Live 4.0 discussions...

[DHR53]

O.K. I 've been messing around with Live 3 that I just purchased, and of course I've used the demos for years... Being on a Mac, I always liked the look of the program and it's efficiency, but I was never actually motivated to purchase Live until now with expectations of the 4.0 version... Anyway, I'm sitting here with a bunch of Hmmm... questions/observations that I can't resolve... and I'm wondering, why DID I buy this? For instance: If I create a 2 bar loop in Reason (with notes), why would it do me any good to bring it into Live and convert it to audio? If I wanted to change it, (in any way) I could do that in Reason, and have (in my opinion) more control over it? Other than to reverse the wave (Audio editor) I don't see the advantage to audio... Other than if I had a bunch of Hardware synths...(I don't). So I use Reason all the time, but I can't really see what Live is offering me In conjunction with Reason, besides speeding up and slowing down loops, and maybe doing some weird effects that frankly I don't care about anyway... most of what I've been able to do was not very musical in my opinion! I'm starting to think that loop people don't really create music as much as they construct it... Maybe I'm not thinking right about this, I need a loop appreciation course or something... I think my brain is too oriented to: hear notes in head; play notes... Arghh! Maybe 4.0 will turn on the lights... I never really liked Acid that much, should I like Live???

[Johnnycarcaz]

This is my opinion but I dont find using live as a writing tool very productive. Some people effectively use live as a production tool, but if your like me, you enjoy the use of a full sequencer for writing.

I LOVE live. I cant see using it, even with vsti support, as a sequencer to write with. That said I cant say enough about how much FUN this thing is with mixing bits together. To blow off some steam I have taken to come home and making 16measure original loops to throw into a mix. The effects, I think are top notch. The ping pong delay, oh very psychedelic!

im certainly no guru but I know a good thing when I see it. Throw a midi controller into the mix and the real fun begins. I have been using keys as mutes so it makes it easier to drop things in and out. I havent mastered qauntizing as of yet but I see how useful that is for lining things up.

hope you can get yourself into live
-j

[dten]

DHR53, I'm in the same boat as you. I had fun with the Live demo, and Live 4 looks cool, maybe somewhat of a fast-and-dirty sequencer replacement. But now it's sitting on my hard drive and I'm thinking, "What can I really produce with this?"

The thing that gets me is the lack of transitions. Now, I'm absolutely sure there's a way to do it that I don't know of. But, I tend to not like going straight from Scene A to Scene B without some sort of fill or transition (and I don't want to create 20 fill scenes, and each one has to be mentally matched up to the in/out scenes it's supposed to fill)... and other things... I think maybe I think too melodically or something...

I keep telling myself it'll be great for making remixes, or perhaps taking a track somewhere that I hadn't thought of before... we'll see!

[stale bread]

I think you guys might need to just step back a little, and maybe just read alot of Live post from different sites, including the ableton site because you feel like live imposes something on you but it actualy does just the opposite. you don't have to loop stuff for instance, turn looping off and never loop again. just write music. the things live can do some other sequencers do already and some things live can do no other sequencers can do. it's biggest freature is how it approaches even things that other sequencers can already do. Like audio manipulation. all of the big three sonar logic cubase etc.. can do audio manipulation, but not in the same fashion. what I'm really trying to say is that there is no reason for you to feel like you 'can' make music with one of the other sequencers but that you 'can't'
make music with Live, because Live is different but at the same time it's the same as the others. to be at home all you have to do is not use the features that you're not interested in.

for alot of people the fact that Live is a 'Live' sequencing instrument is becoming secondary because in the studio it can accomplish anything in it's current state minus midi, and after Live4 the other sequencers will be updating their midi capabilities and how their apps deal with midi to be able to comepete with Live , because Live will be able to do midi just like your standard sequencer, but it will also be able to do things with midi that the other apps will not.
I'm not getting on you guys case I had
to get use to Live at first myself, then the first thing I learned was that there are layers to how much
one can become acclimated with the program. first I was like 'ok theres an excel spreadsheet and I can dump a bunch of samples in the cells and bang away, it took me forever and even now I'm still finding out new things just about the correlation between the scenes and the clips, then throw in the clip automation, and the efx, the resampling, and the almighty warp markers and there is no end to what you can do. we haven't even got into the tempo automation, or even the whole other half of Live which is the arrangement view. people use Live in so many different ways it's rediculous.

