I must confess, I have not used Ableton Beat Repeat plug-in that much (even if it has been around since the 5.0 days)

But I did a test tonight, had two house tracks playing, same key, and had one or two bar loops happening with both tracks, and move the loop bars around. Meanwhile, I had beat repeat slicing and dicing one of the audio tracks into new variations. The result was pretty interesting, like a freshly made groove-loop every time.

This is a little bit how the Spectrasonics RMS Stylus is doing with drum tracks. But I could take any DJ tracks and let Beat Repeat make new versions of small loops over and over again, annotating other tracks. So it could build up totally, unexpected new mixes, live. If the loops also have melodies, the beat repeat changes would make it all very interesting!

Which leads to another topic. I do feel that a DJ should be proactive, do unexpected things, even if it could lead to problems on stage from time to time. It’s very boring to be part of a totally prepared show, with everything done in a secure way to avoid mistakes. For me that’s more boring than a train wreck from time to time, but the DJ is really trying to push it and make the event an experience for everyone.

Maybe you have seen this movie before, but here Robert Henke is presenting beat repeat plugin.

Here’s another nice and easy feature in Ableton Live 6.0. When you switch to MIDI map mode, and define controls, you could also specify in the MIDI mappings window the min and max values for the actual controllers.

Two examples where this is good to do — with DJ MIDI control setups — is the volume and EQ3 settings . It’s good to restrict the max volume to 0dB or something similar. In a busy DJ session you might by mistake push the volume slider or knob too far up, resulting in over 0dB signals sent to the master.

With the EQ3 equalizer, for example with the low end bass, you don’t want to push the eq too far up, over 0dB, when tweaking the knob. Now, when you tweak it far right, you know that you will not exceed the max value you have set.

This all is especially good with crazy DJ sessions, you take down the EQ low end with a track, and then to reset it for the next track, just move the knob all the way to the right.

Also, don’t forget to tweak the knobs just before the DJ session starts, if the values are in a specific setting, and you start tweaking, you might initally get really odd and unexpected values. So it’s good to reset all of the knobs before the DJ session starts.

I have a hard time using rotating knobs as the volume control, especially when doing DJ mixes… It seems I could never get a nice feeling of smooth changes, especially when pushing down one channel and up another one. It might also depend on my current Novation Remote 25 LE that I use temporarily as my controller — while waiting for the perfect DJ MIDI controller to arrive.

I’ve been looking through the current controllers out there. Behringer BRC2000 is a rotary one, the BCF2000 looked OK, but I think the price is too high for what you get, especially as it only has eight rotary controllers — I would like to get three per channel, for a combination of either DJ eq, or with a switch using other effects.

If someone made a MIDI controller similar to the Ecler Nuo4, that would be what I would purchase in a jiffy. Alas, Nuo4 only has volume MIDI controls for two of the four channels.

I suspect that M-Audio will release something similar later, the new X-Session Pro is cheap, has four channels, but somewhat limiting, but it might do the job for the time being until better controllers show up.

I also looked at the Novation Remote SL Zero, my biggest gripe with that one was that the slider ranges were very short, I really want very long slider ranges, with precision… Then again, maybe that’s another compromise I have to live with, as I liked the rest of the design.

Hey, what’s that cheap Casio synth doing in your studio? Well. I needed a quick way to find out the key of various songs I’m adding to my DJ playlist collection. I save the key as a file name and a clip value in Ableton Live as well. It means I could quickly find song keys, and compare it with the playing clips, and with complex warp mode I could easily change the pitch and get the keyed-in mixing that sound really good.

So I took this old cheap synth from my son’s room, and it’s a snap to hit the key and get the info.

Key mixing is good, but you need some music theory, or at least learn it the hard way, how to mix together different keys. With the complex mode and changing the key, you could put together all songs with the same key, but it would sound boring after a while. There’s tension added when you put together songs where the keys change. But with some little tweaking you could use any song connected to any other song.

Ok, let’s talk more about doing the ‘production style’ Ableton Live session work.

