Recording loops live in Ableton and slowly building a track on the fly.

[MisterMoleyMole]

Hi all

I have often seen really cool videos of people building a track slowly on the fly from record snippets, beat pads, scratches etc using ableton. I understand what they are doing as far as just recording loops and letteing them then play and movbing onto the next bit, but how is this done in ableton.

Can anyone give a bit of a noobs description of the ableton setup needed to do this as i would love to give it a go.

Main bits i dont understand are ...

1 - How to record loops and get them to play instantly after finishing recording.

2 - Is there a knack to get the perfect loop, i can see me getting the loop slightly wrong and screwing everything up mid way through and having to start again. Are these guys just perfect at hitting start and stop buttons or is there some trickery so that ableton knows whats going on and cuts the loop to exactly the right length ?

I think thats it for now, i'm sure after an answer i will have loads more questions

Cheers all

Gav

[charo]

check out the kid beyond ableton rig or there is a couple other of these sampling type rigs being used over at the ableton forums and the abletonlivedj forums.

let me know if you can't find links and ill hunt them down for you.

[BentoSan]

Ableton Live 8 now has a live looper installed into it making live looping really really easy.

I still think the looper could use some improvements to futher build on the live looper idea but we will have to wait for Max4Live for that. For the moment just bust out the ableton live manual and read about the looper unit. You dont need to press it perfectly on time (though there is an option for that) you can use Ableton lives quantisation features to take care of all the timeing for you.

[MisterMoleyMole]

Will have a look at that looper when i have a copy of Live 8 to play with.

For now ive just found this which looks like its what i want, so for anyone else out there who is interested in doing something like this ... follow this link http://www.bome.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1583

Cheers for the replies.
Gav

[BentoSan]

Yeah that looper isnt too bad, if you do a search you will find that we have talked about it before. The only problem with it is that sometimes it has problems deleting clips Thats more of a functionality problem within Ableton not allowing to delete clips using midi than it is a problem with the code used in that setup.

Sadly there really alot of room for improvment with all live loopers that are running around at the moment, but you can only do your best with the tools that are given to you.

[Monika.mhz]

I've had the looper delete all my previous work and start fresh. i'd rather use like an APC40 to cue blank clips to record onto.
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The best method, I've found, in getting the loops right, is to play the sequence like 2-3 times before actually clicking record. then hit record at the beginning of the sequence.