeing your video, it gave us a clearer way to set it up as ours was convoluted and required complicated triggering. I really want to thank you for helping us refine our process. It works much better for us now thanks to you.
Use a cheap usb to midi interface, send the midi through the interface to just about any midi device that has a sound bank to trigger a click sound of your choice. The audio can then go out through your sound card in stereo. If you want the best sound quality get a usb audio interface (which will have better sound than your internal soundcard) that has at least 2 audio outs AND midi. if you get an interface with more than 2 outs you can send the click as audio and forget the midi.
Ray, if you wanted to begin planning for the future, you could import the individual tracks that you discuss. Then to keep working the way you are presently assign every channels outputs to the Main outs (1&2). This has severals advantages. Obviously future proof. This makes it so you won't have to rework your tracks when you make the switch later. You can balance and mute each channel individually. Gives you a bit more flexibility even now. Let me know if you would like a tip on getting levels.
Wow this is exactly what I need. I was looking for a DAW that can call up a track on cue like this. Now just to actually get all my 300+ tracks over to Ableton. Never used it before.
Hi - after you import the songs, if you discover the volume levels are different - can you adjust the volume of the wav files in Ableton or do you have to re-import. I can see the waveform but can't figure out how to adjust the volume on it - don't want to have to do it live for each song in the mixer...
I was just gonna ask about the individual song volume. I have been experimenting every new song in its own column, that way I can use a multi dynamics or EQ to lightly mix every song so it flows and sounds smooth. I suppose there is no shortcut.
Thank you!!!!! I've only been looking for this tip like... forever!!! Thanks guys and let us know if you post that tutorial on how to trigger songs with a midi controller! Rock on guys!!
why do you run it hard right insted of RL stereo? Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying. Will it run songs continuous or do you click pad for each song.?
I am new to ableton. IS there a reason why you can't just use the internal metronome for your click and route it's sound to a separate output like you are doing with your click track?
I didn't understand what you were saying about having the tempos specified next to the song name in the Master column. It sounded like you were stating that if we merely write the numerical tempo as part of the text in the Master Colum "song name", that Ableton will automatically make the song's tempo to be that which you wrote. Did I get the right? Thanks for what you're sharing, too!
when you name the track then add the tempo it "senses" that and formats it so its an actual tempo. there's a format you have to use but it autofills that in...usually
+Craig “Woodchuck” Durham Yes, I have experimented and found that it does work. So, if one were to name the session in the Master Column by the song name, assuming that the entire song could be written in 1 session (but mutliple tracks is OK), then all of the tracks in a session will play simultaneously, all synced-up to the tempo specified in the Master Column's "name". So if the song's name is "Song A", one might name the whole set of tracks for a given session, in the Master Column, as "Song A 118", for example, and Ableton will actually "parse" the name of the song, by default" and pull out the numerical part, "118", and set the tempo for that session to that number, i.e. 118 BPM in this case. Thank you. :)
i have a full audio sequence that changes time sig, and bpms quite frequently..(a synth sequence, or some call backing track) How do I set the click in ear to accomodate for that?
Awesome tutorial! Only one problem. For some reason one of my backing tracks when I import it gets warped to hell during just the verses. I've tried deleting warp markers n transient things but its just one song that the verses goes off. If i play the backing track by any other means (fruity loops, VLC media player) it plays just fine...help?
Hi, this is exactly what I'm looking to do except pretty much all of our songs have varying tempos and I'm struggling to find a tutorial on this. I know I can set up master tempo automation in the arrangement view but that isn't much help when I want to create a full set with backing tracks and light show like in your video. Do you have any tips? I'm sure it must be possible somehow but I'm struggling to find anything
Does anyone get audio dropouts when using backing tracks with ableton? The «D» icon lights up about once every 20 minutes and the audio dissapears for a second
+collin bashaw I also use this method to use playback while playing live. For tempo changes, I print the click to an audio track with the tempo changes included. So instead of listening to a 4 bar midi loop, I'm using a recorded audio file.
For each song that has a different BPM they have a little button within the clip that says SLAVE BPM or something like that and it will change the bpm of ableton when you launch that clip
great video, can you suggest a more simple bit of software though, i want to have a set list of about 50 songs, wav or mp3, add a midi program change to turn the digital reverb in my rack on and off at start and end of songs, or change scenes on my digital desk, nothing more than that really, any ideas?? cheers kev
Why mono ? And does the audience hear the backing tracks in only mono as well and do they hear it coming from one side only, too ? That would be weird, wouldn't it ?
