Live Instrument Tracks

Live Set Overview

Okay, so let me just give you a tour of the rest of my live set here. I'm going to open up some of these groups, and we're going to start with the live instruments. They're right in here.

Organizing Tracks

So, you know, I put these things in groups because I don't really need to see these tracks while I'm playing live. I like to only focus on what I have here. So I put them in a group and then I close it down.

Grouping in Ableton Live

The way you put things in groups in Ableton Live is:

• Select them all, whatever it is you want to have.
• Hit Apple + G.

After a second or two, you will get a little group. I'm going to just undo that because we don't need that, and here we are with our live instrument group.

Organizing by Sound

Now, the way I like to do things is I like to organize it by different sounds.

Drum Sounds

• Right here, I have drums, and these drums are played with the pads on my MPK Mini.
• Those are the drum sounds, and you can see the instruments here.
• I'm currently using my super tape drums, just to let you know that I actually do use my own instruments.

Launchpad Effects and Percussions

Next, I have my Launchpad effects and percussions.

• When I go into my Launchpad here, I got some percussion tracks and I can switch to different instruments that I have loaded in here.
• What you gonna do? Just some different samples there for fun and more samples there. So that's the Launchpad stuff.

MPK Mini Track

If I go into my MPK Mini track, this is stuff that I can play on my MPK Mini. I have:

• Synths: That one, I believe, is my Nintendo Rack.
• Bass sound: I've got different, kind of like, transitional sounds. These are great for when you're switching between parts, just some nice noises.

Vocoder

So I have that set up, and finally, I have a vocoder, which we'll get into as well.

OP1 Track

I have another track for my OP1. This track is just waiting for OP1 sounds.

• What's great about this particular synth is there are all these different sounds ready to go right off the thing.

iPad Track

I have another track for my iPad, which allows me to put in pretty much any app I want and get sound through it right in here on this track.

External MIDI Instrument Track

There's another track I use for sending MIDI to external gear using the external instrument. We'll talk about how to do that in a little while.

Microphone Track

Finally, I also have a track for my microphone.

• On this track, I can add delay to my voice and play around with delay a little bit.
• I can give a beat: Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.
• Drop down the pitch of the beat: Repeat.
• I've also got an auto-tune which makes me sing. I like the auto-tune; I don't care. I know it's controversial, but sometimes I want a robotic sounding voice, so I like to use the auto-tune.

Additional Effects

• Here's another thing I can do: a kind of telephone voice, a reverb out kind of thing. It's whatever you want, really.

Summary

So this is how I collect all my live instruments in different tracks.