The Ableton Backing Track Course for Drummers

1. Welcome to the Course!: My name's Harry and welcome to building an Ableton backing track rig. Now, there's no right or wrong way to do this. This is just the way that I've kind of done it for a while, and it's worked out quite well. But anyway, what we're going to look at is which Ableton software to actually buy because there's a couple of different versions, opening it for the first time. Then going through an importing audio where I can give you all of the stems that I'll be using, labeling it up all the way through to mid control, different plug ins, how to control Ableton from your keyboard if you don't have something to midi control it with automating the drum pads, creating custom click Using foot switches, changing the set list without having to change Ableton minutes. It's quite remarkable what you can do with Ableton and we're only scratching the surface. Suck Join the course. Join me in building an Ableton back and Track rig. You can download everything I use so you can do exactly the same thing as me, along with me at the same time. And please ask any questions that crop up. There are no stupid questions. I'm building this because this is what I wish I had when I was learning Ableton, and I still had 1,000 questions. So please Wherever you're watching this course, you can ask questions no matter what they are. Will that be through social media, sending me an e mail or in the discussions point down below. I'm here to help and help build you an Ableton back and Track rig. So with that, let's get started. 2. Chapter 1 - Which One to Buy: So first things first is that we actually should probably buy the software. If you don't already. If you do, then feel free to skip ahead. Or if you've got the lowest tier, then obviously, this is what the other ones do. First things first is you want to go to ableton.com. Now, as of making this course, it's 2024, and Ableton has just released Ableton Live 12. Now, this course, I'm going to be using Ableton Live 11 because the differences aren't huge. And I don't really want to pay to upgrade it when I don't really need to. Anyway, moving on. On the website. If you go to live at the top here, then you'll get this beautiful, very aesthetically pleasing studio. These acylt kits, the acrylic kits. They're very in at the moment. Again, at the time of recording to the video, they're very in. We're going to hit the big buy now button. Now, for you, this is going to look slightly different than to me because if you've not bought it, then you'll see a different screen. If you have bought it, like I have, then you'll see this. Now, like I said, I'm using Ableton Live 11. So that means it's giving me the option to upgrade to 12. Now, like I said, I don't really want to do that, but everything that we're going to be doing is the same in 11 and 12. So if you're buying Ableton for the first time and it's Live 12, then congratulations. You are using a newer version of Ableton than me. But Everything is exactly the same I promise. You also just probably looks fancier. So with that, you'll probably have this screen here. So there's three options to Ableton. There's intro, there's standard, and there's suite, and these go into three essentially different categories of what you'll need from Ableton. So if you actually scroll down, you can see all of the features listed, and it's relatively excessive, if not exceedingly excessive. So I'm going to skip over all of that. Obviously, feel free to read that, if you want to. I did when I first bought it. But in a nutshell, Intro is, like it says, the essential, so you get 16 tracks and 5 gigabytes of sound. Now, that's a really good place to start if you're running really simple backing tracks. But for what we're going to be doing in this or what you could potentially be doing in this, you'll want to get more because wise it's just going to run out really quickly. So, what I've gotten I'm currently using and will be using is standard. And that's worked for me beautifully ever since I've bought it, I've run every gig off of it. And I've never needed more. And the reason is because Sweet has everything. So that has unlimited pretty much everything. It has a crazy amount of sounds and effects that are built into Ableton. And Sweet is for those that are using Ableton as their main DAW. So if you're recording into Ableton, if you're then editing everything, if you're sampling, mixing, producing. All of these very fancy terms that we use as musicians. Then that's what Sweet is for. Sweet is for the big guys. Now, I've never used any sounds that aren't already in standard, or if I do use stuff, then my workflow generally is logic into Ableton because I tend to record everything in logic and then put it into Ableton. I can use Ableton. As you prefer logic. So anyway, that was a long waffle to say standard is what you want if you're copying me directly, and you're only using this for backing tracks. If this is your main DAW, I would recommend suite because then that'll unlock everything. But as you can see, when I click, see upgrade offers. If you choose to buy intro for now and see what that does, you can just upgrade for a cheaper price to standard. And again, if you're on standard like I am now, but you want the full suite, then you can upgrade to the suite, and it's super easy to do. As a heads up as well, for those that are teachers or students that are watching this. If you scroll all the way down, there is actually a little education offers for students and teachers, so you can get 50% off if you have university email, something like that. It's super simple to do. I did that when I was a lecturer here in the UK. I just used my university e mail and that got me 50% off. Highly, highly recommend doing that, if you can, because, you know, 50% is a hefty chunk. So that's just a heads up if you're a teacher or a student, and you do want to get Ableton. So make your purchase. And once you have head back here and head into the next chapter, where we'll be looking at opening Ableton for the first time, the layout and how I've got mind set up, and then we'll go straight into importing audio, how you handle it and actually starting to build these backing tracks. 3. Chapter 2 - Layouts, Arrangement and Session View: So you bought Ableton. You've got Ableton welcome to layouts and everything and all that sort of stuff. So, if you're opening Ableton for the first time, one of the big things that I've always noticed is that if you come from, like, logic, for example, it's a really nice interface. It's really easy. Same with garage band and quite a lot of DAWs doors. Ableson I actually found a little bit more daunting, a little bit more scary. I don't really know why. I just I just kind of is. It's just scarier. Anyway, there's a lot of things going on with this. So here's the basics of where you can find everything. First things first, you'll get greeted with this screen. Now, on the left here, this is where you'll find all your libraries, essentially. So this is where you'll find all of your sounds, all of your drums, all the different effects that's going on audio effects, like dynamics, Qs, all of that sort of stuff. Now, if you're like me, you've got a standard, then you'll have about this many things. If you've got the full suite, like a fancy person, then this will be a much bigger list because I think we've got seven gigs and standards and site, you've got 70, it's an insane amount more. But anyway, This is where you'll find everything, and this is where when you save presets and things like that, then you'll find that in the user library, and, it's pretty good. So