Ableton - Moldoveresque Beatjuggling.....

DJ Life & Community General Discussion
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Ableton - Moldoveresque Beatjuggling…

Hi Guys,

Thought i’d share this with you here as i know a few of you are on Ableton, the project below has taken me a while to get my head round and to be honest has stopped me getting into Bento’s smart mixer so thats next on my list…

Anyway, with testing the Beta of Live 8 my reaktor ensemble started crashing my sets so i started to look at how i could recreate the effects within CLists Beatlookup with the native effects of Ableton. I use a Korg PAdKontrol that’s switched into native mode and configured by an application for the Mac called Farmpad however this isn’t essential to getting the setup working.

Within Beatlookup i’d modified things so that whilst the buffer constantly records audio i could press a single button and grab just two bars of it, then with the 16 pads of my Padkontrol i could play from any 16th of the sample i’d recorded giving me some wicked glitchy type stuff when playing fidget style house, the triggering from the pads was also quantized so that the audio sounded clean and in addition if i left the pad held down it would play up a beats worth of audio…

So to get this working in Ableton is a little complex but after test driving it this weekend IMHO the results are worth it!

Right then… First you’ll need bomes or equivalent keystroke convertor, then a midi patchbay type affair, and finally an IAC bus (someone fill me in on what PC users will need to have to replace this for Windows)

Done this step by step so sorry if it’s a little basic…

  1. Create four Audio Tracks like so… Route the signal in from whatever you want your source material to be…

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  1. Map a Key to the Arm and Speaker on Buttons…

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  1. Midi Map across the Tracks corresponding to the pads on your controller…

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4 Add a Midi Track and place an Exterbnal Instrument Plug into it setting the output to an IAC bus…

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5 Using Midi Patchbay merge the IAC BUs with the standard output of your Midi Controller (in my case my padKontrol is already routed into Farmpad as i use it in native mode with a heavily modified config file)

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6 Record two clips that are two bars long (this is as long as i’ve done so far but it’s easy enough to make it as long or short as you want…

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7 Now comes the fiddly bit, in the first clip you’ll need to select the envelope for the midi message that corresponds to the midi mapping you gave to clip number 1, in my case that was Control 60 on channel 5…

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8 Then move along the clip and fire the second clip after an 1/8th of a beat, i tried originally on half beats but you get a much better result as each row of pads on the padkontrol correspond to a whole beats so you can easily work out patterns when mashing it up!

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9, 10, 11… Continue doing this until your record clip is firing off the bank of 8 clips mapped into your Audio Tracks…

12 I have then mapped my Knob 1 assign button to Launch my Record clip and at the same time i have a Bomes script which firstly changes the global launch to 16ths and then keystroke translator firing out “A” which turns on the speakers of the tracks and arms them…

13 You’ll see in the Midi track (Looper Control) screenshot that i have no input from any Midi device, as i now launch my Record clip Ableton will cycle through the 8 clip slots recording effectively 1 beat of audio into each slot… This should leave things looking like…

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14 If your happy just recording the two bars and then mashing things up then great, i wanted my recorded loop to take over things so i have a follow action on the record clip to launch the Loop clip below after two bars, the Loop clip is virtually identical to the Record clip, it differs in that the Midi envelopes are only open for an 8th of a beat so there is no build up of clips playing on top of each other…

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15 My recorded clips monitors are set to off but output to an Audio channel set to in this channel simply sums together all the outputs, i tried running the four channels as a group in the Beta of 8 but i just didn’t get the Midi response times that i got when i ran them as seperate channels in their own right…

16 I placed a gate on the original source channel and sidechained it’s input from the output of my Recorded Clips Tracks…

Now when your jamming firing clips it cuts out the original source signal leaving it sounding clean, of course if you want the original source to come back in over your mashing then simply midi map a knob to the attenuation of the gate, when it’s turned up to 0.00db then the gate is bypassed…

I’ll cover off how to delete the clips with one button in a nother post if anyones interested, it’s simply the same trick as above but instead you fire a midi message toturn off the speaker and unarm the track, then in a cycle you need to send a midi message which launches the clip as before but whilst it’s still playing send another message that correspond to the midi mapping you gave to the track status display, this will then change the view to that of the clips audio. With this in focus your third midi message fires and is converted by bomes to a keystroke in deleting the clip, i run the cycle three times as sometimes the odd clip isn’t deleted…

The below should make it easier for midi patchbay…

I forgot to say that you’ll need to go into Abletons preferences and set the launch option for all new clips to gate, otherwise as each clip is created as a loop, triggering it will just see it run round and round and conflict with other clips as you launch them…

Once you’ve figured the above the next thing to do is to create 16 individual Midi Clips that solely launch a single midi clip for a 16th of a bar, place them below each other in order through one to 16 and place follow actions so that they cycle through…

Set all of these clips launch action to repeat and the quantize option to global… Then map a seperate scene on your controller to trigger these clips… Voila to the best of my knowledge Monome stylee stuff???

A third bank of pads on my padkontrol is dedicated to four tracks of Dummy Clips, the audio from my masher passes through each of the four tracks and allow me to trigger some nasty filter sweeps whilst beat repeating stutter like amongst other things… As time goes by i’ll probably add more and more clips so that i dont end up having the same effects each time, plus i can see some follow on action business going on to randomize them as well…

Cheers
D

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This sounds pretty cool, had to skim the article, will definitely check this out when I am getting on my flight later today. Maybe a quick list of advantages (over just using cue’s in traktor) ie. gate control of orig. source and disadvantages would be helpful at the top of this post. It would also help to organize what works and what doesn’t work well with this system, so as to pave the road for potential improvements.

