Who uses software on stage?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mixteco
  • Start date Start date
M

Mixteco

New member

I always use Reason 4 live and I love the synths and other sounds. Lately tho, Ive had a major problem. Our drummer recently moved away due to personal reasons and well we havent had much lucky finding a solid, on time, dependable replacement. So in order to keep on practicing and rehearsing without a drummer we've been creating patterns and just triggering them thru an MPD.

Now, I know wut yall are thinking...( dude get yourself a real drummer!) but its only temporirly until we find someone dependable. Anyways...

We've created the patterns but have had VERY BAD luck with using ReDrum on Reason 4 live. Its like we cant trigger them at the exact time we want without them finishing their steps..then we have the problem of the pattern not going back to beat as soon as we trigger it back.

Are we doing something wrong or perhaps there's something we dont know?

Anyone with some help or aid ...please us:confused::o

 

Theres quite a few drummers who've come around to practice but most dont seem to be dedicated or have enough passion b/c they'll show up 1st time and then like "forget" they had practice...and we dont like that as a group in general. lol

Anyways, anyone, help? My acount on proppellerheads can't post topics (which sux) ...

 
We had band practice for a month with a drum machine while we were between drummers, but never with software / vsti's or whatever.. Never live with anything except a real drummer tho. For live use, a drum machine is one thing, an xp laptop that crashes once every 200 hours of use is another, I'd never trust my gig to a computer to stay running.
 
I've been doing gigs with a computer since 1983. Hard to believe, but in the thousands of gigs there was only one time that the computer completely fucked me: it was in 1984 with a Commodore 64 and the hard drive screwed up, and the gig was cancelled. It was pretty awful but it was a freebie. Odd thing was that it was at a mall right outside of Sears and if had I known what was wrong I could have gone into Sears and got a new hard drive 'cause they sold Commodores then. It was a bad day.

After that I went through various systems. This last 10 years I have used QMidi which I can't say enough good things about. It is basically a player. For several years I used the Apple clamshell iBooks - I have 4. I did thousands of gigs on those and not 1 even hiccup - not uno crasho. The iBook clamshell was an especially robust package. Rock solid.

QMidi is the best computer program I have seen so far. It has never, ever crashed even once on me and has always worked flawlessly. I can't say that about 1 other computer program.

This last 2 years I've been using an iBook G4 running QMidi and Ableton Live at the same time.

Ableton Live, with all it's horrible problems (and it has many) does a nice job of changing arrangements on the fly. You can set it up so that when you are playing a beat, you hit a button and it will complete the bar and go to the next pattern, and all that works very well. It has many MIDI issues that need to be resolved though and the company is MIA for the most part. I do not like the company.

You are much better off with an actual module or drum machine for sounds than a software synth as far as reliability, and truthfully I trust Mac OS 9 more than Mac OS X, but I use OS X because of Ableton.

I'm not sure what your actual problems are.
 
Ableton Live, with all it's horrible problems (and it has many) does a nice job of changing arrangements on the fly. You can set it up so that when you are playing a beat, you hit a button and it will complete the bar and go to the next pattern, and all that works very well.


I'm not sure what your actual problems are.



Basically bro...

We make the patterns, right? Then play the beat but when we wanna change the pattern, such as going into drum rolls or certain fills, when I press the button for it to go back to the main pattern it usually doesnt go as fast as it should? Like it repeats the "drum rolls and other lil fills" twice...ya know wut I mean?

Ugh I dont know wut Im trying to say...its just one of those things that confuse me and makes me wanna kick my chihuahua dog:o:eek::laughings:

But I use Windows Vista running on a Toshiba Laptop for over a year now and no problem wut so ever. The only time I had a problem was one time when I accidently restarted the computer in the middle of a song...it killed the whole setting:(

 
If you want to see your results with Reaper, I could send you a copy of the FX that I made for my live stuff.
Basically, I have up to 10 channels feeding into one control channel, then I can selectively mute/unmute them to determine which pattern or fill or whateve is playing at any given time.

The only real problem I've run into with it is that the DDR pad I control it with sometimes misfires.
 
... Basically, I have up to 10 channels feeding into one control channel, then I can selectively mute/unmute them to determine which pattern or fill or whateve is playing at any given time..

Yes, that's another way that works.

They do "give away" basic versions of Ableton Live with many synth packages that run only 4 tracks. For what you're doing that would be a good way to do it. You could probably find one of those versions ultra cheap. It has the capability of quantizing your selections, so no matter when you select something it will finish the bar you were on smoothly.
 
Back
Top