that's where you can find everything. Now, moving to the right hand side, this is view one of two and Ableton. So Ableton has two different ways that you can view it, and we'll get to that in seconds. But this is called Session view. And that, if you're ever needing to Google something, ask me something or something like that, and you're in this view, then the thing to call it is session view, and everyone knows what you're talking about. So these here are your channels. Now, rather than in a normal DAW where they go across, which Ableton does have, I'll get to that. Right now, it's going down. And that's because if we head even further to the right, where we've got reverb, delay, and Master, if I click here one, two, three, four, as you can see, it's highlighting across the row, and that's where it's playing from. So if I hit the little play button here, you can see all of the squares light up. And that basically means that if you import audio to that point in a row, all of those audio tracks will play. Now, this is great for certain backing tracks, where if you're just used to hitting play, and you just want it to run, then this is amazing for that. The only issue that I do have when using back in tracks for this is that you have no control over where you are in the track, you kind of have to hit play and then just go. But it has its benefits. It's really cool. I generally use this view as the mixer. So again, using logic as an example. If I want to bring up the mix view, then obviously, I will do that. But here in Ableton, this is what I'll use. So speaking of which, if I click on one of these channels, this is a middy channel because it says mid at the top. But as you can see, that's where our inputs, the monitor, which is essentially how you're monitoring the audio or whatever's on there. So in this case, it's the input auto detect it. And then if you don't want any input at all. And then you've got your output of that specific channel, and you can drop down the menu there to configure it to go wherever you like. So that's where you'll find all of your inputs and outputs. And then on the audio track, you've got your sends here, which are over on the right hand side, as you can see with reverb and delay, and then you'll have your volumes just here, you've got your panning, this orange button, how you activate and deactivate the track, and then you've got the solo just underneath and the record arm just underneath that. So as you can see, it works similarly to a normal door, it's just in slightly different places, which makes sense. It's a different software. But Anyway, we can move on from that. Underneath here at the bottom, this is where all of your effects go. So like I said, a minute ago, where this is on the left hand side, where all of our effects are. This is where we then put them at the bottom. Now, this is a little bit different to what you might be used to on again, logic, for example, where you'll actually put all of the effects say up here. But instead, you click on this channel and you'll find the audio effects. You can see that as a good example in reverb, where we click on it, that's the reverb down there rather than being listed just underneath. That we are while to get used to. It works, and it's kind of nice, but if you're not used to that, it can kind of be a bit weird. The last thing at the top of Ableton and all of it, you have all of these options here, so you have all of your tempos tap tempo time signature. This is your click here. So if you ever want to activate and deactivate the click, it's these two little circles. You've then got 1 bar, 8 bars, 4 bars and this is essentially how many bars you get before it starts, essentially. So I've got 1 bar of time. And then we'll start. This is then all of your normal play stop, your bar markers, and then you've got all of these other options here like loop and some other stuff that we won't get into right now. Then on the far hand side, we've got some other options which are really handy and we'll see later on in this course, where you've got the keyboard, this key, incredible, as you can see, things have changed. Again, we'll look at that. In the mid and key category in this course. You've got your inputs here for Middy signals. You've got your Midi very exciting. And then here is where your CPU indicator is that session view. Like I said, there's two views to Ableton. The second one is arrangement. Now, you can use these buttons here on the right hand side, the little burger menu, if you will. Or you can hit tab and it switches between them. So this is arrangement view. And again, like I said with Session view, the term arrangement view is a normal thing in the Ableton world. Everything in this view is the same except this middle section here. So right now we've got all of these very lovely grade out boxes to get rid of that. We can just press that button up there. And now we've got kind of what we're used to in a DAW. In the middle, this is your timeline. And if I hit play, as you can see, that's where it's moving across, that's what we're normally used to in a door. So this is where you'll put all of your audio tracks one after the other, exactly the same as every other door, except this time, rather than the channels being on the left hand side, they're on the right hand side. That's Ableton. Wants to be a little bit different, which is fair enough. It is different. So these are the same channels that we have in session view, they are an arrangement view. So the two midi channels, the audio, the inputs and the outputs, the track arm, the solo, and then the record arm as well. And then underneath here, this is where again, you drag your effects once you've selected the channel. And at the bottom, you've got a reverb delay and master exactly the same on session just rather than being at the top, they're now on the right hand side, and we can see all the audience. Now, this is the view that we'll pretty much be working in for the rest of this course. Everything that I do, you can do in session view. But like I said, the way that I run back in tracts on Ableton or at least the easiest way that I found to run backing tracks on Ableton is with arrangement view. We just have better control over where everything is. We can skip ahead and go back to the introverse chorus, et cetera. We just have more control, and I like it. But again, take all of these things that I'm teaching you in this course and apply it to your own rig. Copy me exactly. Don't copy me exactly. It's completely up to you. This is your Ableton rig, and I think that's the important thing. Make it work for you. And just try an experiment. So up next, we've got the really exciting things of actually starting to import audio and let's build our backing tracks. So we've bought Ableton. We've got the layouts. Let's start building the tracks. 