It wasn’t until about three months ago that I seriously started to consider taking my music from the studio to the stage in the form of a live performance. Until January, I didn’t start collecting the gear I would need for it. Here’s my number one issue, despite having owned a slick pioneer DJ setup for years, I never had the time or the burning desire to practice and therefore it left me as anything but a DJ. Given that and the fact that I did not own a laptop and all of my music was built from softsynths, I basically decided to write any form of performance out of my life. Then, Oneel and Fitzpatrick approached me about doing a podcast on BTUlive.com. All of the sudden, I felt as though everything had changed.

Dave Richards at the Tastyfresh Sound System

Off and on for about a year, I had debated about creating a mix of the music I had written. I had wanted to do sort of a fake live pa in Sonar and put it out on the market. It could have been done. I spent a long time trying to figure out all the ins and outs. In the end though, it meant managing about 138 different loops and possibly that many audio channels in Sonar. That, from everything I could tell, would have been a nightmare. It was further complicated by the fact that its audio clip looping was limited to about 64 bars at a time. If you had any loops longer than 64 bars, you were up the creek. I needed a better tool to handle this and so I took the Ableton Live plunge and everything started to open up for me.

With my purchase of Ableton, I had had the central power source for both a live performance and a DJ set. I was able to beat sync and loop audio well past the 64 bar mark. I could also use whatever plugins I wanted. Midi control was a cinch and basically everything could be mapped to anything with very few strings attached. With this, I put together a quick studio mix of my music and that became the second hour of the first episode of BTU Live Presents… Tastyfresh. In all seriousness, it was then that I really got hooked on the possibility of taking my music from the studio to the stage. I was, however, missing some critical things: the right midi controllers, a laptop and well… a set of instructions or examples on how to get there. Sadly, after looking off and on for weeks, there wasn’t any step-by-step plan out there for a live performance in Ableton or much of anything for that matter. Some people had posted insights as to how they did theirs, but nobody covered the basic and stupid questions that everybody must have when they first go down this road. That is what this article is about. It’s not a strategy guide. It’s not a template. It’s just some guidance on what to do from someone who has done it before… even if it was just one time.

The Goals

Before you even decide that Ableton or any other software/hardware “stage” sequencer is the way to go, you need to decide what your goals are for the live performance. Do you want to play every instrument live? Do you want to only trigger loops? Do you want to do a hybrid of the two? Do you want to do a mixture of a DJ set and a live performance? Is your goal to seamlessly blend between your tracks? Even more important than that though is this: Are you really sure that you want to do a live performance over just DJing alone? Until you have answered all of the questions like this, don’t spend a dime. You’ll probably be wasting your money.

Minimum Gear

My studio for years consisted of the following:

• A PC with an internal sound card
• FL Studio for drum programming
• Sonar for recording and arranging
• Reaktor for synths and effects
• Several hundred megabytes of drum samples (not loops)
• A few other minor softsynths and effects

As you can see, there wasn’t any hardware in the studio beyond the computer. This can work great for studio work, but it will look like crap if you take that on stage. I don’t want to explain to the audience that I’m not really checking my email. Besides, you can’t move more than one slider at a time with a mouse.

As I worked through the questions I had listed for my goals, I decided that what I really wanted was to run the live pa as a DJ set in which I triggered the individual loops of a track and then blended them into the individual loops of another. This seemed to be the best way to do it at the time.

In order to accomplish this hybrid DJ / Live Performance I needed to closely examine what type of midi interfaces I needed to have available. For the DJ aspect of it, I wanted something that would work like a DJ mixer. That meant I needed knobs for EQ’s and some sliders for the various faders. For each individual tracks, I needed a way to trigger them and sliders to control each loops volume. Ideally, it would be great to have two of whatever that device was and use each of them like real turntables. Beyond that, it would have been nice to have a third device type of device/keyboard to manipulate the performance’s sequencer’s user interface beyond what midi would normally control. So ideally, I would need to have two to four external controller devices to do what I wanted to do.

