Link Ableton to vinyl turntables
Hi
This is my first post on here and I’m hoping somebody can help me.
I’m wanting to link my Ableton up to my mates vinyl turntables. i’ve been looking at the Red Sound Soundbite Micro and wanted to know what people thought of this piece of equipment.
Would this do the job?
Or what other options are there?
Thanks in advance.
The Bridge (to Serato)
In Virtual DJ 7, you can set up ableton as a rewire slave to one of your decks. I’mlooking into this (very slowly) at the moment. It means that one of your decks can control the transport of Live (start/stop/tempo, etc…)
I’ll be trying it on a 4-deck VDJ skin, where I’'ll use 2 decks for timecode vinyl, and a 3rd deck for the Live set.
hi
thanks for your replies.
serato defeats the object as we are wanting to use his vinyl collection.
we want him on the decks and me using loops and samples, plus the effects.
anybody else have any ideas?
You could route the send/return of the mixer to you’re ableton soundcard.
I don’t quite know how to work it out on the software side of things, but its definitely possible.
Give this a shot - they have demo ..
redsound micro would work - but I have heard you have to really babysit it and keep it on track.
I’d man up and just match it manually. It’s vinyl - you have pitch control, and Ableton has tempo control.
Have you tried mapping pitch controls?
@jprime - lol yeah maybe i do need to man up!
to be honest, i’ve seen Spektre doing something similar but with cdj’s (using normal CD’s)
i’m sure there must be some way of doing it without having to manually match loops up to vinyl.
the hunt continues…
The wav-tick software link I sent you works a treat, been messing with it all morning syncing and looping Traktor and Ableton to the audio signal from iPhone.
Yes its expensive (now) .. but the “demo” is free to use so long as you aren’t making money out of it.. no doubt it’ll come down to a reasonable price if they can get it on the app store.
Give it a shot.
Seriously, this.
set two buttons to nudge, and you’ll be fine.
Ableton also has wide and fine pitch controls.
When I had my vcm-600, I’d match Ableton to other things all the time. It takes no more effort than spinning with vinyl.
Sure you can do it and I do it occasionally, for a whole set though when your completely at the mercy of someone else’s BPM not fluctuating wildly and needing to spend any time beat matching/nudging continually when you are trying to cue up/load loops and play with other stuff would get very very tiring very fast imho.
Guess it depends on his mates beatmatching skill, genres, mixing style and BPM range and if the loops / fx are going to run continually or just one shot bits and pieces.
i’m going to give it a try this weekend, see how it goes. I’ll let you know! For info, we’re going to be playing techno. I’ll make sure he keeps the vinyl steady otherwise he’ll be getting a dead arm
I mean…Ableton sucks at following a MIDI clock. I’ve done it. Matching Traktor to Live with a MIDI clock works fine, going the other way around is a tremendous headache. I can’t imagine how weird it would be with a less reliable clock or one generated off audio.
I honestly think doing it manually would be easier and more reliable.
Completely take back alot of what I said, and you are probably right (for now) I totally forgot just HOW bad Ableton is at keeping sync with an external source till I tried using it for more than a few mins. Just seems so ridiculous that slave clock is SO bad still… what a basic fecking feature
Ms pinkys is rad. I have it and use it. Still rewriting the m4l patch though
ow does Ms. Pinky handle beat-sync’d fx? Can you use beat-repeat on a clip that is being controlled by the Pinky vinyl? (or do you have to keep the Pinky Clip sync’d w/Abletons master tempo manually?)
Ms Pinky playback is independant from Live, it does not sync with Live, it’s like an instrument plug in that plays sample you load into it in a variety of ways. However with the Max for Live Ms Pinky device, you could make it sync to Lives transport.
Yet realize Ms Pinky plays/manipulates audio independently from Ableton. You load clips into Ms Pinky, Ms Pinky does NOT play/scratch Ableton clips.
SO you wouldnt put a Beat Repeat on an Ableton audio Clip and manipulate playback with Pinky vinyl. You would load what ever clip into Ms Pinky and you would put a Beat Repeat after the Ms Pinky device.
HOWEVER, you could record Loops of manipulated audio clips in Ableton using an M4L looper like rbrt23’s Superlooper. The Superlooper has an auto export feature. You can route that to the Pinky device so when the recorded loop gets exported it sends its file name directly to the Pinky device to select for playback.
That said, the Pinky M4L device can be configured in a bunch of ways depending on how savvy you are in Max. For example you could
You could what?!?
(I’m on the edge of my seat, here!!!)