Hi Rence. What he's doing here would be perfect. I'd like to send a click and the tracks to the drummer and just the tracks to FOH. I'd like to be able to send stereo to FOH and drummer without doing the track full left mono, click full right mono thing. Any help would be awesome!
hey you guy pls help.. How can i run scene by scene like medley.. i mean.. When i play song 1 by scene 1 and next song i gonna play song 4 by scene 4 .. so.. can i press scene 4 before scene 1 stop , and then song 4 play continue after scene 1 stop .?
Can anyone here tell me. if its possible to launch a scene with all its clips from another point in time than the starting point, f.e. if during rehearsals you wanna just work on the end of a song, rather than have to play the whole thing through to get to the end ... kinda frustrating to have to sit through the whole thing just to rehearse the last 15 seconds :-/
Hi Ray, when you used the Novation launchpad were you able to asign each song in ableton to a different button on the launchpad? If I have 60 songs with 3 tracks in each all lined up in one long column on ableton could I asign each to a button to activate? thanks!
Make sure you're stopping the scene and not just the backing track. Also make sure your metronome isn't on. Hopefully, one of these suggestions helps. :)
So i purchased the “lite” version does that mean I’m only limited to doing 8 songs since it only allows me 8 rows ,max? I just wanna make sure I’m following correctly. Is there a way i can set it for more songs, or do i need to just upgrade?
+Light.Sweet.Crude The click track he made is an instrument loop created in midi. You could also use the built in metronome sound from Ableton, or use a recorded audio file.
Question: I have had difficulty getting the front of house (FOH) tracks to match on volume. You mentioned you all had to work with this as well. How did you do it? I've found that even when I bounce the individual FOH .WAV file down and check the root mean square (RMS) levels on the master buss, they are often not the same when I import them into session view. Then I have to mess with their individual volumes which works ok but is not ideal.. Great video. I've been using a similar setup for a while. Takes practice but works well.
Hey Ray, looks like this post is about a year old, but just wondering if you've experimented with running your trax stereo as opposed to mono? We run ours mono through an iPod, but I've considered the idea getting a laptop and running them more or less the way you're talking about here. So yeah I was surprised that you would still elect to run them mono with this set up. I'm guessing you've tried it and didn't like it?
thank you! This is EXACTLY what I was looking for. Do you know of an alternatives to Ableton Live? I'd be happy with something similar to Winamp that could do mp3 and Midi simultaneously.. Oh well, I have a copy of Ablelton Live Lite laying around some place.
Hi, very nice video, i´m planing to use ableton in live shows for my post-rock band in order to throw loops of guitar (to one head amp) and bass lines loops to a DI and mixer and also stereo textures (all in wav format pre recorded) and controll all ableton from my Boss ES-8 pedal midi board. We play with in ears so the clap of master clock ableton it will sound just inside the in ears. The rest it will go to a mixer normally. What do you think? Your ableton config i think it will work for me. I can use the master clock from ableton or from may Boss ES-8. I can choose. Like this ableton it will be just a slave in everthing. I don´t now what better yet. So what i need is also a sound car with several outs. One for the loop guitar (mono) other for loop bass (mono) two for the textures and synth sounds (stereo) and other for the ableton clap. At list 5 or six. Any idea. What sound sound card are you using? What do you think abaut this config?
I hope you don't take this as a stupid question, but is your Main PA volume down on the Click channel? You should have the main slider all the way down, and should only be sending the click via the monitor send. If so, and you still have the issue, (which I have had this issue as well) increase your output volume from your click track, and reduce the gain/Trim level on the mixer channel. I have found that if you have the gain/Trim Level High enough, even with the slider all the way down, The click will still give you a little blip in the sound, due to how harsh the click is. Hope this helped.
mankind3D Some interfaces don't have as good of stereo separation as you'd think, so tracks panned hard to one side can still have some bleed-through to the other side. This bleed through can happen at the hardware level in the interface, at the connector, and even in the cabling. It happens more often than you'd think, but generally you don't notice it and it's non-issue. But sending click-click into a the front of the house, even if it's 40dB down, can still result in a faintly detectable signal when you're pumping it up with a 1000W PA ;-)
Great video! Thanks for the awesome intro. Are there any sites you can download top 40 (like) samples to use to import into Ableton? I play in a 3 piece cover band and we'd love to expand our set list and take the sound to the next level. So we're looking into this kind of setup. But I'd hate to have to record 4 hours of backing tracks from scratch when their may be resources already out there.