4. Chapter 3 - Importing and Handling Audio : So we've done our layouts. We're going to use arrangement view. And I'm going to try some audio. So with this video, you can actually download the exact systems I'm using. They're just from epidemic sound, so I don't get hit with copyright and that sort of stuff. And they're this, like, really nice 80s pop thing, which really digging at the moment. I might look back at this course in a few months time and go, why did I choose that track? But so far, there we go. If you've watched any of the recent YouTube videos as well, then you've heard these tracks. So, Anyway, my point is, download them if you don't have tracks already. If you do. Great. So I'm going to do this in arrangement view. Like I said in the last chapter. This focus is now going to be in arrangement view. So I'm going to delete the middy and middy tracks by hitting the back space twice, and now we've got two audio tracks. From here, I'm just going to open up the folder Annoyingly. It's named Track one track three track two. So I'm sorry about that from what you're viewing. I'm going to go track one, and here I have all of the stems. With epidemic sound, they do give you a master stem, which you will get when downloading this. So as you can see, highlight them and just drag them in. Before you let go, you just want to press the command button on Mac, because as you see, they then import underneath each other. If you didn't do that, they'd then go on one track side by side. It's a little bit annoying. But There you go. Now, if you've not used Ableton before, there's a feature on it called Warp, and it does a bunch of stuff, but the gist of it is that it warps the audio to try and match it to the tempo of Ableton. Now, you'd think this is a brilliant idea, and it's wonderful. Well, that's a good job Ableton. But no, it's more annoying than not. Now this is coming from someone that likes to just plop it into Ableton and be done with it. So when I've discovered that when I hit play that you might be finding right now, that the audio doesn't sound right is because of Warp. You can double click on a track and you get all of this lovely stuff. And what you want to highlight is essentially this warp Now, if you're like me and you want that to be off all the time, what you can do is going to live into settings, Warp down here, so record warp launch, and then auto warp long samples, that's going to be automatically on. You want to change that to off. And then every time you import audio now, it'll just import the original audio. And there, I potentially have saved you many hours of stress that I had when I first started using Ableton. So I'm just going to check that all of the audio is in the right place. Now, one thing that isn't great about Ableton is actually how you go about it. So as you can see, there's this white line, and that's the selection bit. That's where the playhead is going to play from. So if you just hit play, then it's just going to play from exactly that point. Which is not really what we want sometimes. To get to go back to the beginning, rather than trying to fiddle and be like, click at the beginning. Oh, near lip. Rather than trying to click, you can double hit the stop button at the top. That will automatically make you go right back to the beginning, and then you can just. Okay. And we're good. It goes from the beginning. Again, another little thing about using Ableton. If you then press space bar again, it's going to go from the start from wherever it's selected. Rather than wherever the playhead is. That's a little bit different to again, what you might be used to if you've not used Ableton before, but just a heads up because it can be a bit weird. The last thing as well, is if you go up here, you can see that there's a little speaker icon that my mouse changes to. So if you did want to skip ahead and you don't want to click, then you can just go up here and just You can click around. I did say this was an 80s pop style track. So you're welcome. So the next thing I want to do is I want to line that up with the click. This track right here is 140 BPM. And I know that because it says it on epitomic sound. I'll include it in all of the folders so we can see which one is which. But what you want to do is essentially go up to here where it says 120. Click on it, and you go one 40. Now, I'm just going to hit play and see if it's in time straight away, but I doubt it is. So I'm just going to activate the click by clicking on the circles and hit spacebar. It's really not. So I'm just going to oom in Command A to select everything and then I'm just going to find the downbeat. Two, three, four. Two, three, four. Cool. That big hit there, sounds like the one, so I'm just going to drag it across. I'm going to select it, to click on. Cool. I could have looked at the drums bit there, it's got the down bit anyway. Cool. I'm going to skip to the end just to make sure that's some time the way. There we go. Nice. Okay. Just before I move on, I am also going to show you the preferences of Ableton, just in case you're not getting audio where you want it to be. So going to live to settings into audio. This up here is where you can find your inputs and outputs. So in this case, I've got no devices by input because I've got nothing into input. And then the Macbook Pro speakers here as my output. When we get into a few chapters time when I'm using my focus right as the playback stuff, then again, we'll dive into this, and I'll show you the specifics, but that's where the preferences are as well. Before I forget. So in the next chapter, I'm going to import the next two tracks. We're going to label them up so that says introverse chorus, all that sort of stuff. Show you the automation of a click, so then the click is still in time the whole way through and start importing click tracks and all that good fun stuff. So really making this a full backing track masterpiece. 5. Chapter 4 - Adding Markers and Prepping the Project : So we've imported the first track. And between these videos, while you are gone, while you were just clicking play on the next thing or if for autoplay. Who knows? We that weird time between, I have ported the second two tracks. So again, if you've downloaded the same stems, this is track two and track three. If you're using your own stems, then at this point, I'm now doing multiple tracks. I've zoomed out a little bit. As you can see, they're just one after the other, but the problem is, if I go to the second track and press play. The click isn't at the same time. Again, same with the third track. Oh, it's so close, but it's not quite. The way that I get around this, and there might be better ways now, and if there are, please let me know in the comments or the discussion down below or shooting me an e mail as well. I don't mind whichever one. But this is how I've done it this whole time. On the master, I'm going to open that up by clicking the little arrow, and then I'm going to press the A key for automation. You can also press these two arrows just up here above the tracks. Same thing. Master is already opened up, but it's the mixer at the song tempo, and this is the important bit. Right now, I've set it to 140 PM. Because that's what the first track is. So I'm going to click right at the beginning, add little dot. And then at the end, I'm going to add another little dot just to say this is 100 fur. Now for the next track, I believe it is 116 PM. 116 PM. So I'm going to click here again. And now I have the fun job, as you can see, dragging it down until I get to 116 b PM. I'm going to be honest. This is a very fiddly job. There's nothing glamorous about this at all. It's been a very, very long, stressful time doing this, which is why if you found a better way to do this, please let me know. Anyway. Now, before I go to the end of this track and add to the second marker, I need to sync up this track with the tempo. I'm going to zoom out. I'm going to select all three tracks by clicking at the top, holding our shift. There we go. I'm going to presume But this big splosh here is beat one. I'm not even gonna listen. I'm just going to drag and guess as I'm gonna be completely wrong. Zooming in. Let's say. Let's find out. Oh, I nailed it. He says, I'm going to skip to the end. Let's see. Yes. Okay. I nailed it. I'm very proud. Again, back on the master, I'm just going to a for automation. And now I'm going to just stick a little little bloop there, just