The base of people that use Live shows just how USEFUL a program it really is, look at it like this:
there are film composers, straight up accoustic rock acts like james taylor type of music, hiphop people, electronic purist of all sub genres, folkmusic, jazz, reagge, and all kinds of musicians who use it religously, you can't have that kind of diversity unless it's a montrously useful product. and you might be thinking to yourself 'well maybe but midi heads don't find it useful', but on the contrary, since Live first came out it has been the number 1 program to pull die hard midi only folk away from midi, it's been the number one draw away from Logic and this is the first time something has been like this,,, the reason is simple, it allowed midi people to do things that prior could only be done with some very tricky midi programming, but Live allowed them to do such things with audio only. I gotta end this post its too damn long but suffice it to say that we're only talking about Live 3 right now, when Live 4 comes out it's going to be a very very sick world trust me.
one of the things that might help in addition to reading up on what people are doing with live is just look at the features and then apply them to your
sequencer of choice from traction to logic to nuendo to cubase to sonar to digital performer and on, but look at lives features and imagine if your favorite sequencer could do those things and then you would see how useful live is.

[Johnnycarcaz]

thats has been the one thing that has kinda boggled me, transitions.
I would like to do some nice break downs, drum and bass style, but havent figured a good way to do that yet. Using a cross fader and mutes(with midi controller keys assigned) has somewhat been a good result but not as professional as I would like. I attribute this as I need to play around much more. I could see how it would be easy to get messy slipping in break downs everywhere.

I hope somebody reading these messages go "AWHAW, YOU SHOULD BE DOING THIS!"

I believe that the key to this is a good midi controller. I have looked into the 3 demo and it has two inputs instead of the single input. I cant wait till I got the bones for 4 and the EVOLUTION UC-33e.

anyways I feel ya on that point
-j

[Johnnycarcaz]

I have been finding it hard to use other posts cause of the quality of people on kvr. Not so many trolls. Ableton's site is chalked full of them btw!


-j

[dten]

Aha I totally agree Johnnycarcaz, I visit a few different forum sites and KvR is my favorite, Ableton my least favorite...

Anyway, thank you stale bread for your perspective, it gives me hope that my Live purchase was not wasted and I will have many hours of joy with it in the near future... Anyway I got it because I really like the design and it was fun to use, and I thought it might be a good complement to Logic because of that...
who knows, if 4 turns out as good as everyone hopes, maybe it will be my Logic purchase that was wasted... but as someone said in the FAQ of one of these boards somewhere, sometimes education involves a little risk.

[stale bread]

hey no problem dten, at first I was one of those who would ditch everything because of Live 4, then something strange happened to me this last week. I was going to get rid of fruity loops which I just bought about a month ago, and Battery when Live 4 came out but i've been getting into Live 3 a whole lot more since the live 4 announcement and now I feel
like I can see the benefits of all of it, so I will continue to use fruity loops and battery, and I'll keep live 3 installed too, cause live 4 will feel alot different than version 3 by the looks of it. there's just no reason to tie myself down to one, I'm also going to go ahead and get energy xt, audio mulch, and traktion so that I can be inspired by all of these different approaches and apply which one works best for how i'm feeling at the moment.

and yeah kvr is a great place.

[DHR53]

I guess what it comes down to is this... a lot of people (electronic music DJs, producers) started out with harware... i.e.samplers. And to them Live is a really flexible alternative in software... they think in terms of bits and pieces that are really just rearranged and then put back together. And mostly AUDIO! the people who actually played instruments, went to Pro Tools... But If you started in software, you probably use a keyboard of some sort, or a piano roll style grid to enter in notes manually... Uh, melody driven... I started out in the eighties with a Ensoniq keyboard and a Roland MC800 sequencer... Play notes ...create song! But I really think there is something to this construction and destruction process, I just don't have enough experience myself... I wish there was more written about techniques for using audio to create compositions, other than just duplicating the midi note entry process? Hmmm... I'm sure there is I just haven't found it yet? (Although that was a good article that was posted here...) back to the drawing board...

