Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Surface Sessions 07-3 – Performing Live – freezing instruments in Ableton”.
This is part three, where we’re freezing instruments enabling live in order to prepare it for performance. I have some other tracks that i created on my main desktop computer, which are then going to transfer across to the surface for performance, so they’re all done in live and they’re on this usb drive. Let’S have a look. One of the great things about ableton is that it does pull together everything that you use in the project into a single folder that makes it very easy to transfer about, so i’m going to copy those across there on my main system.
I used a lot of the native instruments complete package, and i’ve also now installed this on here, so it can share the same sounds because of the size of all the library incomplete. I’Ve had to attach an external drive which i’ve got here which is attached by usb3, so it’s plenty fast enough to deal with all the the streaming of samples that i want to do now, of course, when playing live, do i want to rely on an external Library drive uh having to run it through the hub and all those sorts of things and the potential technical difficulties with that, although there shouldn’t be any, but you know you want to reduce any possibility of technical difficulties in a live situation. So what i will probably do is mix all of the instrument tracks down to audio tracks, to make it much simpler than i don’t have to take this drive.
And then i can remove the potential problem, whether that drive failing or the connection failing or i spill communion wine on it or you know a dozen different things that can go on with that. But we’ll have a look. It’S also going to be interesting to see that these projects that i made on my main desktop computer on how well they run on the surface, because obviously the processing power is very different um. So that’s going to be interesting. So, let’s, let’s have a look. Let’S boot it up and uh and see what occurs.
Let’S have a look so back to the desktop here we go. The little external drive is now flashing away like crazy as it’s pulling up and loading up all the samples. Okay, that’s interesting. It’S a whole bunch of battery for library it couldn’t find okay.
This is because the currently i’ve got a micro sd drive in there, which says it’s. The d drive, whereas the libraries are on the e drive, which is different to my desktop computer. So i’m going to have to tell it where this is phew got around that one. Let’S see if this plays back well currently, looking at the cpu meter, it’s on about 50, so there’s at the moment plenty of room for adjusting things.
So i do have one thing missing, which is this hi-hats clip here which i’m going to have to go searching for it may have come from some extended library, that’s not a standard with ableton. So i have to go and dig that out see if i can bring that over, but otherwise yeah that seemed to work very well. Let’S have a look at the other one. Okay, there’s one plug-in that can’t be found which is omnisphere which isn’t installed on here but is installed on my desktop machine.
So what i’m going to need to do is freeze that track and convert it down to audio in order to bring that back over. So i need to have a look at that, so you know in some ways that highlights some of the difficulties in transferring from one machine to another. You’Ve got to make sure that you have the same set of plugins or, if you don’t, you have to start creating audio versions of those, so i’ll go away and fix that and come back and then we’ll have a look at it again. So what was missing from that? First song was one of the sound packs.
So, let’s see if we can pull that out, it was the forge right. So if i now open the confession track, one of the factors in running a live set is the issue is whether you’re gon na have the time to load it up or not, between songs so going to be loading up a lot of library and contact, for Instance, then, maybe that’s not going to be the best thing for you. Okay, we’ve got our little bit back, which is good because that was actually quite an important little sound with the other track. I had to go and freeze the omnisphere track so to convert a clip.
That’S using a virtual instrument into simply an audio clip is very simple in ableton, so this clip here is using a electric piano, the mark, one in contact. So it’s quite a large instrument. Loaded up, that’s quite resource heavy, i suppose, and what i can do is just stop that i essentially right click on the track or the channel or whatever you call it go, freeze track. Okay, this track is frozen, so i’ve got no more information on it.
But what it’s actually done is created a little mix down file of that particular clip of that of that part. So i can copy and paste that to there and there it is as an audio file and as an audio loop. It’S a lot less processor intensive. I can then delete that track.
Once i’m happy that i know what i’m doing, i can delete the contact track unload that instrument, and that gives me all of that headroom back and it’s not having to load that instrument up when it starts. So i’m going to go through this i’m going to continue to work on this particular song and then i’ll go through and i’ll freeze each track turn them into audio files to make it uh the lightest possible footprint. As far as playing it back goes. I mean there may be stuff, i want to play, live, maybe stuff, i want to affect, live and that’s fine. I can leave those ones, but if anything else which is just going to be playing quite simply or or unmanipulated during the gig, then it makes far more sense to convert that to audio, so it has a lower impact on the system as a whole. I hope that makes some kind of sense. Okay, going back to this track. We didn’t have the on the sphere plug-in, so i had to go back to the main system and do the freeze track and move thing. So now i’ve got a new version of this number. Two, let’s open that one up. Okay! So now i have that track there, purely as as audio great easy right, i’m going to get on with producing about half an hour music for this gig and start working. All this stuff um into a way that i can perform it.
That’S the next project and i have i have only seven days, so i better really get on with it. In part, four we’ll be looking at how i’ve prepared the visuals that are going to be running off the surface. .