to say just to mark the end of the track. I'm also just going to highlight all of this and delete it. Just to make it neat. You know what I mean? Just to make it neat. So, can I come out of automation. I'm just going to bring these tracks closer again to keep it neat. Now, this one's 140 5:00 P.M. So again, just go to add my dollop. I've had about three different names for it. I'm gonna drag it 140 5:00 P.M. There we go. And then coming out of automation, just go to see where it's at time wise. Yep. Okay. That sounds like b one. So again. We can track that track it all the way there. And then. Nice, skip to the end. A, you can't go wrong with part time. Ah, it's just so good. Okay, cool. And then I'm just going to add a little dollop. I feel like I'm on a cooking show now. Just add a little do up to the end there and should be right. Good to go. And the only reason why I'm doing that is because I've got three tracks. But if I were to add to this, then I don't need to worry about where the automation is. I now know that the click has been automated for all three tracks. I'm gonna hit Save because that's important. And now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to mark up one of the tracks. I've got the markers that says intro verse, chorus, et cetera. I'm just going to use this first track here for now. So let's just right at the beginning. You're going to use the set button. A little arrow comes up. Then you're going to go Command R to re name. I'm just going to go intro. I would say this will still be in tried. There we go. I'm going to that bar there, sounds like a verse, so I'm just going to hit set. Come on, verse one. I could be wrong, but that's what it sounds like. I'm going to skip ahead in the edit, so you don't have to watch me do this, but essentially what I'm now going to do is go introverse chorus all the way to the end of this track. I'll see it there. Hello again. As you can see, I've now gone through and gone introverse pre chorus chorus, et cetera. Now the reason why we want to do this is because when we get into middy and automation and that sort of stuff. Now we can actually skip ahead and back. And this is what I'm saying in a few chapters ago about me enjoying arrangement view more than session view is because you have this sort of functionality. If I were in session view, obviously, I could just put introverse chorus and have that sort of control. But just being able to actually dive into it and fully do that, there's something about that control that I like. I don't know if that says something about me, but we can move past that. So if you now click on the flags, that is now where the selection is. Under the set button, which is now turned to the delete button, there are two little arrows. And basically, it'll skip ahead to the next flag after one equal bar. So it'll never just skip. It'll always just wait a bar and then go like it's a musician. It's really cool. So here's a little demo. So playing from the intro. If I click the button now. It's now skip to the s. I click it now. Three chords. To click Corus Back to the same chorus. So as you can see, you can now jump through the tracks, and it's starting to become something really cool where it's becoming a full Ableton thing. So I'm now between this chapter and the next chapter. I just go to label up the entire project, so all three tracks are now going to have the markers. And in the next chapter, we're then going to talk about hardware and how to output all of this and what I actually run as my backing track Rick. After that, we're then going to start getting really nerdy where we're going to start talking about media signing things and how to add an auto stop. So when it gets to the end there, it doesn't just carry on. It automatically stops. And it just gets so horrendously exciting. So I'll see in the next chapter for all of the hardware that we need to run backing tracks. 6. Chapter 5 - Hardware & External Equipment: Let's talk about hardware and outputting all of this, so it's not just on a laptop. We have multiple outputs, that sort of thing. So the rig that I use is just a really simple focus right 18 20, as you can see here. Now, I actually use the second gen because it's super old, and that's what I used to record in here. And it turns out it works quite well for backing tracks. So if you went and got the third gen, you'd be in great hands, and you've got a nice little audio interface at the same time. Now, the reason why I went for this is because of the amount of outputs. So you can actually extend this with ADT, so just behind me in a wreck. Just over there. I don't know if you can just about see it in shot. I do have the octop so I can extend this to 16 channels of inputs, and I think 20 channels of Well, it's the 89 20. That means 18 inputs 20 output. But anyway, on the back, it has a bunch of jack outputs, as you can see, kind of here should zoom in. The focus right essentially allows me to have ten outputs, which is incredible. It also has middy in and out, which means I can just use a five pin midi cable for the SPDSX which we'll get to in the next chapter. Like I said, it means I can have extensions and I can input stuff, and it just kind of works for what I wanted to do. It's not the best because it's not deliberately made for backing tracks, but I've used it for years. It's worked great so far and there you go. So that's the focus at 18:20. I have a loom of eight outputs because that's generally how many backing tracks I've needed to use up to this point, which is just like a ten meter thing. It goes eight jacks into eight XLAs and then at the gig, I can hand that to a sound engineer. Now, if you want to be sensible, then what I'd recommend is getting a rack mounted DI box because then you can go Jack into the DI box and then XL's out to the sound person. They'll be very thankful if you do that, but I've risked it and just gone Jack to XLA. So. Body. And so far, it's been great. So, there you go. Now, as well as that, I have just a little one plug thing. So I can plug. It's basically an extension lead, so I can just have one plug into the venue, and then I've got six plugs that I can plug in my mac. I can plug in the SPDSx. I can plug in a bunch of stuff like an iPad if I want to charge it. I can charge my phone. I don't have to rely on the venue to provide me with more than one plug. I can just do all beautifully housed. Up next, I've actually then got a three rack like this. What I'd recommend when buying a rack is I'd always look out for ones that are double sided. So that means you can rack things on the front and the back. Because annoyingly, the rack that I've got, you can only mount things on the front. And I wish I could mount the power on the back, so I have more room in the front and just to make it more compact. But I've got a three rack, and it works well. It just means that yeah. I wish I could mount on the back. Now, what I've recently added to this is this, which is a Cutage at USBC And the reason why I went for this one specifically is because this is a powered dock, which basically means that I can now plug in the interface to this dock. I can plug anything else that I want to be inputted into the mac into here. And then it's just one USBC cable out into the mac. It charges it, it connects everything. It's perfect. It also means that it's got HD and my output. So if I did want to be fancy and plug in a screen, if I was doing that, then I could again, one USB into the mac and it's done. So this is what I've added in the last few months and it's been incredible. What I was doing before is I just had everything plugged into that power strip. I had