If you have songs, it’s good to chop things into specific sections for easy mapping. The most natural ones are to find places with just drums, ending, beginning, no keys, so those could be used as the backbone for any new remixes when playing Ableton live. The other natural clips are any acapellas or clips with no drums (those empty buildups in many dance tracks). So now when you have clips with just drums, and clips with just instruments, you could mix together two totally different songs, assuming the BPMs variations would not cause problems. I even have separate colors for these now, as colors are quicker to see than text strings mentioning the clip style. Anyway, it’s VERY IMPORTANT that you could clearly see in the clip what it’s about, so you need a system to mark up clips for reuse later.

Secondly, you could make clips with just the bass and drum section. Using complex warp mode you could change the pitch of such things and map them with any other clips with keys. Small changes are fine, let’s say D and D#, or C and A. With wider changes things start to sound strange, so you need to think about chromatic mixing. That’s another story and requires some musical background to learn what fits together, and what not.

A big problem is to add together too many layers of musical material, so it sounds like a big Eno soundscape with drums behind — this is where taste is important, and layering of clips where there’s a dominant part, and supporting parts, is important.

You could also use the EQ to block out the low end for certain clips to just get the high-end, pads, or hihats, and let other clips take care of the low end.

If you are really good, you could use very long loops, 32 bars or so, it’s easier to get all this to work reliably with short loops, so it’s good to start this way.

When you play track live, put aside such clips you would like to use later in the show, place into a dedicated other audio track (I have two, drums and Misc where misc has non-drum loops). Then, any time you wish, you could trigger these loops later.

If you are really, really good, you could even change the loop length for any saved loops and reuse them this way, or put the starting point somewhere else than in the beginning of the loop, and this way make variations. Or, you could trigger the same loop over and over again for rapid loop styles.

It’s also sometimes fascinating to start the song with the ending of a track, and then continue, or mix-and-match sections of the song out of order, let’s say start with the first buildup, empty section, jump to the end drumming, then start with the first verse. This while you use other clips underneath from other songs.

Also, for buildups, it’s good to use the levels to introduce clips instead of starting them immediately. Same with fading them out rather than stopping immediately.

One big key is to train your memory to remember songs and clips in your head, the more you kind of remember the character of a song, the easier it will be.

The warping must be perfect, otherwise mushing will easily happen.

I must say, all this is still a big experimentation for me, myself. I’m learning every day something new about having a pool of clips and doing remixes on the fly. But it’s fun.

Here’s the workflow I’m using with Ableton Live 6.0 for taking any audio tracks, music, and chopping it into useable clips that I could mix and match later in a DJ-live session. The idea is very similar to what Sasha is doing, in other words make new productions live.

a) Open a new Live Window/project

b) Drag in the WAV/AIFF/MP3/AAC file into the one and only audio track as the first clip

c) Autowarp, adjust markers from beginning to end, make sure it all works out, set proper 1.1.1 point and so on.

d) Set a default beginning loop that sounds OK, 8 or 16 bars.

• As this is the whole song, you could use this for the whole playback, and just start it, and remove the loop point so it continues, and place starting points on this clip, in case you don’t want to use the additional clips created.

e) Clone this clip (command-D), rename it to INTRO - JUST DRUMS or something meaningful.

• I use upper-case as it’s easier to see the text string.

f) Clone this again, adjust the loop point to the next natural loop, maybe more intro, or the first part.

• I have trigger as the default clip start, set this in your preferences, or in case you want to have some other starting option, change those per each clip.

g) Continue such cloning (don’t forget to move to the next cloned clip), until you have the song chopped o N parts (I could go up to 20 and beyond…).

• The key is to make loops that sound good when you combine them in any possible ways!
• I’m also using color coding to separate the intro loops, main loops, end ending loops.

h) When happy, rename the first clip so it has a good title, my style is:

• <> means that you place your own string in there, 128 D# TEC for example
• As a bonus, you could even colorize the clips, intros have one
• color, main part another, ending a third color
• Or color clips with drums only, or any other things you want to
• quickly see using a coloring scheme
• I use a cheapo plastic synth to find the main key of the song
• The is an internal running number I use as an index to make each song unique.
• The whole reason for all this is that I could on the first clip always see the main info about the song.

i) Save this whole thing as a project (.als folder), name it -){}[

• This so in your file browser you could quickly find certain styles, or BPM values, or keys.
• Put this in your main archive folder

j) Run collect and Save so that any audio files you used will be copied into this new .als project file, as well.