Oh and Bento smart mixer ftw!

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Sorry this post assumes that you’ve already seen the advantages of using Ableton over Traktor… I’m not saying that one is better than the other just that Ableton would be your preference, in fact the above allows you to record up to 16 cues at any point in the song and recall them at will…

Cheers
D

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Nice posts dude :slight_smile: You should provide the ableton live file too so people can have a look at whats going on. Im sure people would love to hear a walkthough of how your also deleting clips.

Edit: Oh for pc go get Midi Yoke Junction emulated midi drivers - MIDI Yoke Junction

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is it just me who cant read someof the text in this as its gone off the edge of teh page?

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See my edited post above I meant theoretical disadvantages/advantages of the system (your theoretical system) not your Ableton vs. Traktor’s cue juggling. My thinking on that comment was that it would be helpful to list advantages/disadvantages of the system from a perspective of refining it, see the post you quoted again for best clarification of what I mean. Sorry if I am being a bit confusing, just always pressed for time typing posts at work. Also thanks alot for sharing your setup, really appreciate it.

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Pretty sure that is due to the pics in the text of the orig post exceeding the width and changing the margins, highlight the text and you can see it ok.

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Yup we are going to apply to a hack to the forum templates that auto resizes the picture so its impossible to do this in the future.

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Good Caaall :wink:

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NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Offtopic from my offtopic: Saw him last night here in ATL, it was amazing, he was freestyling to breaks and beats for more than half the show. Very deep lyrically.

Ed. My original intent for posting the pic was that I was hoping it would exceed the margins so that I too could make my text hard to read before this glitch was fixed, it will be changed, and my post will be hard to read, mark my text

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As i only learnt how to do screenshots yesterday this would be wicked!!

I get ya… Right then the advantages of this set up…

Firstly is for the non musically rythmical (ie. those of us who are rubbish as the drummer on Guitar hero) by being able to quantize both the recording and playing of your samples you can make some excellent sounding mashing on the fly with absolutely no pre-preperation (bar the lengthy set up)…

Secondly, as you record effectively 8 beats of music ordered in rows of 4 you can instinctively hit the pad that will be on the kick snare and fill throughout the sample…

Thirdly, with the Monome style setup you can do some pretty cool stuff with accapellas without having to set up your sample slicing in advance…

Fourthly, if you wish you can map an effect to each of the pads so that for each of the times you trigger a clip you also trigger a corresponding effect eg. you could apply a frequency shifter to the second snare clip and create some audio havoc, or have a beat repeat set to repeat but with maximum variation on one of the kick drum slots…

Fifthly, for me a biggy, with the sidechaining of the original source material you can effectively let the original sample continue playing unto it’s destination whilst cutting in and around with your mashing, alternatively set a two bar loop first then record your audio giving you both options… For those that do a second pass on their recorded mixes, the first to get the transistions and the second to jam this can make for some pretty cool sets (Studio only of course i’m not suggesting to present it back as something live)

Sixthly, if anyones used any slicing vst’s before that reorder the slices in which they are played you can easily set this up in advance by using midi clips as dummys to trigger the audio clips with follow actions to keep the groove going!

Downsides… Having to run the delete clip process through three cycles to make sure the clips dissapear is a bit clunky but ableton makes it difficult in not having a simple remove clip function nor a focus on a clip mapping for an individual slot. My combination of three midi messages to play then focus then a keystroke convertor of delete can sometimes come a cropper if you’ve clicked on another open program and don’t notice that Ableton is not the focus for the keystroke (i lost all my bookmarks from Safari at one point!)

I’ll share my live set when i get back home on friday, it’ll just need the samples removing as it’s way to big to upload, oh and it’s a Live 8 set so you’ll only be able to use it if your on the beta?

Cheers
D

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cool post!!! thanks S4racen

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It should be noted that Clists beatlookup can constantly record the input so your always juggling the last 2 bars or you capture it as a loop as was explained in this thread. So theres a few advantages of using Clists beatlookup but this is great for those who dont own Reaktor.

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Yeah that’s true, i tried to emulate constantly filling and deleting the 16 slots but found it slowed the mac down to a crawl… I always found with Clists that just as i had got a groove going with a sound i liked it got replaced in the buffer hence why i went for this solution…

I’d love to get into max4live though to see how to recreate the concept as a plug in rather than the complicated routing and triggering, the max4live pages on Cycling74s website show such a device but give little detail of it…

Cheers
D

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You can get around around that with beatlookup by setting a loop.

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This is true (and my default hot loop, one button that quantizes to 2 bars, selects the clip playing and focuses on the wav and then sends a keystroke of “L” which i’ve mapped to the start and end buttons) and was what i’d been doing as my first point of using beatlookup…

My set up now means i can miss the first button press… doesn;t sound much but when you’ve got a few layers going on with your controllers it makes sense to boil them down to as few key presses as possible…

Cheers
D

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can you please post the als file? I have the ableton demo atm and it will save me years of time.

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Sorry it’s at home in Luton and i’m in a Land Rover Dealership in Southampton!!

I promise you it’ll take twice as long to unravel mine… Plus it’s in 8 so it’s a bit unstable as it’s still a beta… I know of no reason why it wouldn’t work in seven though…

Even so i will post it up when i get home on friday!

Cheers
D

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cool beans lol