the Mac charger. I plugged that in, plug that into the mac and it was just it took away one thing. But it can be sort of like a make or break sort of thing. So if you don't have the budget to get this, don't worry about it because that's why we've got the power strip, but it's a nice little upgrade to do, so then it's all really efficient and you can tidy everything away in the rack and it. It's beautiful. Now, before we move on to the next chapter, I did say that the focus right 89 20 isn't the best for backing tracks, and that's because there's things like this, which is the i connectivity play audio 12. Now, this is half size little tiny things about this big, and it's just got 12 outputs on the back, it doesn't have any inputs. And it's also got redundancy, which basically means that you can plug two max running the same Ableton project, and one of them goes down, The other one will immediately pick it up and the audience won't know, you won't know. So it's kind of a nice little, it's redundancy. It's a safety thing. The problem is is that connectivity recently stopped making this, and it's a little bit annoying because this is a bit more expensive than the 18 20. A It was about 580 pounds. And it was perfect. Half U size fit really well, smaller than the 18 20. It didn't power much. You could do loads with it. But that's because they recently brought out the connectivity play audio one U. And it's the same size ish. As the 18920 or a normal interface that's rack mounted. It's got 12 XLR outputs on the back rather than Jack, so you don't have to go into a DI box or anything like that. It's got middy in and out on the front. It's basically all of the stuff that people wanted from the play audio 12. But the problem is, it's double the width. Again, it's got redundancy and all that good stuff that we know and love. But it's double the width, and it's also double the price, there you go. Estimated street price of $1,200. It's about 1,000 pounds here in the UK. And that's really expensive if you're just trying to run back in tracks in like a function band or just a divile project. Yeah. And then they stop making the play audio 12, and then it's not accessible. And this whole thing. I'm a little bit annoyed, but they do make really good products. So if you have the budget, get this because this all last you a lifetime, it has redundancy. It's got all of this amazing stuff that you can upgrade in the future. But yeah, then it's that plus the rack plus everything else. So, you know what I mean? I don't have it yet. And there, y. There you go. So that's what I run hardware wise. It's worked out really well so far. Again, find what works for you. Some people have used Baringer interfaces. Some people have done other things, and there you go. That should hopefully give you an idea of how I'm running it, like I said, just through an audio interface. Outside of that, I then use the Roland SDSX as a midi controller and well, a sample pad, and with that, I then have a foot switch to then control stuff, and it gets really rather exciting. So with that, in the next chapter, we're going to look at medi controlling Ableton and adding an auto stop so then it stops after every track. 7. Chapter 6 - MIDI Mapping and Auto Stop: Let's get onto some really exciting things. We've now built our backing track, we've ordered some stuff. Some stuff has arrived. So now we've got the Ableton rig, the hardware to output on. Now let's get into some fun stuff like midi controlling it, stuff like that. As a caveat to this, you don't actually need to have the audio interface and all that sort of stuff to run backing tracks. You can just output this of the headphone output of your laptop and just have click to the left tracks to the right. Problem solved. And even in Ableton, if you did just have the left and right, the master out, you can just have output one. And then say clicks, you could have that output two. Easy of that. You don't have to have all fancy things like I do, or anyone else does. Do what works for you. Anyway, one of the fancy things we're going to use in this is a midi controller. In this case, it's going to be the Roland SPDS x, not the pro for this video because the SX is still the most popular one. As a heads, I'm using the five Pen MIDI outputs from the SPDSX that go into the focus right 89 20, they just off camera here, and then that's going into my Mac. If you don't have that or you don't have the midi cables and all that good fun stuff, then what you'll need to do if you're running the SPDS X, not the P. You'll need to download the MDD driver, Google Roland SPDSX drivers. The first thing there, some support. If you've seen any of my Tu videos, then you know this very well. But then what you want to just do is just scroll down. If you're on Windows, the USB driver is right there. And for Mac, keep on scrolling down. There we go. M Oh, Sonoma. That's a new one. Probably download that. But pretty much one of these two will do it. Go through that whole process on the actual SBDSX, make sure you go to Menu setup option and then change that from wave Manager to Audiola MIDI and then you're good to go if you're using MIDI over USB. That was a mouthful. Again, if you'd like a slow version, there is the YouTube videos as well that have all of that. But I'm going to presume up to this point, you've done that. If you're using the P and you're using USB MIDI, you don't actually need any drivers. They've already built it in. It's all very fancy, and it's wonderful. If you're using something else, Then you might need to download some drivers for that product. I can't tell you what you're using, unfortunately, I wish I could that'd be really handy. But you might need to look up the product name drivers. Like I did Roland DSPDSX drivers, you might be using less drivers or something like that. Once you've done that, I Ableton, we're going to go to settings, and then here where it says, Link Tempo Midi we want to go into the midi ports down here. Now, for me, I'm using the MIDI ports in the 18 20. So as you can see, in Scarlet 89 20, I've got track and remote Scarlet 18920 USB. I don't have either ticked because I'm not sending any MD out. I'm just sending MD in. But if you want both ways, then you can tick that box as well. Once it's all plugged in, in the top right, you see these two little squares. When you hit the SPDS x, you want that to flash like minus as you're hitting it. And that essentially means that you're getting midi input from your mid controller into Ableton. That's where we can start having fun. As I mentioned in the previous chapter before the hardware, I've labeled up this entire Ableton project. I'm just going to focus on this first track here. And where we had intro verse, pre chorus chorus, et cetera, I now want to control that with the SPDS x. So to do that. We're going to hit the middy button up here. Everything that you can control a MD now turns blue. So the first thing I'm going to do is the play button because I want it to play. I go to hit a pad that I wanted to play, and there we go. No, F two. I'm going to do the same for stop. On a different pad, there we go, F sharp two, as we can see that's a different one. And then rather than clicking on little flag and then putting that as a midi note. The reason why we don't want to do that is because we've then assigned that to a specific button on the SDS x. So we could be 45 minutes into our set. And if we press that button, it's going to go straight back to the intro of the first song. We don't want that. What we want it to do is to go next and back. And that's where these little arrows come into play. So I'm going to grab