+Manic Museum I would say if you are using a playback system, only the musician(s) that need to listen to the click track (drummer I would assume) would have to use IEM. I have performed many shows running backing tracks using many different systems. Sometimes the whole band is on IEMs and other situations that doesn't work out. As long as the drummer is playing with IEMs and playing in time and the band stays in time with the drummer, it should work out just fine.
I use Apple Mainstage, which comes with Logic but is available as a standalone for like $30, I find it to be FAR better for live music than Ableton (DJ stuff is a whole different story, but then again, I'm not a DJ)
Daniel Westphal Daniel Westphal Can you define that per song? like, some songs stop at the end and wait for a key press and others flow to the next with a specified delay between them?
Daniel Westphal yah I got that. but imagine that the singer says something between the 2 songs and you know it's about 15 seconds of talk. Like "Hi, how are you tonight? ready for some fun?" and the next song is on automatically.
Nice! Thank you. I was thinking I would have to create an empty MIDI track to put between 2 songs and make the silence. I wont do that for the majority of the songs. I'm still looking for a solution to control it with just one footswitch (just press to play next song). Some of the songs will be automatic like we have been discussing. But most of the show I will want to be just pressing a pedal to play next song, nothing more. PS - I don't even have ableton yet. I'm putting a show together and I still researching the best way to run the baking tracks. For now it seems Ableton Live is the way to go.
LAKOTAH by the looks of it the 'click' he's using is actually just an instrument loop. Meaning that he'd be able to send the audio from that specific track (instrument) to wherever he wants. If they had a separate output from the computer that the click could run from then it could be fed into in ears while the rest of the sound is fed to the speakers? just a guess but it seems that it would work something along those lines
LAKOTAH i just also saw that he's hard panned the tracks to the right and the click to the left meaning that if the output was stereo they could have one side going to speakers and the other side going to a specific sound source.
What type of soundcard/interface do you run live or do you just split the audio straight out of the laptop headphone jack? does that matter or not just as long as you pan the track left and in ears right?
Hi Ray Great video. thanks. I had a question. you mentioned that you are all on "in ears" but that you were also playing smaller shows. Given that most small venues don't have a separate monitor mixer and they don't have enough aux sends/foldback sends on the front of house mixer how do you deal with guys in the band getting what they need in their "in ears"?
+BelaTakesChase the only person that needs anything in their ears is just the drummer. as long as he can play to a click everything else works just fine.
He likely has an 8 beat gap built in to the beginning of his backing tracks. So when he starts the track, there is a full 8 beats of silence before there's any music playing
Stupid question... I am currently running tracks for a tv show via Logic X, which is great, lot's of options, but can't switch songs quickly or change show order on the fly. Looking into Ableton, and so far so good, but stuck at creating Midi Click Track. Only step missing here. Anyone have detailed info on this step? Brand new to Ableton. Thanks
+John Halterman I second that. I would like to know how you arranged the click to do 2 full measures of click before the track started and to link the midi block to be linked to the backing track.
When you write the tempo in your song's name(Right side, in the master section) like Sen Olsan Bari - 4/4 31 BPM, Ableton Live detects it automatically.
Actually you can alter the time signature for each Scene as well as the tempo, so the click track would follow whatever time signature you've set for that scene.
hi. each of your ableton scenes (master column) is a song. each of my scene is a part of a song : scene 1 is intro, scene 2 is verse etc. with what you are doing, can you also use a midi track in ableton with a master keyboard for instance to play over your wave file? or di you need a second ableton running on a separate laptop?
We run it hard right, because we are only using a stereo out from the laptop and the click is coming out of the left channel. So, basically it's a mini 1/8th inch stereo out cable from the laptop that goes to 2 mono XLR cables (one is tracks the other is click). You can buy that cable at any Guitar Center.
It will run songs continuous if you set it up that way. You would use what's called a "Follow Action" in Ableton. But we just trigger the songs manually usually with a trigger pad.
