I honestly tried and tried mapping Ableton previously with the BCR / Nano / RMX before but never felt “Comfortable” with any setup for DJ purposes.
Now once I got the APC40, well I really never felt comfortable with Traktor anymore no matter how I mapped it. So, spent the past week mapping, re-mapping, chaining, macroing in Ableton and have not even fired up Traktor in the past 5 days.
Tonight … I tested all the mappings I set up worked the way I liked, and started playing around all I could think was DAMN … THIS THING IS FUN !!
There’s just so many toys! So many channels AND above all its pretty logical if you can forgive the browser (my only real gripe).
And no, i’m not pre-planning to any great extent (like everyone says you need to), to that I mean I have a few hundred tracks pre-scanned of each genre “pretty well” Organized. Certainly More music than I would ever have had with me on vinyl and perhaps thats a good thing in the sense that it makes the brain think a lil more about whats good and whats mediocre and can be left behind. I can always grab a track from Itunes and drop it in if the need be, scanning only takes 10-20 secs.
Really REALLY love being able to have a library at hand of drum loops and then being able to record samples at will JOY!
I can’t imagine trying to use Ableton from a DJ perspective though for anything other than pretty much straight forward 4/4 EDM.
Anyone wondering if its worth a shot, definitely give it a go, also highly recommend having a look at M-lovers Ableton DJ vids on youtube to get a grasp of FX chaining and Macros.
Ableton is a lot of fun. I only gave it up because the rest of my life was coding and I realized that to do what I wanted, I had to write midi remote scripts. It eventually became too much like work.
That’s because they’re all wrong. I mean…yeah, if you’re doing a Live PA, you have to write the parts/songs first…but if you’re DJing, preparation in Live is no more pre-planning than setting beat grids and cue points. People who say that don’t know what they’re talking about.
It’s true. I dj entirely on the fly with Ableton. I try and get all my tracks beatgridded before hand but if I don’t it’s no big deal…with house or anything else with a strong kick it will be nearly perfect and then it takes about ten seconds for me to make tiny adjustments. And the freedom to have a bunch of drum and vocal loops loaded up and ready to go really is liberating. My only gripes are the browser (I dont like that I have to use the mouse to select tracks) and the fact that the looper just loops the audio, not the track. Ableton makes djing feel as creative as live PA to me and that’s what I love about it.
Actually I dont think anyone looking for a decent Ableton DJ template could NOT find your one (unless they are really computer illiterate ).
Didn’t quite suit what I needed and wanted to do but I did take some inspiration from yours in the form of x-fader FX and channeling the EQ’s up top
Few racks pulled from various sources tweaked to suit, I need to have another look at your template actually as to how your triggering the one-shot fx though (not quite that far in yet)….just dunno if I have space for them on a one layer grid.
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