🎪Better Rehearsals & Tighter Shows

Aug 28, 2024

don’t like video? here it is in text form:

We don’t use tracks.
- Not because we’re ideologically opposed to using tracks,
- but because there’s already 11 of us onstage,
- so it’s not really necessary.
- Everything that goes to FOH is made by us in real time.
Whether you use tracks or not, Ableton is still an amazing tool for running your stage show. We use it A LOT.
- It’s how I create the demos,
- it’s how the singers rehearse on their own
- onstage it provides:
  - the click track,
  - the count-ins,
  - reference pitches for singers,
  - I don’t have it set up in here yet, but soon it’ll change the patches on my pedal board so I can just focus on playing guitar
  - and if we want, I can use it to display lyrics or control lighting or order a pizza.
so let’s take a look.

It’s just an empty midi clip.
you can see that there are also Locators with the song names
- that’s how we tell Ableset where the songs start
- and we’ll look at that in a minute
but I like to have a song name track
because it lets us see which song we’re looking at
even when we’re zoomed in

Our whole show is charted…
there are measure numbers on the charts…
and to make our lives easier, those measure numbers are mirrored here in Ableton.
They’re just empty MIDI clips…
that have been labeled.
The first time I did this was really tedious…
because I had to manually create & label each clip…
and some of these medleys or uptempo tunes might have 200 bars.
So I had to manually label 200 separate MIDI clips.
But now that I’ve done that, Ableton makes it really easy to reuse that labor…
because you can pull one Ableton live set into another Ableton live set.
I have my measure numbers track saved as its own set…
and tagged as a favorite…
so I can just drop that right in…
make a couple of adjustments for length and for any 2/4 bars or whatever…
and then we’re good to go.
Measure Numbers set is here in this Dropbox folder.

they’re labeled…
and they’re color-coded.
- So INTROs are always green,
- VERSEs always orange,
- PRECHORUSes are yellow,
- CHORUSes are blue,
- BRIDGEs are purple.
- etc
The section name track controls some other things in Ableset… which we’ll look at in a minute

I’m skipping over how we got here, but I’m happy to make another video showing how the sausage is made in terms of creating the basic demo tracks.

That lives on this track, and when the singers do sectional rehearsals or work on choreo, that’s what they listen to.
There’s also a subgroup that has the vocal demo so they can spot check themselves.
I have all the mute buttons for these demo tracks mapped to the F key.
- This makes it really easy to cue singers.
- the band I say “I’ll count you in to m48,” but that doesn’t mean anything to the singers.
- So I’ll back up, let the whole thing play with both band and singer tracks in our in-ears,
- then mute it again.

Pitch Track
- It’s a basic piano sample.
- For songs where the singers come in right at the top, this gives them a reference pitch.
- In the past we would have the piano player give them a pitch
- But this seems a little more elegant.
- Also useful for one-off situations like this medley:
COUNT IN
- this is actually the voice of St Vincent’s MD, Daniel Minseris
- it’s him counting 1 through 6
- most of our songs have a two-bar count in
- and then out loud, onstage I’ll count the 1234

for CLICK I actually have two
- I wasn’t sure which the band would prefer
- there’s a BLIP
- and a WOODBLOCK
- these are just the default Ableton click options
  - I dug around in the application files and found the samples they use
    - In Finder on my Mac:
    - Applications > [right-click on] Ableton > Contents > App-Resources > Core Library > Defaults > Metronomes > Samples
    - then I added them to a drum rack

SHAKER is just a secondary click track
- Our show opens with the four singers doing a doo-wop acapella number…
- and to help them stay in time I just have this shaker audio.
- When it changes feel here, my other shaker is MIDI:
- If I was trying to conserve tracks
- (ie if I was using a less-expensive version of Ableton),
  - I would just combine click, count in, shaker, etc
  - and maybe I’d forgo the SONG NAME track
  - and put the Ableset device on another track (it doesn’t matter where it is).

I’ve got this little AbleSet Controller device on a track
up here in the menu bar you can see AbleSet is running on my Mac
and we can view & control our Ableton set from any web browser using AbleSet
- you can see the songs in our set
- we can change which songs are in our performance
- or change the order of those songs
- WITHOUT having to alter our Ableton file
- I can unfold the section names
- or I can switch to Performance View
- and if I had a lyrics track configured, I could have auto-scrolling lyrics
and there’s all kinds of subtleties
- like where I have it jump ahead to the next song
- does it stop between songs or keep flowing one into the next
- does it need to pause so we can break time before continuing onward
you can see here my Sections track has +CC in its name
- that makes it so the color-coding I did in Ableton is mirrored in Ableset
and also on our Sections track
- we can set sections to loop
- for example, here’s a four-bar vamp
  - that we play while the singers introduce the band
  - because it says +LOOPFULL, it’ll continue looping until I release it with the L key
- and then just before the horns come in
  - we switch to a 1-bar vamp
  - and when I release it, it counts the horns into their flashy bit before the last chorus

See you soon,

Josh

Notes On Guitar