[meister eder]

I hope somebody reading these messages go "AWHAW, YOU SHOULD BE DOING THIS!"

AWHAW, YOU SHOULD EXPERIMENT WITH DELETING THE STOP BUTTON FROM EMPTY CLIPS IN SCENES!

(sorry for shouting)

[Johnnycarcaz]

can you go into a lil more detail about deleting the stop?
sounds interesting but im at work and cant play with it as of yet, but at the same time im stuck here looking all confused like "WHA?"

sank u so mush
-j

[DHR53]

Hmmm... I was reading that in the manual, but I could not figure out what the practical result of doing so was... Guess I'll have to check thhat one out too!

[dten]

Hey, I tried the suggestion last night.

In every empty slot, you see the little square STOP button. But if you command-E while that slot is selected, the Stop button will be deleted, and the slot will be completely blank.

The effect is that when you are playing another scene, and you switch to the scene containing the blank slot, whatever was playing in that slot's track in the previous scene continues to play.

Now I still haven't figured out why you'd want to do this, instead of simply copying that other clip into the scene... well OK I guess it gives you flexibility to continue playing whatever was previously playing instead of forcing it to be just that clip, so you could ....

ah... whatever are your "transition" clips, you place them in your transition scene... and any tracks that you don't want to transition (you want them to keep playing whatever they were playing when you switch to the transition scene), you leave them blank and delete the STOP button in those tracks... yes it has the potential to facilitate blending your new sounds with the previous sounds, without "hardcoding" the previous sounds, so that you can use your transition sounds together with whatever other scene you want to transition from, instead of having to explicitly create complete transition scenes..

I'm rambling but, it's definitely something to play with. Thanks dr.wackler

[Motion]

Hi Johnnycarcaz and everyone....have you seen the Grex MXF8 which is from the guy who invented the Notron,quite a few Ableton jocks use it and it has been designed with Ableton functionality in mind,it has goodies like the "ratio sequencer and the quantorum"...a bit pricy but then it's a quality bit of kit:

The MXF8 from Grex Ultra Dynamics in the UK was designed with the collaboration of experienced DJ’s and musicians and takes the potential of controlling MIDI based software & hardware to an exciting new real-time performance based level.
Connected to any MIDI based setup; the MXF8 gives quick and easy control of up to 56 MIDI Controllers along with volume cross fading, Beat Gating, Punching, Kill, MIDI Clock generation and unique Ratio Sequencing.


Realtime dynamic mixdowns

MXF8 is for anyone with more than a passing interest in putting more excitement, through direct physical interaction, into their electronic music making. People who wish to perform live or make more exciting mixdowns from their multitrack computer based gear should take a look at this silver machine with functionality inspired by some of the amazing stunts DJ's can wring from their decks and mixers.

This assignable crossfading, muting, tempo and "ratio sequence" wrenching machine is suitable for all musical genres.

Complex live setups are easy to control from this single unit using the powerful programming features of the MXF8. The MXF8 packs powerful functionality with unexpected potential for skillful imagineers into an almost familiar looking mixer format.


Universal Midi Compatibilty

MXF8 connects to any midi based computer setup and has been designed particularly with software such as Ableton Live and Propellerheads Reason in mind. Your MXF8 is the ideal master controller allowing instant control of clip triggering, volume changes, cross fade mixing, channel panning, effect parameter adjustment, tempo control, sequence start & stop along with many other user-definable possibilities.


Control 8 virtual decks

The MXF8's dynamic interaction with your midi/audio sequencer computer programs gives 8 simultaneous music streams and 56 additional midi controllable effect states to work with to use for recording or performing live.


When Live really means LIVE!

Test and extend your skills beyond the boundaries you thought possible using the MxF8, but don’t expect the machine to flatter them. Using the MxF8 will be as effective as YOUR performance allows- so a background in performance DJ-ing comes in handy.

In short, MXF8 gives you the power to destroy, remix and improve, and back again, in real time!

Here is the link: http://www.grexultra.com/erol.html

[drez]

Thanks Dr. W and dten! That is indeed a powerfull combo for transitional breaks!

The way it is really cool is because you can unlink a loop clip and have it play for like 16 measures while opening a filter and in the middle of it, switch to a scene with a break but keep having that clip building and building.

A W E S O M E !