Thanks for a great run-through of your set up. We had been running a set up a few different ways including using Ableton to trigger our lights sending MIDI to an Obey 70. After seeing your video, it gave us a clearer way to set it up as ours was convoluted and required complicated triggering. I really want to thank you for helping us refine our process. It works much better for us now thanks to you.
Use a cheap usb to midi interface, send the midi through the interface to just about any midi device that has a sound bank to trigger a click sound of your choice.
The audio can then go out through your sound card in stereo.
If you want the best sound quality get a usb audio interface (which will have better sound than your internal soundcard) that has at least 2 audio outs AND midi. if you get an interface with more than 2 outs you can send the click as audio and forget the midi.
Hey, can you exlpain me how to make the click and backing tracks to sound in my ear monitors, and the backing tracks in the speaker?, thanks.
Ray, if you wanted to begin planning for the future, you could import the individual tracks that you discuss. Then to keep working the way you are presently assign every channels outputs to the Main outs (1&2). This has severals advantages. Obviously future proof. This makes it so you won't have to rework your tracks when you make the switch later. You can balance and mute each channel individually. Gives you a bit more flexibility even now. Let me know if you would like a tip on getting levels.
Wow this is exactly what I need. I was looking for a DAW that can call up a track on cue like this. Now just to actually get all my 300+ tracks over to Ableton. Never used it before.
Hey how you trigger click before song start, those 8 beats I guess you have in first column (song +click), could you explain that? thanks!!
I have a drummer named Brian; these are kind of shenanigans you come to expect from drummers named Brian. You've been warned.
Thanks for the reply, I bought a fast track 600 sound card with an aux head phone out like output 3-4 and then use for monitoring now... thanks
Could you please give me some examples of devices or software to trigger video ? Thanks
Hi - after you import the songs, if you discover the volume levels are different - can you adjust the volume of the wav files in Ableton or do you have to re-import. I can see the waveform but can't figure out how to adjust the volume on it - don't want to have to do it live for each song in the mixer...
Make sure you turn off Auto Warp long samples in the preferences menu
But with a click on the left and a mono mix of the song on the right, from where do you manage to hear the rest of the band? On stage monitors?
what would you do for songs that have tempo changes?
I was just gonna ask about the individual song volume. I have been experimenting every new song in its own column, that way I can use a multi dynamics or EQ to lightly mix every song so it flows and sounds smooth. I suppose there is no shortcut.
Great video for the impatient Ableton beginner that I am. Very useful! Thank you so much :)
How can you send a stereo mix and the click on a different output?
Can i use any song without click track in stereo track for live gig ?
Thank you!!!!! I've only been looking for this tip like... forever!!! Thanks guys and let us know if you post that tutorial on how to trigger songs with a midi controller! Rock on guys!!
why do you run it hard right insted of RL stereo? Maybe I misunderstood what you were saying. Will it run songs continuous or do you click pad for each song.?
I am new to ableton. IS there a reason why you can't just use the internal metronome for your click and route it's sound to a separate output like you are doing with your click track?
How can I adjust, that the Playback stops at the end and skip to the next!? Same as in the video!
I didn't understand what you were saying about having the tempos specified next to the song name in the Master column. It sounded like you were stating that if we merely write the numerical tempo as part of the text in the Master Colum "song name", that Ableton will automatically make the song's tempo to be that which you wrote. Did I get the right? Thanks for what you're sharing, too!
when you name the track then add the tempo it "senses" that and formats it so its an actual tempo. there's a format you have to use but it autofills that in...usually
+Craig “Woodchuck” Durham Yes, I have experimented and found that it does work. So, if one were to name the session in the Master Column by the song name, assuming that the entire song could be written in 1 session (but mutliple tracks is OK), then all of the tracks in a session will play simultaneously, all synced-up to the tempo specified in the Master Column's "name". So if the song's name is "Song A", one might name the whole set of tracks for a given session, in the Master Column, as "Song A 118", for example, and Ableton will actually "parse" the name of the song, by default" and pull out the numerical part, "118", and set the tempo for that session to that number, i.e. 118 BPM in this case. Thank you. :)
i have a full audio sequence that changes time sig, and bpms quite frequently..(a synth sequence, or some call backing track) How do I set the click in ear to accomodate for that?