a drum stick for the next one. Yeah, I will do. I'm deliberately not saying which thing on the SPDS x I'm using because this will be completely up to you. I'm just hitting the different pads, what I want to be midi controlled, and then previous. There we go. So right now, I've got play stop next and previous as we can see from our locators here. They're all different notes, which is good. It means they're not clashing. And yeah, once we've done that, we come out of Middy. And now, when I hit play. Let's go to next. Great. Now, if we want a star show or before every show, hush now. Before every show, I always double tap the stop because that puts the playback right to the beginning. And it means that I can start the show with no problems and know that at the beginning. Now, one thing that we want to look at is an auto stop because right now, it just kind of ends, and we want it to do something more than that. And this is going to be a little interesting because there's a few different ways to do this. And again, as I said in a few chapters ago, if you found a better way of doing this, obviously, let me know. I'm still learning with all of this. This is by no means the right way. This is just the way that I've done it. So what I want to do insert a middy track. I'm going to rename that to autotop And now we're going to use the IAC driver on a Mac. Now, unfortunately, this is Mac only, but I'm sure there are windows alternatives. Unfortunately, I don't actually have a windows here to test that with, so I can't tell you what to do. In this case, you'll want to Google the phrase Windows alternative for the IAC driver. And that's what we're going to be using. So, in Max, if you head to the Audio Midi setup and then go from Window Show Middy Studio, we have this really great thing called the IAC driver, and this is built into all Mac. What this essentially is, is it's an internal midi device that means you can send and receive MD from it. So it's as if someone's put an SBDSX into the Mac and now any program like Ableton or logic or whatever, we'll read this as its own individual midi device, and it's so helpful. So on ports, I've already got bus one, but just for the sake of this video, I'm going to add a new one. You might not have any, and that's fine. So for bus two, I'm just going to rename that Auto stop just to make it clear. Devices online. Hit apply. Now we can exit of that. X of that. E out of that. That's it. Now we've made our MD track. So Ableton, we're going to go into settings, back to the link tempo Midi. And in here, it should appear they go IAC driver Auto stop in and out. Now, for me, is AutoTi track. I'm just going to track and remote for both because then I know that Midi is coming in and out of the IAC driver. So back in Ableton, the top channel Auto stop, I want that just to be IAC driver for the Auto stop is the only input because that's I'm going to leave it on all channels because that's the only thing it's being used for. Hence why I've named auto stop because then I know that's the only thing the Auto stop is doing. Now for the output of the IC driver, I want to send it back into Ableton. I'm just going to select the Autos stop to make sure it's exactly that. And the channel. I'm going to select channel ten. Now, this is where it starts to get a little bit backwards and forwards, but bear with me. The reason why I've selected Channel ten is because the SPDS x output channel ten by default. I haven't changed that because I don't need to. So when I create my midi note by double clicking here, I want to make sure that that note is the same that's being sent by the SPDS X to tell Ableton to stop. So remember the beginning of this video where I assigned the stop button on the SPDS x to the stop up here in Ableton. I need that to be the same note because you can't apply two midi notes to the same note. So I'm going to go up to Mid. The stop button here is note F sharp two on Channel ten. In the little end thing here, I'm going to scroll all the way down to C two, find F sharp two. There it is. Put the velocity to 127. We don't really need to, but it's just, you know, just make sure. And then, in theory, when I click play here, It now auto stops, which is perfect. Because now we don't need to worry about having to stop and start after every track. I'll just put the intra thing here because for some reason, they've all disappeared, but yours should be there. It now means that if I get to the end of that track, stops, I can go next play. And the way I did that is just by hitting the next marker, and then we're good to go. So like I said, that's why I want to have at the beginning of every gig, the double stop to go back to beginning, Because when I get to that auto stop, it's going to select that marker, and I need to make sure that I'm playing the gig at the right point. There is an easier way of doing this, and that's where the software called Ale set. I'll get into that in a few chapters time because it requires buying another piece of software, and you may not have the budget to do so. So if you don't have the budget, that's how you can add an auto stop. But if you do, then check out Chapter eight, which is plug ins and external things, and it starts to get really fun. But anyway, in the next chapter, we're going to now make the SPDSX also a sample pad. So we're going to run samples from this project midi controlled by the SPDSX and then we're going to look at automating them as well, because we're really cool. 8. Chapter 6a - MIDI without a MIDI Device: Okay, so maybe you don't have a med device like the SPDS x and things like that. As a heads up, you're saying as able to rig in the future. So the next few chapters, this is what essentially the complete thing is going to be like. But I'm just going to hop in here and show you that you can actually map the different songs to the numbers on your keyboard. So you don't even have to have a middy device at all. It's super easy. All you want to do is this key button up here. Click on that. Things turn orange and what you can map. So in my case, I just want to have one two and three for songs one two and three. So I'm going to click on mania Master, because that's what it's called. And I'm going to one? Because it's song number one. Song number two, going to be number two. And then song number three. Talking about three. As that. Once that's done, hit the key button. And now, one goes to song one, two goes to song two, Three goes to song three. And it's fantastic. And you can do this with the whole keyboard with anything that is highlighted in Ableton. So anyway, that was just a really quick little hop in there while you're looking at controlling Middy cause maybe you don't have a demi device, and that's completely okay. So that's how you assign the keyboard to Ableton. 