Wel­come to a third post of a behind-the-scenes look into my Able­ton Live set­up. The first posts are some­thing of a primer, describ­ing the gear I use and the basics of set­ting up a mix; from here, I dive a lit­tle deep­er into the Able­ton waters. If this is your first time here, or if you’re new to Live, you might want to start at the begin­ning.

The Click

One of the first things I set up in a typ­i­cal Wits ses­sion is the click track. A click is a real­ly help­ful tool on the show; I use it both as a quick ref­er­ence before count­ing off a musi­cal num­ber and occa­sion­al­ly as a metronome when a con­sis­tent tem­po is help­ful. Live has a built-in metronome which is rout­ed by default to the cue mix, but since mechan­i­cal beeps are a lit­tle less than inspir­ing I pre­fer to use clips on a ded­i­cat­ed track.

What I do is cre­ate a MIDI track titled ​“Click,” route it to ​“Sends Only,” and load up a per­cus­sion pre­set of Live’s Impulse instrument:

Impulse is Live’s basic sam­pler; it’s easy to use and uses very lit­tle CPU. Once it’s loaded up with per­cus­sion sounds it’s just a mat­ter of cre­at­ing a MIDI clip and pro­gram­ming a pat­tern, like this sim­ple 16^th note shaker:

When I get a loop I’m hap­py with, I drag the fin­ished clip over to a fold­er I keep in Live’s Places titled ​“Click Sounds”:

Clips saved in this man­ner will save not only the pro­grammed clip but the track’s instruments/​effects as well. I have a bank of clips saved, so for any­thing that needs a click track it’s as sim­ple as drag­ging a clip from the fold­er to an open cell in the appro­pri­ate scene.

About Those Scenes

Each row in Live’s ses­sion grid is called a scene. In the exam­ple I’m using today, there are six scenes created:

If you recall, launch­ing a scene will trig­ger all clips in a scene’s row (in this case, the only clips so far are the click sounds). You launch a scene by press­ing the launch but­ton (the orange tri­an­gle next to the scene title), hit­ting the Enter key when a scene is select­ed, or trig­ger­ing it via MIDI (more on this later).

You’ll prob­a­bly notice the scene titles are pret­ty spe­cif­ic, for exam­ple, ​“Bill­board – 192 bpm – 4/4.” One cool thing about Live’s scenes is you can pass tem­po and time sig­na­ture changes via the scene title; in this case, launch­ing the ​“Bill­board” scene will play all clips in the row in a 4/4 time sig­na­ture at 192 bpm. Slick, right?

In the Launch tab of Live’s pref­er­ences you can adjust the scene launch­ing behav­ior; I always have both ​“Select on Launch” and ​“Select Next Scene on Launch” set to ​“On”:

As you can guess, hav­ing these options enabled means the scene launch but­ton will not only launch the cur­rent scene but also cue up the next scene. Mov­ing through a setlist couldn’t be easier.

Map It Up

I don’t want to mess with the lap­top once I’m behind the kit, so I use my Roland SPD-SX to nav­i­gate the ses­sion using Live’s MIDI Map­ping func­tion­al­i­ty. Map­ping a but­ton in Live to a phys­i­cal but­ton on a MIDI con­troller is stupid-simple:

1. Place Live in MIDI Map Mode (Command+M on a Mac).
2. Press the but­ton you want to control.
3. Press the cor­re­spond­ing but­ton on your MIDI controller.

The SPD-SX needs a lit­tle set­up before using it as a MIDI con­troller. I cre­ate an emp­ty user kit, name it ​“Scene Launch,” and assign MIDI num­bers to each pad: MIDI note 001 is assigned to Pad 1, 002 to Pad 2, 003 to Pad 3, etc. Next, I put Live into MIDI Map Mode and assign a pad to var­i­ous func­tions in Live I want to control:

I’ve also mapped the mix bus faders to the SPD-SX’s two con­trol knobs, and I tog­gle Live’s trans­port with a Boss footswitch.

The Click Scene

So, now that everything’s set up…how does this all come together?

For any­thing that needs a tem­po ref­er­ence, I’ll cre­ate a scene and title it with the name and tem­po infor­ma­tion. In that scene, on the Click track, I’ll drag in an appro­pri­ate loop from my Click Sounds folder.

Dur­ing a show, I’ll hit a pad on the SPD-SX to launch the first scene, which feeds a click track into my in-ear mon­i­tors. I can shut off the click with the footswitch (or start it up again if I need to). In the mean­time, Live has cued up the next scene. Rinse and repeat.

That Sounds Easy

It is!

But You Made It Sound Complicated

Well, I’m not the best writer. But thanks for read­ing! I promise I don’t just use Live as a glo­ri­fied metronome — turns out I actu­al­ly use it for fun things like play­ing music. More on that in my next post.