Awesome tutorial! Only one problem. For some reason one of my backing tracks when I import it gets warped to hell during just the verses. I've tried deleting warp markers n transient things but its just one song that the verses goes off. If i play the backing track by any other means (fruity loops, VLC media player) it plays just fine...help?
Hi, this is exactly what I'm looking to do except pretty much all of our songs have varying tempos and I'm struggling to find a tutorial on this. I know I can set up master tempo automation in the arrangement view but that isn't much help when I want to create a full set with backing tracks and light show like in your video. Do you have any tips? I'm sure it must be possible somehow but I'm struggling to find anything
Does anyone get audio dropouts when using backing tracks with ableton? The «D» icon lights up about once every 20 minutes and the audio dissapears for a second
What if your songs have tempo changes? .-.
+collin bashaw I also use this method to use playback while playing live. For tempo changes, I print the click to an audio track with the tempo changes included. So instead of listening to a 4 bar midi loop, I'm using a recorded audio file.
For each song that has a different BPM they have a little button within the clip that says SLAVE BPM or something like that and it will change the bpm of ableton when you launch that clip
Is it possible to change tempo "on the fly"? In order to trigger playback during a song if we are not tied to the tempo from the beginning.
Brian the drummer.... ROCK AND ROLL! ;)
great video, can you suggest a more simple bit of software though, i want to have a set list of about 50 songs, wav or mp3, add a midi program change to turn the digital reverb in my rack on and off at start and end of songs, or change scenes on my digital desk, nothing more than that really, any ideas?? cheers kev
how do you create the click track and then how do you sync it with the song?
Why mono ? And does the audience hear the backing tracks in only mono as well and do they hear it coming from one side only, too ? That would be weird, wouldn't it ?
It is a mono signal with no pan when it gets split out of the computer so when in comes into the live board it will be in the center
This is exactly what I'm trying to do. Do you have a tutorial on how to get to this point. Kind of a start from the beginning, get to here?
Might be a stupid question but how to you get that playlist setup you use throughout the vid?
Hi Rence. What he's doing here would be perfect. I'd like to send a click and the tracks to the drummer and just the tracks to FOH. I'd like to be able to send stereo to FOH and drummer without doing the track full left mono, click full right mono thing. Any help would be awesome!
Great tutorial!
I just can't get any sound from the clicktrack (MIDI track)
Is there anything special I have to do with the MIDI track to get sound?
hey you guy pls help.. How can i run scene by scene like medley.. i mean.. When i play song 1 by scene 1 and next song i gonna play song 4 by scene 4 .. so.. can i press scene 4 before scene 1 stop , and then song 4 play continue after scene 1 stop .?
how do you vary the amount of count in? like 2 bars or 4 bars for the "click" to run before the track starts playing?
Can anyone here tell me. if its possible to launch a scene with all its clips from another point in time than the starting point, f.e. if during rehearsals you wanna just work on the end of a song, rather than have to play the whole thing through to get to the end ... kinda frustrating to have to sit through the whole thing just to rehearse the last 15 seconds :-/
Hi Ray,
when you used the Novation launchpad were you able to asign each song in ableton to a different button on the launchpad? If I have 60 songs with 3 tracks in each all lined up in one long column on ableton could I asign each to a button to activate?
thanks!
Hey guys! How to stop the click-click track automatically as soon as backing track is over? My click loop continues to play :(
Make sure you're stopping the scene and not just the backing track. Also make sure your metronome isn't on. Hopefully, one of these suggestions helps. :)
So i purchased the “lite” version does that mean I’m only limited to doing 8 songs since it only allows me 8 rows ,max? I just wanna make sure I’m following correctly. Is there a way i can set it for more songs, or do i need to just upgrade?
Great Video, But why use Mono Tracks and not stereo ?
Someone please respond lol, I can set a metronome to play but can't make a separate click track... how are you doing that?
+Light.Sweet.Crude The click track he made is an instrument loop created in midi. You could also use the built in metronome sound from Ableton, or use a recorded audio file.
Keep hustling, big things incoming! 🚀
What version pf ableton live is this? It looks like all I need so i dont need the 2019 version.
Awesome
Fuck sake, Brian.
if you are using it in mono ….why don't using I tune or your iphone to play you tracks?
+topaktarus no click track in monitor to start songs maybe...