• Important, we want these to be self-contained, so they could be moved from location to location, from computer to computer.

k) Quit, test, make sure things look OK. Put a note into your log about this new song, in case you want to keep track of these.

In use, drag in the .als project into any audio window, or copy/paste it in, all your clips, including ordering and coloring, is preserved.

Yep, a lot of work. Then again, I’m mostly interested in Ableton Live as a producer/DJ tool, combining two-three songs to see what happens, similar to what Sasha has done for a while. For that you need to do all this pre-work, but the fun part then is that you could combine, mix and match, and do all kinds of interesting mixes from then forward. The best part - in a live situation!

I this test last weekend. The idea was to see if Ableton Live 6.0.1 could handle eight hours of continious live mixing, as in a very long DJ session.
It worked. Eight hours and two minutes. Standard MacOSX 10.4.8, latest M-Audio drivers, 2GB RAM, 2×2.0GHz PPC, 23″ studio screen.

Lessons learned:

+ No crashes. I spent the first four hours doing Sasha-like mixes of various elements, but then when my .als files run out, I switched to manual loading of audio and moving the playloops by hand and doing loops on the fly. I could even save the final eight-hour session, there was a short SPOD (spinning beach ball) of about 10 seconds and then the file was saved, 3.8Mb in size, as it just contained the changes in the session. I think a clean laptop environment should indeed handle an eight-hour session, provided you are really careful with the setup, no odd things running, latest drivers, tested, and so on.

- Do not do midi map changes while in session, recording stops. I did this by mistake 30 minutes into the session, so only 7:30 minutes or so was recorded. I tried to reproduce this later for bug reporting to Ableton, but was not able to get into this same situation. So I still don’t know if this is a real bug or a fluke.

- The autowarping in 6.0.1 is not that super-accurate, there’s always a need to go in and fix it, and do this during live… I avoided using any non-prewarped and checked out files in this session…. This is
another thing that I think Ableton should fix in post 6.0.

- It’s indeed hard to keep track of songs used after a while. I will send Ableton a report with possible ideas how to for instance flag used .als project files with a color in the browser.

- Eyes, eyes. I woke up the following morning with a tension headache. I watch screens all day long at work, but eight hours straight looking on the Ableton screen is tough. Maybe having a stronger contrast setting would have helped. Or then just try to not always focus on the screen during a long session. It would also help if the next round of Ableton had a cleaner screen setup, for example bigger font/graphics support, and more layers to turn on/off.

+/- It’s important to mark up the material concerning song key, BPM tempo and so on. I have my own system, but I realized things I want to change now after this test. The more you know upfront, the better. Again, there’s only a certain amount of text info present (I will fire another feature request to Ableton about having automatic popup support with meta-information about tracks…). I will also mark my clips better concerning sections with only drums, so no cueing is needed when saving such tracks for later use.

- Electro/minimal is boring, at least that’s how it felt for me. What I ended up doing was to spice it up with clips from earlier tracks that I put aside in two audio tracks (drums, misc) that I could trigger from time to time. Especially minimalist drums, for me, are not that strong, so having more drum tracks running helps.

+/- It’s good to know your tracks inside out. The ones I knew, I hardly bothered doing any cueing, as I knew the format.

- I did about one to two mistakes every 30 minutes. Means I need to practice more.

+ Especially in a possible club environment, you don’t have a chair, so you need a good stamina, and a healthy posture. Yoga helps.

Sorry this was long, but this was interesting, and I recommend anyone else doing it, in case you have time! For me, I’m really happy Ableton 6.0.1 held up, I was prepared to file off a long list of bugs, but I never needed to write these down in my notebook.