9. Chapter 7 - Using the Instrument and Drum Racks: We've reached quite an impressive point up to this point. We should have pretty much tracks ready to go. Mi controls. We've got an auto stop at the end of each track for a little bit of safety as well, which is quite nice. Now we want to add clapsunds and make the SPDSX kind of kind of what it was supposed to be when they made it. But rather than having the outputs of the SPDSX and finding the samples and importing them that way, I'm just going to do it all through Ableton. And the reason why I want to do this is just purely because then on the SPDSX I can just plug in some mid cables and I'm done rather than having to go midcables another set of audio cables for the SPDSX that going to a DI and an output I said it's a lot. If you did get a rack mounted DI box, then you could just go jack into those DI and then the loom output of the DI box. You can then give to the sound engineer. But again, it involves you having to plug in more cables. I'm just trying to be the most efficient. Plus, we can automate it, which basically means the sound on a single pad can change depending on where we are in this Ableton project, and that is the best bit because it starts to mean that we can do some ridiculous things. So, the first thing we want to do is add a middy track. And then I'm just going to name it SPD S so From here, the input is going to be the scar at 89 20 USB because that's what the MDI is coming from. It's coming from the 89 20. If you're going USB MDI into it, then you will see SDSX or SPDSX P or whichever device that you're using. I'm then going to select Channel ten because I just want it to be really specific of I want you to get the data from this thing on this channel. It just basically means that if you plug anything else, MDD wise into this, it won't get mixed up. You won't have some weird signals. It's just really clear of what's being told Same with the auto stop that we made in the last chapter. We deliberately wanted it to be channel ten on the IAC driver because then that's the only input that it's going to have. What we then want to do is record arm this because essentially what that means is seeing the input of MD from the SPDSX live. If this isn't working for some reason, make sure you check the record arm because it might just be there. Then we're going to go over to our left hand side where all of our effects are, if you remember from the first video of the layout of Ableton, and we want to get an instrument rack. I'm just going to drag that and put it onto this. And as you can see in the bottom here, we've got our instrument rack. And then within that instrument rack, I'm going to drag a drum rack, and this is what the drum rack looks like. Now, the reason we want to do this is because now we're setting ourselves up for automation. And if you're not interested in automating, you can don't worry about this bit. But if you are, stay tuned. So on this drum rack, I'm just going to command D to duplicate, and you want to do this as many times as you have different samples. So in my case, I'm going to just have one sample, which is a clap, and then this one, I've got a DJ sound, which I'm just going to call vinyl. You'll understand when you hear it. I'm only using one sample for each just for this demo, so I'm not here, you know, programming this whole thing. But for you, do this for however many samples you have pads left or triggers or whatever. Yes, you know, makes sense for you. So on clap, what I want to do is decide which pad on the FBDS x I'm going to hit. For me, it's the bottom right because I've got a little label on it that says clap. And when I hit that, I know that I'm getting an input. I can also see that down here. And so I know that that note is a sharp to where it is it. There it is. It's highlighted here. For you, it'll highlight as well. I just know what mine is because I've done this for far too long, and I may have memorized all the notes. I don't want to talk about it. We can just move on. Again, if you're not sure, you can't be bothered to look it up. What I also like to do is to click the Middy button, click on something I haven't mapped to Midi and then hit the thing. There we go. And now I know it's note Hop two on Channel ten. I can just click back on that and delete it to get rid of it because I don't want to accidentally record, but now I know that's HO two. So, I'm going to bring in my clap sample, 1984 clap. It's beautiful. It's very quiet, but it's beautiful. What I want to do on here, volume is just click on that, make it zero. And then volume to velocity. I like to make that 100%, because essentially what that means is that it follows the dynamics. But it does mean that it can clip, so a safety bit is like 70%. There we go. It's nice and loud. On the vinyl, I've got a nice vinyl, like I said, DJ thing. Again, what I'm going to do is going to go a sharp two. There it is. I my little samples folder. I'm going to find See what I mean? I'm a DJ. Again, same thing, volume zero velocity, like 70%. Again, that's going to be probably too loud, but adjust that to what you want. Now. As I hit it, they both play. What we want to happen is that to be automated. A certain point in the song, we just clap, and then another certain point in the song, we want just that DJ vinyl. We go a thing. To do that, on our instrument rack, and this is why we've created one, use the chain function. Then you're going to grab this little blue thing here and change that to one. Now, if you have like ten of these, then you're going to go zero one, two, three, four, all the way up to ten. Again, if you've got 15, 20, however many, change it, so it's zero one, two, three, four all the way down. So now, want to hit the SPDS x. It's just claps because it's set to zero. If you wanted to be really fancy about it, you could set claps to one, the vinyl to two, and then you have a safety net of zero, where Ableton will automatically be on zero. So if you wanted this to be silenced, you could have that for me. I only going to leave that at zero, and that's going to always be the bottom one. Anyway, we can hide that by hitting the hide button. And you want to repeat this for all of the samples that you want, all of the samples you want to do. Like I said, I've only got one that each group because that's all I'm going to do for this demo. But normally this would have five or six different samples or depending on how many triggers and things I have on the drum kit, that's how many samples I'm going to have. So on the SPDSX channel, I'm going to hit a for automation, or, again, the little arrows up there. And then I'm going to on the top menu, select instrument rack, and then on the second menu, hit Chain selector. And now, let's say for this demo during the intro. I'm going to double click on it at seven by one that at zero. For the intro, I want the claps. So that's instrument rack, zero. Let's say for the first verse. I want to change that to the DJ thing. So I've put one because that has changed it 0-1. And again, you want to now adjust this for your whole song. So if you want all the verses to have the DJ thing, but the chorus is to have the claps, what you do is then you scroll along, where it says Chorus. Click in here, click another one, back down to zero. I like to make them all. Match up, so that first bar then changes. Sometimes you want to go in and change just before, if you're naturally playing ahead of the beat and all of that sort of stuff. Adjust this to your playing. But now you can see how this works. So if I'm song five or six in, and I want a completely different set of samples, I can set that to number ten, for example, if that's where my samples are. And I just accordingly or automatically changes. I'm go hit eight to come out of that command S to save it because we're smart. And now, if I go to the intro, we've got claps. I go hit play on the SPDS x. I skip the verse one. Here we go. Let's go to the chorus. And there you go. That was all very loud. But we can move past that. But that's how you automate drum pads in its simplest form. It can get really, really nerdy from here and really exciting. I love doing this sort of stuff for a whole gig. Well, I say that. I go through phases. I like to do it, and then I really hate it because it's really fiddly. And then I love it again. And it's just one of those things that when you're playing live on stage and everything just changes automatically. It's just so cool. So that's how you sample with the SPDSX and then automate it as well to make it even cooler. We're coming close to the end of this now, and from here, it starts just to get experimental. So it's just adding the things that you like. Finding out stuff of what other people have done and adding it to yours. The last last chapter of this series is actually me showing you some Ableton projects that I've used in real life scenarios. So there's two that I'll show you that include two different things. But for the next chapter, we're going to round it all out. I'm going to show you some handy dandy little things that I'd like to do. So the first one is actually if you don't have a middy device, you can use the buttons to change all of your tracks. And the second thing is an external software called Al set that means that you can change the set list of an Ableton rig without having to do anything in Ableton. You have more control. You can put it on the Pad. All this really fun stuff. That's than the next chapter. 