+Dan Marshall you can have your click on left and the track on right?...,. Easy does it :-)
Question: I have had difficulty getting the front of house (FOH) tracks to match on volume. You mentioned you all had to work with this as well. How did you do it? I've found that even when I bounce the individual FOH .WAV file down and check the root mean square (RMS) levels on the master buss, they are often not the same when I import them into session view. Then I have to mess with their individual volumes which works ok but is not ideal..
Great video. I've been using a similar setup for a while. Takes practice but works well.
Hey Ray, looks like this post is about a year old, but just wondering if you've experimented with running your trax stereo as opposed to mono? We run ours mono through an iPod, but I've considered the idea getting a laptop and running them more or less the way you're talking about here. So yeah I was surprised that you would still elect to run them mono with this set up. I'm guessing you've tried it and didn't like it?
Where can I get a copy of your template? Are you just using a mouse or you using a controller to trigger Ableton? Maybe you re still around.
Thank you for explaining! :) but i have a question...
How do you run inear for every member?
thank you! This is EXACTLY what I was looking for. Do you know of an alternatives to Ableton Live? I'd be happy with something similar to Winamp that could do mp3 and Midi simultaneously.. Oh well, I have a copy of Ablelton Live Lite laying around some place.
Hi, very nice video, i´m planing to use ableton in live shows for my post-rock band in order to throw loops of guitar (to one head amp) and bass lines loops to a DI and mixer and also stereo textures (all in wav format pre recorded) and controll all ableton from my Boss ES-8 pedal midi board. We play with in ears so the clap of master clock ableton it will sound just inside the in ears. The rest it will go to a mixer normally. What do you think? Your ableton config i think it will work for me. I can use the master clock from ableton or from may Boss ES-8. I can choose. Like this ableton it will be just a slave in everthing. I don´t now what better yet.
So what i need is also a sound car with several outs. One for the loop guitar (mono) other for loop bass (mono) two for the textures and synth sounds (stereo) and other for the ableton clap. At list 5 or six. Any idea. What sound sound card are you using? What do you think abaut this config?
even when i pan the tracks, you can still hear the click in the pa system. how can i fix this? PLEAS HELP
I hope you don't take this as a stupid question, but is your Main PA volume down on the Click channel? You should have the main slider all the way down, and should only be sending the click via the monitor send. If so, and you still have the issue, (which I have had this issue as well) increase your output volume from your click track, and reduce the gain/Trim level on the mixer channel. I have found that if you have the gain/Trim Level High enough, even with the slider all the way down, The click will still give you a little blip in the sound, due to how harsh the click is. Hope this helped.
mankind3D Some interfaces don't have as good of stereo separation as you'd think, so tracks panned hard to one side can still have some bleed-through to the other side. This bleed through can happen at the hardware level in the interface, at the connector, and even in the cabling. It happens more often than you'd think, but generally you don't notice it and it's non-issue. But sending click-click into a the front of the house, even if it's 40dB down, can still result in a faintly detectable signal when you're pumping it up with a 1000W PA ;-)
hey how much songs can 1 ableton file or page hold ?
2-- 300 ? possibly ?
how how much sets can it hold ?
Great video! Thanks for the awesome intro. Are there any sites you can download top 40 (like) samples to use to import into Ableton? I play in a 3 piece cover band and we'd love to expand our set list and take the sound to the next level. So we're looking into this kind of setup. But I'd hate to have to record 4 hours of backing tracks from scratch when their may be resources already out there.
Thanks man. Really appreciate the tempo change tip.
Thanks for this overview. We're a trio and trying to incorporate synths without adding more people. Is it necessary for all 3 of us to have IEM?
+Manic Museum I would say if you are using a playback system, only the musician(s) that need to listen to the click track (drummer I would assume) would have to use IEM. I have performed many shows running backing tracks using many different systems. Sometimes the whole band is on IEMs and other situations that doesn't work out. As long as the drummer is playing with IEMs and playing in time and the band stays in time with the drummer, it should work out just fine.
I use Apple Mainstage, which comes with Logic but is available as a standalone for like $30, I find it to be FAR better for live music than Ableton (DJ stuff is a whole different story, but then again, I'm not a DJ)
Igénytelen programozó munka.
What do you have to do to get the set list to advance to the next song automatically. I can't find anything that explains this.
Daniel Westphal Daniel Westphal Can you define that per song? like, some songs stop at the end and wait for a key press and others flow to the next with a specified delay between them?