Just as a side note: For those of you who don’t know, most midi devices transmit on 16 channels. This means that one slider could theoretically be set to control up to 16 different things. This doesn’t mean that this is a good thing. Yes, it does mean the device is flexible, but the drawback is two-fold. First, you have to have a way of remembering what the slider is controlling on all 16 channels. And Second, you have to know which channel that slider is currently transmitting on. The moral here is to keep it simple.

Once you know roughly what type of controls you need for your performance, you need to go shopping. The best advice I have for you in this area is, take your time. Read every review you can about each piece of gear you are considering. Make sure that the gear is going to be flexible beyond your needs, but is still easy to configure. You don’t want to have to buy more gear later if the gear you just bought doesn’t do what you want it to do. Keep an eye out for new gear that may be released shortly after you think you might make your purchase and hold off if you think the new gear might work out better. If possible, don’t go into debt of this. If you have to, pay it off as fast as you can. Unless you have gigs lined up left and right, you’ll not only have stuff that takes up more space in your room, but you’ll have stuff that you don’t really own and isn’t making you money.

After doing my research and seeking the advice of others, I chose the M-Audio Trigger Finger to use as the “DJ mixer” part of my setup and originally I had intended to use the trigger pads to trigger loops. The other controller I purchased was a Novation ReMote Zero SL. This was perfect for controlling my various effects and to use as the audio mixer for individual tracks. The thing that really sold it was the automapping features that it had with Ableton. It will automatically map the sliders on the right side to the audio and midi channels in your Ableton project. You can cycle through them in groups of eight. This was perfect as I was looking at using eight tracks of audio for each track/song I would be performing.

The next big thing is the computer. You really have only two choices here. You can either haul around you studio PC which would be fine accept you’ll have a hard time finding venues with space to accommodate your PC, monitor and midi gear. Or, you can buy a laptop to used only for live engagements. The obvious solution is the laptop. Now, I’ll be perfectly honest here. My non-existent budget didn’t include the money for a laptop. Had I not worked where I work and had certain people not left for greener pastures, (by greener… I mean more money rather than a better job) I would not have been able to pull this off. Furthermore, had one of the people who left not insisted on an Intel based MacBook Pro, I would not have had a laptop with enough power to do what I wanted.

When selecting your laptop, there are some critical things to look out for. It’s not just the processor speed or RAM, although those are the most important. You have got to carefully consider the number of inputs for external devices and what type of inputs it will take. For example, most laptops have internal audio. This is great if you don’t need cueing capabilities or more than one audio out. If this is the case, it’s just a matter of running audio out of the laptop to the mixer board. If you want to do cueing or use multiple audio outs, you should buy an external sound card. Usually these come in two flavors: USB and Firewire.

Another Note: Technology constantly changes. You know this already. For some odd reason though, not everybody who sells external audio cards know this. USB 1.0 devices transfer data at a slower rate than Firewire A devices (1394a). However, USB 2.0 devices have a higher rate than Firewire A devices. All of that changes again when you talk about Firewire B (1394b) devices. Those are about twice as fast as USB 2.0. If you can find a sound card that definitely uses USB 2.0 connection, buy that over a Firewire A product. Chances are good that if the audio card can be powered of the USB port, it is actually a USB 2.0 device. Native Instrument’s new Audio 8 DJ sound card is this way and is officially marketed as USB 2.0. One good reason to stick with USB is that you can disconnect the device at anytime w/o damaging it or your laptop. With Firewire though, you could fry your firewire ports on both the device and the computer if the power isn’t off. Not cool. That’s enough of this. Let’s get back to the article.

Laptops come with a very limited number of USB ports and most of your modern midi devices will have USB connections. In the MacBook I was using, that number was two. I had to connect a mouse, the sound card, two midi devices and that additional controller I mentioned. That’s three more ports than I had. I needed a USB hub. So when looking at laptops, try to buy one that has as many USB/Firewire ports as what you are planning on connecting. Otherwise, you will need some sort of hub like I did.

