Playing Live

Ableton Live was originally designed as a loop arranger tool made to take studio production to the live stage. Now that the software has turned into a DAW, it of course still holds tools and features that provide a fluid performance workflow with many techniques and possibilities for performance that are hard to come by in other DAWs, or unique to Live altogether.

In this chapter, I have collected a couple of topics, considerations, techniques, and features that are specifically useful for Live Performance and will be helpful for you to improve your performance techniques or prepare your first set for performing live.

The chapter will consist of the following topics:

• Playing live with Ableton Live
• Clip Launch options
• Setting up dummy clips
• Syncing with Ableton Link and MIDI
• Cue Out and output routing
• Ableton Push and other controller considerations

Technical requirements

To follow along with this chapter, you will need the following:

• A computer with at least 8 GB of RAM and an Intel Core i5 processor at least
• A pair of headphones
• A copy of Live 11 Suite
• Chapter 15 Ableton Live project
• Chapter 15.2 Ableton Live project

Playing live with Ableton Live

There are multiple ways that live performance can be approached in Live and if you have ever dived into how accomplished artists use Live on stage, you most probably already came by the fact that some will use the Session View while others will use Arrangement View.

There is no right or wrong way to do it; it depends on your workflow and preferences.

When you perform with the Session View, how long parts of the set last is fully in your control, as you control that by launching clips and scenes. Performing with the Session View will also give you more opportunities for improvisation. However, this performance style will also require punctuality and focus to make sure everything is controlled the way you want it in terms of the structure being played back live, while you also might be busy with effect manipulation and playing external instruments.

Performing in the Arrangement View gives you the level of safety that you are playing along to a...

Clip Launch options

In this section, we are going to start looking at how Clip Launch modes work, as these modes are useful to know about, especially for live performance.

You can define how the clips behave in the Session View when you launch them either globally in Preferences, or individually for each clip in the Clip View.

As you have already learned and seen, you know that by default clips are set to Trigger mode, which means that when you launch the clip, the clip will start playing back, as we would expect. However, to stop the clip playing back, you need to click on an empty clip slot’s Stop button (within the same track), or the Clip Stop button, which is located on the left side of the Track Status display (Figure 15.1):

Figure 15.1 – Clip Stop buttons

As I mentioned, this Clip Launch mode can be changed easily for the whole set globally (every single newly created clip within the same set after making the change) or individually...

Setting up dummy clips

Dummy clips are clips with no actual sound, but their envelope settings control the effects and sounds of other tracks within Live.

Setting up dummy clips for your performance is super simple and allows a lot of creativity and possibilities to manage effect processing.

Let’s say you are singing while you are performing and either for one part of your song or for each song you perform, you want multiple effect parameters to change at the same time. Here, dummy clips can be just what you want to use. Since you only have two hands to control the parameters through a MIDI controller and one mouse to click around with, how many parameters you are able to change at the same time can be limited.

We also learned about Macro Variations within Device Racks, which could be also used for this purpose. However, that is also limiting if you are looking to affect multiple tracks with the effect changes at the same time.

How this is going to work is that we...

Syncing with Ableton Link and MIDI

There are multiple reasons why you might want to synchronize multiple devices and applications. It could be for collaborative purposes, to share the workload between multiple computers, to use multiple applications for creative purposes, or just for fun. In this section of the chapter, we will have a look at a few options to do this.

Synchronizing via Ableton Link

Ableton Link is a technology that enables you to keep multiple devices in sync with each other. This is super useful if you are playing with someone else or you are sharing the workload of your set over multiple devices, such as computers, iPads, and so on.

Link comes built into Live and there is also a growing list of applications from other manufacturers that are Link-enabled.

Link can be used over wireless or wired networks. Yes, it is that simple; you can use two computers, for example, yours and your collaborator’s, run Live on both, join the same WiFi network, configure...

Cue Out and output routing

In this section, we will investigate how you can take advantage of the Cue Out function to, for example, be able to hear the metronome in your headphones without your audience hearing it.

We are also going to have a look at how you can set up an external mix and a separate mix for you in your headphones, which can be extremely helpful when you are singing or playing an instrument during your performance, as you might want to hear yourself singing or playing louder than you want your audience to hear you in order to nail all the notes.

This is all possible within Live if you know your routing options.

We already briefly talked about what Cue Out does in Live and how you can turn the Solo buttons into Cue buttons. You can recap this in the I/O on Master Track section of Chapter 1, Taking a Quick Tour of Ableton Live 11.

What I really want to talk about here is using Cue Out to send the metronome into your headphone mix without your audience hearing...

Ableton Push and other controller considerations

We already mentioned Ableton Push 2 (Figure 15.34) previously in this book when we looked at MIDI controller types, but I wanted to make sure that we dedicated a bit more time to looking at what Push is, as I truly believe that it is wonderful to have a dedicated MIDI controller to control the universe of Live with seamless integration, which enables you to treat it like an “instrument.” Nothing like Push integrates so well with Ableton Live!

Figure 15.34 – Ableton Push 2 in my studio

Ableton Push 2 is the improved version following the success of Ableton Push 1.

Push allows you to lay down ideas even quicker than just using Live on its own. It also gives you an amazing tactile experience, as you literally feel like your music is at your fingertips. The improved display of Push 2 allows you to be able to barely look at your computer screen when you are using it.

You can use Push...

Summary

We have arrived at the end of another chapter. In this chapter, we dived into features and considerations for performing live using Ableton Live, such as approaching live performances by looking at the two views that Live has to offer, as well as Clip Launch options to customize how clips are set up for playback in your set. We covered dummy clips and how to use them, and also explored the word of syncing using Ableton Link and MIDI.

Furthermore, we looked at how to use Cue Out, which allows you to separate the metronome from the music in your project so that you can include the metronome in a headphone mix that is not heard by your audience through the speakers. We took the headphone mix topic even further and investigated the possibility of setting up a headphone mix that includes the metronome but with additional control over the volume of each track going into the headphone mix, which differs from what the audience hears through the speakers, by using Sends and Return...