Daniel Westphal yah I got that. but imagine that the singer says something between the 2 songs and you know it's about 15 seconds of talk. Like "Hi, how are you tonight? ready for some fun?" and the next song is on automatically.
Nice! Thank you. I was thinking I would have to create an empty MIDI track to put between 2 songs and make the silence.
I wont do that for the majority of the songs. I'm still looking for a solution to control it with just one footswitch (just press to play next song). Some of the songs will be automatic like we have been discussing. But most of the show I will want to be just pressing a pedal to play next song, nothing more.
PS - I don't even have ableton yet. I'm putting a show together and I still researching the best way to run the baking tracks. For now it seems Ableton Live is the way to go.
I have a question: How do you direct the tracks + click to drummer and just the tracks to the main P.A. system run by the venue's sound operator?
LAKOTAH by the looks of it the 'click' he's using is actually just an instrument loop. Meaning that he'd be able to send the audio from that specific track (instrument) to wherever he wants. If they had a separate output from the computer that the click could run from then it could be fed into in ears while the rest of the sound is fed to the speakers? just a guess but it seems that it would work something along those lines
LAKOTAH i just also saw that he's hard panned the tracks to the right and the click to the left meaning that if the output was stereo they could have one side going to speakers and the other side going to a specific sound source.
What type of soundcard/interface do you run live or do you just split the audio straight out of the laptop headphone jack? does that matter or not just as long as you pan the track left and in ears right?
I watched another video saying the cheapest is to use a splitter. click to the drummer and sound to the PA
Hey Rus I've been back tracking for about 25 + years , I have all sorts if ways od doing it let me know if you need help
Hi Ray Great video. thanks. I had a question. you mentioned that you are all on "in ears" but that you were also playing smaller shows. Given that most small venues don't have a separate monitor mixer and they don't have enough aux sends/foldback sends on the front of house mixer how do you deal with guys in the band getting what they need in their "in ears"?
+BelaTakesChase the only person that needs anything in their ears is just the drummer. as long as he can play to a click everything else works just fine.
He likely has an 8 beat gap built in to the beginning of his backing tracks. So when he starts the track, there is a full 8 beats of silence before there's any music playing
Excelente aporte hermano! bendito seas!
Stupid question... I am currently running tracks for a tv show via Logic X, which is great, lot's of options, but can't switch songs quickly or change show order on the fly. Looking into Ableton, and so far so good, but stuck at creating Midi Click Track. Only step missing here. Anyone have detailed info on this step? Brand new to Ableton. Thanks
+John Halterman
I second that. I would like to know how you arranged the click to do 2 full measures of click before the track started and to link the midi block to be linked to the backing track.
+Jared Burkhalter Hey Jared... I have this all figured out and it's pretty simple. Let me know if you need a hand
Yes, please
+Jared Burkhalter If you have team viewer or Skype be happy to run you through the process. you can hit me directly at john@skee.tv
Hi! I'd also like to know how to solve this... do you already know and could explain? That would be great!
thank you! very informative
How do you find out the tempo for the song? Does ableton find it itself?
When you write the tempo in your song's name(Right side, in the master section) like Sen Olsan Bari - 4/4 31 BPM, Ableton Live detects it automatically.
shinedown love em tho
How do you change tempo between tracks ?
Yes all the songs has different bpms
awesome! thank you!
Thx so much for info this helps a lot.
I suppose that the click MIDI track is only as useful as long as all the songs are 4/4 time signature.
Actually you can alter the time signature for each Scene as well as the tempo, so the click track would follow whatever time signature you've set for that scene.
Hands Of Blue Music How to do when the song has two or more time signatures? Say, pre chorus is 6/4 and the rest of the song is 4/4
search a tutorial on "ableton live follow actions"
Thank you much! NOAH
im just uploading something that may help everyone. if you need assistance message me. ill post the link as a reply to this video and also on comments
Yeah Bryan lol
1:45
Then you could say..."We started from the bottom now we're here..." Ba Dah Tssshhhh...
I don't like how your voice trails off....
hi. each of your ableton scenes (master column) is a song. each of my scene is a part of a song : scene 1 is intro, scene 2 is verse etc. with what you are doing, can you also use a midi track in ableton with a master keyboard for instance to play over your wave file? or di you need a second ableton running on a separate laptop?