That hub introduced an unexpected problem: power management. Basically, if x amount of power is flowing to a USB port and then you put four devices on it, then that x amount of power has to be divided among those four devices and chances are, it won’t be enough. The MacBook pro has an additional known problem where the USB port next to the power input receives more power than the other port on the other side of the laptop. The lesson learned here is to power your USB midi devices separately from your laptop’s power whenever possible.

Breaking the Audio Down

Dave Richards opening AfterHours 2007

If you’re like me, you made all of your tracks without considering how you would perform them live. Once you realize this, you probably will feel pretty stupid. I did for a while; a long while actually. You see the way I have traditionally worked, I will normally have anywhere between sixteen to thirty-two tracks of audio. Over sixty percent of those are for percussion. As I mentioned before, I wanted to use no more than eight audio tracks for each track in my live performance. So, how do you take that many tracks and fit them into eight? Simply put, you have to start combining what makes sense.

There isn’t really a good way to explain how things need to be broken down. You have to do it on a case-by-case basis. You need to consider several things though:

1. What audio loops do you have now that will always be playing together?
2. Even if those loops play together at the same time, do you gain some worthwhile control if you keep these loops separate?
3. Do you really need to have all these loops? Is it possible that some loops could simply disappear?

As you go through this process, you’ll add additional criteria to measure your loops by. What I’ve listed are some pretty good ones to start with.

Another step you can take that will help simplify not only this decision by how you actually perform is to decide now what types of loops each audio track in your live performance project will hold. In mine, I decided to have the following audio tracks: kick, baseline, drums, tribal, 1 tribal 2, Synth 1, Synth 2, Vocal. This meant that I could play one kick loop, one baseline loop, one drum loop with the main percussion, two tribal percussion loops, two synth loops and one vocal loop. This pretty much set my structure right there and I always knew what type of sounds could be expected on any one slider.

Once you know how you audio tracks will be assigned, this should give you a better idea of how to combine your loops. If you have three audio tracks dedicated to playing synth loops, then you can play up to three different synth audio loops at a time. The catch is you can use any number of synths in each audio loop. So if you need to play twenty different synth lines at the same time, it’s just a matter of figuring out how you are going to introduce them to the mix and in which order. Then, you divide them up into three audio loops.

You should also try to do some light mastering work to each loop. At the very least, normalize each of the final loops that you plan to do. The main reason for this is to give you a level playing field with the volume of each loop. If you do this, then you can say with some accuracy that when you adjust the volume on an audio track to 0 db that every loop you put into that track should play out at 0 db. If you don’t do this, you will have a harder time knowing how to adjust the volume for each audio track as you bring them in or out. Granted, you should be listening to what you are playing, but if this is your first gig, this will be one less thing you have to focus heavily on. After all, if you have eight loops playing at the same time with a total of sixteen different loops per track and ten tracks in your set, that means up to sixteen tracks can be playing at any given time out of a possible 160 different loops! I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to memorize everything about each of those clips.

The next thing you should do is make sure that the loops for each track are stored in separate directories and that they are clearly labeled so you will know what each of them contains. If you are using Ableton, you also have to warp each of the 160 loops.

Are you starting to see a time crunch here? It’s a huge one. This is why I was in a huge rush trying to assemble my set prior to Cornerstone. Honestly, it didn’t come together for me until the night before I had to leave. The lesson here is to take whatever time you think it will take to assemble your set and double it. The good news is that once my loops have been exported and warped, I’m done with them for good. The next time I do a live performance, I just need to add any new tracks I’ve been working on.

Setting Up the Sequencer

I’m honestly not going to spend a lot of time on this part of the article. There isn’t that much to say really. I chose Ableton because of the flexibility that it gave me. It allowed me to route audio as I wanted to and it was extremely easy to map everything to the midi controllers. For those of you using hardware, this next bit won’t apply to you.

