How To Build A Live Performance With Ableton

And so do you want to take us through... how you start things up there's many ways to do this and you know there's hybrid approaches there's fully in the box approaches do you want to take this through before we get to building a track and performing a track just what you are doing in terms of a hardware situation how you've rigged everything up

yeah so the first time that i I played live in Folkestone before lockdown and before I moved back up to Glasgow.

So that would have been seven years ago or so.

That was my very first kind of Ableton live performance thing at an EMOM in Folkestone.

But then I did another one, I guess five years ago, and scared the living daylights out of myself.

To the point where, at an early attack release, I had said to Fraser, who was pulling together the...

I volunteered to do a set.

And he said, right, come on then, we'll, you know, come and do it.

And I scared the living daylights out of myself in practice.

and had to call them and say, look, I can't do this because I was trying to kind of have individual components of tracks and then launch something.

And it had to be launched at the right moment to then be in the right place to then build the track in the way that I intended it to happen.

And so there was a lot of pressure on that has to be done then, and then I need to swap to this track, and I need to make sure this is ready, and then I need to play that part or launch that thing or do all this.

And if something doesn't work, then it's going to feel really clunky and out of place and awful.

And as I say, and the other thing was there were moments where I had to do two or three things like chunk, chunk, chunk, really quick, change, change, change, launch, do stuff, mix, do stuff.

And then there were other bits where I was kind of standing about going, well, this is working, this is nice, but what am I doing? You know, this is the moment where I check my emails as the meme goes.

So I hated that.

Now, I think the thing is that if you do that regularly, if this is your day job, then you can put the hours in on the practice to make sure that all of that stuff is muscle memory and you can do it without thinking.

And if something goes wrong, you've practiced how to recover from that thing going wrong.

And that's great.

Hat tip to the professionals who do that because it's insane.

Juggling flaming chainsaws.

So where I've got to now is a much happier place where actually I work with stems that I've prepared.

And so in the last few live performances, I've got essentially some stems that I know will play start to finish.

I can mix parts in and out of those stems so that you get a little bit of variation and things aren't just full bore all the time.

And I can even throw some of them out to effects and stuff.