Introduction

On my way to the first european blip festival, I took the ferry from Gothenburg in Sweden to Frederikshavn in Danmark and had the great pleasure to see that Covox doing the same trip. Amongst a flurry of discussions going from stationnaries/stickers addiction to the bad swedse habit of not understanding Danish, we had a little chat about Ableton live…
Of all the people that got from pure Gameboy music to a more rockin’/dancy territory, he’s certainly one that had great success in achieving it and his set at eurofest was once again a demonstration of his ability to burn the floor.

It’s been quite a bit of time that I felt like using Live for doing livesets. Even tho I’m still loving my portable units to track in the bus, the idea of taking a small laptop and a serie of controllers beats the one to transport 3 PSPs, GP2x’s and Gameboys together with a huge string of cables.

I’ve never really taken the time to dig the possibilities of the session vue in detail, and even if I was sure I didn’t want to use the arrangement side for live (because it would make everything too rigid), I had trouble translating the way I work into something that would make sense there.

Hopefully, I got to spend a little time fiddling with Live while in Scandinavia and I think it’s slowly getting together.

I’m not going to pretend I’m doing a revolutionary series of post here but I though a few might end up taking the same path and that it would therefore make sense to log my experience here..

Song structure

The way I write is not really loop-based. There’s always a evolving structure and I like to keep that tight. For this reason, preparing my sets in LDSj/LGPT always consist in taking the songs and cutting them into big chunks. A little bit along the “intro/build-up/verse/chorus/…” idea -except I don’t really do pop.

Then I separate the chunks by an empty set of chain so that, unless I’m doing something to move to the next block, the current chunk will keep on looping. Here’s an example with an extended view of my shaxweek live project:

I really enjoy this structure because it garantees the track’s cohesion but it allows me to repeat parts that are importants, extend the track or shorten it if it happens to clear the floor

My first experiment with Live was to be able to replicate this structure and see how it would feel.

Porting it to Live

The first thing to do is to of course to render the tracks. Since Live works with audio, we need something to feed it with. At this point it doesn’t really matter if you decide to render it in stereo, using a left/right separation on LSDj if you want to be able to treat rythm & melody differently or if you want to render separately all the 4(lsdj)/8(lgpt) channels. For the sake of this demonstration, I’ll play only with a single stereo track but it will work with separate render too.

If you are working with LSDj, it’s going to be really important to determine the exact tempo of the track. LGPT renders track at perfect digital timing but LSDj won’t. It’s consistent but consistently off. Since we’re going to chop the track heavily, you should make sure the grid in live is perfectly aligned with your beats, otherwise it won’t loop properly. Also, do yourself a favor and turn warping off, you don’t really need it at this point.

Since I’m using a constant structure and mostly 4/4 track, each of my row in the songs is going to be an even number of measure… mostly 4 or 2 but in this case it’s 2. The first step is to chop the track in bits of 2 measure so that each bit is at an equivalent length of on chain above.

Covox told me that ableton live 7 has a fantastic “Split to MIDI” option that does it pretty automatically but since I got only Live 6, I did it by setting a loop region of 2 bars, hit “Ctrl+E” for split, move the loop region the the 2 next bars, hit “Ctrl+E” again and so on. It’s a bit of a bother but certainly no biggie. In the end, you have still your full song but it’s cut into small 2 bar chunks.

The next step is to take all of those and add them in the session view. To do so, select ALL of the chunks then drag the whole to the session vue button (the vertical bars on the upper right corner) so that the session vue appear.

Keep dragging them to the first slot of the first track and release them there. You will end up with a long string of clips one under the others containing each 2 bar chunks of the song, one after the other:

Leave them all selected for now because we’re going to change their chaining properties right now. By default, a non warped clip stops as soon as it finishes unless you trigger a new one or assign it to an action. Since we want to mimic LSDJ/LGPT style, we want all the clips to trigger the next one when it’s finished.

With all clip selected, go to the clip propery panel and look at the launch properties (in case it doesn’t show up, click on the little ‘L’ at the bottom.

Live allow you to setup clip “Follow Actions” which basically allow you to decide what to do next when the clip has been launched. It’s all based from the moment the clip starts (which I find a bit odd, coz I would prefer to say “whenever it ends”) but since we’ve cut all the chunks in two bar size, we’ll simply say that 2 bars after the clip starts, start the next one.

Once you’ve done that, triggering the first clip should trigger all of the clip one after the other.

The only thing we miss now is to mimic the “gap looping” feature of LSDJ/LGPT to that we can have big looping chunks. It happens that if a clip is assigned a follow action of “Next” and that there’s no  clip underneath it, it will do exactly like we want, i.e. start at the beginning of that section. So all we gotta do now is to separate the clips in chunks the same way the original file was, mimicing the exact same structure:

And voila ! Now, to ensure that triggering matches the clip length, set the quantisation of the project to 2 bars and you’re set !

Of course, unless you want such a fine refinement of re-organisation, you might want to chop the original file directly into one clip per ‘song section’, but the point was to demonstrate the possibility of mimicing the exact behaviour of our beloved trackers. Point has been proven !