All I really needed to do in Ableton was create a project with sixteen tracks of audio for the loops, two sends for the “decks” and a master channel. Beyond that, I labeled the sixteen audio tracks to correspond to the audio track names I listed above, but included an R or L at the start of the name to denote which “deck” they represented. I then routed each group’s send to the appropriate send and set the audio output to that directly. The sends then of course were sent to the master channel. The cross-fader was then set to the sends. That was the basic structure.

Once I did all of that, I started dropping effects on each of the sends. You have got to have at least an EQ-3 on each send. There are other and probably better solutions out there than just Ableton’s EQ-3 plugin, but the EQ-3 is dead simple and works. Beyond this, you might want to drop in an auto-filter and a few other plugins. One important thing to consider though is when you will use these plugins and how they will affect your CPU. If you only plan to use a particular effect on either on track or the other, then you need to put the same effect on both sends. If you do not want to isolate the effect to just one track, you should place the effect on the master channel rather than either send. This will help conserve your CPU power.

Yet Another Note: I learned the hard way after listening to a recording of my first live performance that all of the effects I thought were just so cool actually sucked. There are really two things that contributed to this. First, I was never able to fully tweak the various software effects to sound exactly as I wanted them to. I’m not that big of a parameter junkie I guess, but I just couldn’t get any flanger plugin to sound like an adequate clone of the flanger Pioneer puts on their CD decks and mixers. This was a huge disappointment for me. The second thing is that I just simply over used them and used them at the wrong points in my set. In the future, I will probably add one of the Pioneer effect boxes to my set rather than continuing with plugins. This will limit the number of plugins that I’ll use, but it will also free up CPU power and in the end sound better for less effort.

Once you have the basic structure set in Ableton or whatever software sequencer you are using, it’s time to deal with the 160 audio loops you exported. After a long internal debate and a good look at the calendar, I realized that I simply would not be able to do what I had been planning, which was to create very flexible live performance. I wanted had to use each midi channel on my Trigger Finger to trigger up to sixteen different loops for a track. This would allow me to completely structure my show on the fly. The main catch was twofold. First, I needed to ensure that every single loop was properly assigned to a pad. Second, I needed some sort of key or legend to remind me of where I placed each loop. Yeah… that so wasn’t going to happen in the time I had left.

It was about that time when I discovered by accident a magic button on that ReMote SL I had purchased. In the automapping template for Abelton, it turns out that there were controls for triggering not loops, but whole scenes. I was able to move up and down within the list of scenes and trigger anyone that I wanted. This was a lifesaver given the deadline. At this point, I made the decision to actually arrange the entire live performance in Ableton as I wanted to play it live. By doing this I lost the ability to change the track lineup within the show, but I gained the ability to easily trigger massive changes with the touch of one button. I still could determine how long any given segment played and I could control how it entered the set and how it left. I really had all the control I could handle given that this was my first live PA. This was the second time God really confirmed that my decision to by the ReMote was a good one.

Once all of the controls had been assigned and the loops had been arranged, I was basically ready to go. Ready to go with one major exception that is. I spent so long working on setting all of this up that I didn’t have time to do the most important thing: Practice. Sure I had everything configured just the way I wanted it to be or rather just the way I thought I wanted it to be. Since I hadn’t actually played through the show, I had no way of knowing if it was going to work or not. I finally had a chance to make one pass through prior to my show though in a hotel on the way up to Cornerstone. It went fairly well, but it was definitely very rough. I was glad that I wasn’t the main entertainment that day. So, everything thing seemed fine so long as nothing went wrong or acted in a way I didn’t foresee. As always, things did go wrong which brings me to trouble shooting.

Troubleshooting

Dave Richards at the Tastyfresh Sound System

No matter how much you practice and no matter how stable your gear is, you are bound to have problems. I had several.

