EnergyXT - the "LIVE" machine

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Seems this tread has been brought back from the depths of 2005. :)

Well, i have only ever used eXT for a live gig so far. I use live mode and many set up's to do various pieces at home though, and most of the peices I create are made in live mode (or they are at least sketched out in live mode and then arranged in multi mode).

The one time I did use eXT on stage however was a complete dissaster!! :shock: Not eXT's fault. My own stupidity. The gig was one of the heats for a competition involving bands from schools in the local area. The competition was in its third year, i'd entered the other two times with other bands (which shared a lot of memebers :hihi:) but we never won any of the later stages. This time it was me and a drummer that decided to enter - just two of us, me doing one song on keys with vocals, and him on drums. The other with me on bass + vocals.

Well, i'd set up a fairly large eXT project with a multi-layered keyboard type thing going on. Organ + piano layered on top with a bass in the lower keys. I also had a footswitch that made a pad swoosh when i pressed it. My first mistake was having this all in one arrangment, my laptop wasnt liking it from the start. I also was using my little ediirol usb mixer, with my own mic going in and my bass going in. This wasnt simple to set up! Took me ages, laptop, mixer, bass, mic, keyboard, pedal, loooads o leads! :dog: (keep it simple folks!) So yea, sound check went ok, but my keys sounded very boomy on the PA speakers, waay too much bass (we also had no monitors so that was anoying). Ah well 'we thought' i'll add an EQ vsti at the end of the eXT chain - which sapped more CPU!

My second mistake (or third, i dont know :hihi:) was to leave the laptop on for the entire night, and we were nearly the last act on. Im sure it'll be ok I thought. Then some little kid started messing with my faders on my keyboard which were controlling various things in the eXT project. arg.

Finaly got on stage, pressed a key to 'test', and it was the most boomy, sustained sound you could ever hear that just sustained indefinatly! Pedal wasnt working, the project was making various pad sounds, my bass patch had been changed to a tarnce lead and my usb mixer had frozen with a constant audio signal. 'cr*p' was my initial thought of course - and instead of doing the most logical simple thing which would have sorted it all out (re-open the project and turn my mixer on and off) I started to try and fix my project and pressed keys and faders like a mad man trying to sort it. Eventualy the the what i needed to do was to re-set the asio drivers in the control panel. So i got sound again, but my CPU couldnt handel all of the setup so I had to delete my 'pad foot switch' wich was the only harmony for our bass song! And my keys sounded so horrible and boomy, you couldnt hear vocals, and our whole set was ruined. We got through it in the end, but it could have gone smoother! (:lol:) I should never have tried to make things soo complicated. Next time i'm using an acoustic guitar and a kazoo!

WoJ

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right now i'm using eXT as a modular effect patch for live use. I have several weird effects patched in through mixers, etc., and all the essential parameters are patch to an Evolution UC33e controller for live tweaking.

that's pretty much what i would use XT live for as I like the way Ableton Live works. i have two laptops and i run XT on the lower CPU one while i run Live on the higher CPU laptop. but i can also use the same XT patch within Live when i only use one laptop, so that's super awesome. but the dual laptop set up is ideal because i can process external machines through XT and do some serious tweaking while in sync with whatever's going on in Live.

i guess the hardest part about this set up was determining which plugins were the most stable to avoid crashes (for example DFX's Geometer crashes alot, sadly :( but that would be a great plug to use live)

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I just DJ the stuff i made in EXT
I can do a hell of a lot more with a turntable than i can with a keyboard
If we had Pinky support directly in EXT that might change my ways though :)
Omerta

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nice thread!!

i just started to use xt live (for my own). i like the idea to sequence/trigger things non-linear like ik_ik_ik and record it as a track. the tips in the wiki helped me a lot for this.

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Yeah thats what i use Live mode for
I use it to jam stuff together on the fly but i never actually used it live at a gig
I dunno what it is but i still prefer to use hardware for actually playing tunes live
I'm not great with a keyboard but a nice hardware sequencer and a MIDI controller has always seen me through
I do use a laptop all the time DJin though so i might give it a try one day because i can't even remember the last time XT crashed on me
Omerta

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I'm currently preparing some live set ups (which I will need for the next week :hihi: ) and it's a hell of work. actually I like to improvise but I rather keep things simple. it is always useful to some sort of emergency midi and audio clips.
one feature in eXT I'm waiting for is definitely quantised recording: playing sliced drumloops and record drum pattern on the fly so that I have my hands free for ad hoc arranging and fx

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from what jorgen has let slip about it i suspect the new live mode in XT2 will make a lot of people in this thread PRETTY happy ...

slainte ;) rob

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This is why hardware is preferable for some folks. You dont have to mess with all that ginky stuff to get a decent set going on.
Woj,
i bet if you just rented a triton/fantom/motif and did your live thing, it would have been MUCH more simpler!

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:lol: Yea, but you miss half the fun. :?

WoJ

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Another thing, not that I would, but people markey preset banks and sample packs all the time, perhaps in the future we'll be seeing eXT-Live Preset Packs for sale. heh, ;)

WoJ

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I've been using XT for a few months now, only to chain up some effects between my guitar and amp. The main thing I'm finding trouble with is switching FX on and off / sweeping values up or down because that means I'm fiddling with the effects' GUI through my laptop's pointer (can you imagine me playing at the same time?) -

Anyway, one thing that would make it easier to manipulate XT live would be to hook up a foot controller through the USB port??? - is that possible?

I'm using XT on a decent laptop with default soundcard and ASIO4ALL. No latency probs here. I just carry the laptop around as a multi-fx unit thing. Not the most solid effects unit ever, but well...

Great idea setting up the live XT resource thing

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Anyway, one thing that would make it easier to manipulate XT live would be to hook up a foot controller through the USB port??? - is that possible?
it is possible! i'm using my old joystick through usb to control some fx. all u need is nicfits joy2cc plug ->http://asseca-pt.net/nicfit/joy.html

mfg

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