Anyone use Ableton and NOT chop up your songs?
I dj with ableton and I keep my songs intact for the most part. I have a knob assigned to the clip start location so if I want to jump right in at a certain part of a song I can, but that’s it. From what I’ve read on here it seems that everyone separates their songs into intro/verse/break/outro etc. Is this pretty much what everyone does? I really only do that for songs that I have certain routines and mashups for.
Same. For the most part I DJ in Ableton the same way (flow-wise) as I did on a decks/mixer setup.
Seems like you’re under utilizing what Ableton offers if that’s all you’re doing with it. Might as well scoop up Traktor if that’s all you’re aiming to do.
Luckily enough, Ableton has a lot of features besides chopping tracks.
see thats my whole problem with the “Djing in ableton” bit!
some people do full songs then just quatntize (through lives master tempo) the intro/outtro and switch between while others cut the clip up and mix that way by dropping different parts (which imho makes more sense)
ive heard of alot of people doing bass kills or just not EQ-ing at all and transitioning that way
where do you guys start when trying to put together a set in live? do you just warp a shit ton of tracks organize em and have a go? or do you warp with purpose only loading tracks up that you KNOW youre gonna use (if that makes sense)?
The only way ive been able to “DJ in live” is through routing traktor into live and playing with oneshots and effects and whatnot – which i know is completely underutilizing the software.
sorry for ranting/hijacking this thread. but ive been at it all day and havnt made any progress and any help would be phenomenal as im prob gonna have tomm off as well-- hate snow but its awesome when you dont have to work 
Ableton’s effects are better, if nothing else.
I’ve done a lot of sets like that…I used Live for a long time because when I started with it, Traktor sucked. It was the only thing that could mangle songs when you wanted to unless you used SSL and could deal with 5 hot cues and looping that weren’t quantized.
I certainly didn’t mangle songs all the time…I did a lot of “just press play” sets, and I enjoyed them. I don’t see it as that different from spinning with Traktor…just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do it. Most people with that mindset, the ones who really ‘take advantage’ of Ableton…they make horribly boring DJ sets.
In all honesty, I’d still use Live except that Traktor’s just easier. I was flirting with it, and I’d always planned on going back to Live until iTunes somehow got reset to a default setting and moved around and renamed all of my media files…it would have taken days worth of work to get my analysis files to work again. It wasn’t worth it when Traktor somehow got good while I wasn’t looking.
If I manage to sell my VCM and get a more appropriate controller (finally figured out how a xone:1d/2d might not suck) I’d probably go back to Live just for one genre…maybe just do psybreaks with Ableton and use Traktor for everything else…maybe Techno…that’d be fun to tear apart.
i chop the songs up. but sometimes i feel that i may as well leave them intact.
i would like some examples of full ableton sets, anybody have any links i should check out?
yep, whenever i buy music i spend a good deal of time warping and chopping each one for future use, then i sit down, “have a go”, and see where the chips fall. Then i go back and work on how/where i want all the transitions to be, swap songs etc. then record the whole mix once i think i have everything optimized.
If you want full Ableton sets check my soundcloud, although im not sure how diff it would sound from a Traktor one, then again listen and maybe you could tell me heh
I organize tracks by genre as I get them and I pretty much always warp tracks while playing (at home) rather than just tediously going through track after track. So, if I’m trying to get familiar with a new batch of tracks I’ll just load a bunch into the grid, start one up, and warp during the mix (occasionally I’ll run into oddball tracks that I actually need to hear to get warped properly, but that’s a rarity). Putting together a “normal” club set just comes down to pulling tracks in based on what I figure out in jam sessions; I don’t follow a setlist unless its for some really specific routine.
so say you take 10 new tracks you bought and warp em each to say 3 different audio tracks…
and you have one master (full) track and below it you have say
1-intro
2-hook
3-chorus
4-(loop? cues? verse?)
5-Outro
ect…
then just straight up start playing around by triggering different parts of songs at once?
am i that retarded that it could be so easy? or am i missing something?
i feel like warping the track then putting different cue/start points in there would be easier? am i wrong? or is it the same thing? cause im confused 
the only thing that bothers me about doing this is all the work and say out of every 10 tracks you – warp – grid – cue – you actually would use 3 or 4 of them to actually mix?
seems kinda daunting compared to the ease of traktor… im not good with change. but i feel like live djing/remixing/producing all at the same time is the way of the future. gotta get on my game.
i cut a song up as many times as it will allow. i keep one track thats full length starting from the intro, then get each layer thats added on with whatever element is added as the track goes along.
im not yet too proficient at ableton, but when plotting out a mix, it worked very well. allowed you to get exactly what you want out of each song you picked for as long as you want, and allowed 2, 3, 4, 5 track mixing simultaneously.
It’s kinda that easy, but…you’ll change the way you work based on how you see things once you get into it. I’ve never really seen the point of using multiple audio tracks for a single song…though I’ve done a lot with different remixes of the same song.
Actually, the day I figured out how to do in Traktor something I used to do in Live with a couple different remixes of this one Cirez D track…that was the day I realized Traktor had gotten good. It sounded identical (and has since started to sound better) and was about as easy to do.
It’s old, but the breaks mix on my mixcloud (linked below) was done in Live…it’s the only one I have that’s convenient. I’m convinced that you could do everything I did in Ableton then using Traktor now…but it would be pushing it to mix out of it, because it would use all 4 decks.