One of the most common issues when running Ableton in a live situation is that unless you have an infinite amount of midi controllers, at some point, you will need to assign one knob (or slider) to do two things using different midi channels. When you switch to a knob from one function to the other, you will need to jiggle it before you actually start using it to make sure Ableton has recognized the midi change. If you forget to do this, you won’t like the results. Your mix may not happen and an audio clip might play out giving you some dead air. Don’t let this happen. Just jiggle it. You may have to do the full range of the controller too from 0 to 128 before it catches it. Make sure that before you do this, that the crossfader is not in the center or else you will risk having some loops on the other “deck” breaking in too early and not how you had hoped at all. Just be quick about it.

Another issue that I had was the loss of a midi controller. About halfway through my show, my ReMote Zero SL locked up on me. As you might recall, I was using this for my track mixer. This meant I couldn’t adjust the volume to my drums or mute the bass or anything like that. What I believe caused the lockup was that it was unable to draw enough power off the shared USB hub. I was running my Trigger Finger off the same hub as well as my mouse which was only there as a back up. Which brings me to my point: Make sure you always have a back-up for controlling Ableton. By back-up, I mean… always put a mouse on a USB port. Also, I can’t advise turning off a locked midi controller during a show and turning it back on. It might do just fine, but it might also cause further unexpected issues.

I said it before and I laid out why just a second ago: ALWAYS power your midi controllers through other means than your USB ports. I think you could get away with relatively simple devices like a Trigger Finger or a UC-33e, but when you start talking about a sophisticated piece of gear like the ReMote SL, power it off something other than your laptop. The great thing about the ReMote SL series is that you can use batteries and not have to worry about having another power cord. When I powered the ReMote via batteries later in the week and repeated the set, I didn’t have the same problem.

I’m sure there are literally hundreds of things that could go wrong technically with a live set. If I tried to list them all, I’d never finish this article. With that in mind, here are a few things to keep in mind that are more about taking care of yourself rather than the technical issues.

Always test the volume of your monitors before your performance. The last thing you need is a set of monitors with a volume that’s much higher than you actually need blaring at you. You’re hearing is important. Don’t add any further stress to it. Find out before your set where the controls are for this or who is controlling them. See if you can get things adjusted during a sound check first too. Also, don’t forget earplugs. If you are going to be doing this for a living, you need to save your hearing. A good set of plugs will not affect your performance negatively and in fact they might actually make it better. Another thing to watch out for here is the output of you monitoring headphone jack from your soundcard. Make sure you have enough juice from it to make the headphones worth using. I didn’t, maybe I needed to power the FastTrack Pro off something besides the USB port. Fortunately, I really didn’t need them though.

Take care of your personal business prior to the show. This should go unsaid, but if you’re hungry, eat before your set, but not immediately before it. Also, go to the bathroom before your set. You don’t need to perform cross-legged on the stage. And… take care of your needs on stage as well. Keep a jug of water (or your drink of choice) near by at all times. If you were like me and you were playing the Barn, you needed water. The day I played, it was in the mid-90s and the Barn isn’t air-conditioned.

Lastly, expect the unexpected. Murphy’s Law should be one of the laws of the grand unification theory. In my case, I reached for my glasses so I could see the laptop more clearly and a lens fell out. I had already started my set and I couldn’t find the lens so I was stuck. I played the entire show with a fuzzy screen. It’s a good thing I only have astigmatism. It seriously sucked though. I was not expecting it and it threw me off my game.

Well, that’s not only all I have to say on this subject for now, but that’s all the time I have to write it too. I hope there was something in here that you could take with you. I know that I’m not the most experienced performer in the world, but given the lack of resources currently on the web that cover this issue, I felt I had to write about it. I’d honestly love to hear about your personal setups and how you feel I could make mine better, so head on over to the forums and start talking. I’ll be around. No matter what though, remember to keep your set up simple… whatever “simple” is to you.