10. Chapter 8 - Custom Clicks, Footswitches, and Changing the Setlist : We have made a significant chunk in Ableton. So this is sort of the last rounding out little things that I like to do just to make the Ableton rig, a little bit fancier, a little bit rounded, stuff like that. So we're going to talk about custom clicks, Ale set, which is my favorite thing in the world, and foot switches, which is basically rather than hitting play, I can just hit this and it plays the backing track. So I'm going to start this AableSt because that's kind of what's going to power our foot switch and means that we can change the set list of Ableton without having to go in and cut and paste and do all of this sort of stuff. So, AL set is made by a lovely guy called Leo, who is incredible, super friendly, and he knows he really knows his stuff. But anyway, he's just really able set two, which makes things a lot easier. But this is what it is. You just by you download it. It works within Ableton. It's fantastic. As you can see here, it works on a phone, it works on an iPad. It means you can reorder everything. You can skip ahead, yada yada yada. If you do want a nice little $15 off, Al set dot app four slash Drum electric. You can get it for a little bit cheaper. Leo very kindly asked if I wanted to provide a discount. I do because everyone wants the discount. Anyway, if you're watching this and you want this for a little bit cheaper. Drum electric, you can also put the code drum electric into your cart. But anyway, let's add it to our Ableton rig. So first things first, let's open Able set. I go to choke my license. There we go. This is what it looks like. It just sits in the top of your mac. I'm going to open it just to see what's happening. And there we go. It's a little bit of a mess. You can kind of see where this is going. So it's seeing everything as a title head, and that's just because of how I've named it. So let me drag this here so we can see it with Ableton so we can see the changes happening in real time. And we want to adjust this so it all makes sense. It's really quick. I go to get rid of this side thing, just to make it clearer. It's reading the top title there, but it's reading verse one as also a song title. So to change this, I'm literally just going to ad a little arrow to all of these, and as you can see, They're slowly disappearing into that song. And now with the power of editing, as you can see, I've neatned it all up, so we get just a three song title. So if I click on this, start the first one. If I click on this. Starts the second track. And then this. The third track. Which is pretty cool. And then we can go in there and see all of the different sections. Okay. And we can essentially control the entirety of Ableton with this. And the great thing is is you can literally do this from a phone and iPad, and it means that you can put Ableton to the side, just have a phone or an iPad onstage or wherever you're playing, and it feels like you're controlling a normal backing track, but it's all enables them. It's really cool. If you want to change the order of the set lists, then you can change them by here. So if I move racing heart to the middle, then suddenly goes to the beginning. Okay. Goes to racing hearts. And they're never easy. And you can do this for the whole set list. You can even remove them. So if I didn't want to play racing hearts, for example, I can do that and save it. And it just saves me from basically having to readjust the original Ableton file per gig, and I can just have it this way, basically. So now what I do is I tend to build a master Ableton set list with whatever gig I'm using, and then I use Ale set to control it, and it just streamlines the whole thing. But anyway, that's something that has changed the way that I use Ableton and I'm only scratching the surface. It does lyrics. It does a bunch of other stuff. Really, really cool, and I highly recommend checking it out. Next. Let's go foot switch, and then we'll go to custom clicks. This basically, I want to start every track. And the good thing is, if you plug this into the foot switch input of the SDSX, the X P, or anything that has a foot switch, it's mid controlled, which is great. To mid map this, it's painfully easy with A able sets because this is again, why I like to use it. In A able set on the right hand side, we can hit this little burger menu and go into settings. Obviously, we can change a lot of things in here. If I scroll down, edit My mapping, we now have all of these very fancy things. So I already currently have some mappings here, like play it and that's with the SPDSX when it was plugged in via USB. Right now, it's plugged in via MD, so it doesn't see it, so it's grayed out at the moment, and they don't work. For now, I'm going to use the scarlet 89 20 USB. I'm going to add a new mapping by pressing the plus button, and literally all I do is I press it, and then that I can change to whatever I want. So if I go play, now it means I can just go And it plays it. What I sometimes like to do is next song. Then if I play it to the end. My auto stop happens, and then I can just next. It's as easy as that. And I put this down next to my bass drum pedal, and it's really subtle. It's really out the way. And it just means that rather than having to go play, I can just stop and play. So, let's talk about custom clicks. Because up to this point, we've just used the Ableton click, and it's fine, but I like to have a little bit more control over it. So if you head to the website, multitrack.com for free, they have created this beautiful click and guide track, basically, this middy instrument that works within Ableton, and it's incredible. So if you click on this, it will download it. I've already downloaded it. So I'm not going to click on it. But it's completely free. And essentially what you'll get is something that looks like this. It'll open up in a brand new Ableton project, but it's this sort of manic looking thing, as you can see on an instrument device. Now, all I've done is the little save button up here, I've just saved that and saved it as my own click device, so then I can drag it into every single Ableton project. Super easy. So if you're currently looking at the empty Ableton project, just hit that little save thing. It'll appear in your user library, then you can go back into your backing track like I have, create a midi channel, and then drag and drop it onto that. So if I just drag a pre made bar of click, sounds like this. Sounds then like a click track. So I'm going to loop that all the way over to the end. And now's the pum bit. I'm going to solar this so we can hear the click. Let's go from the beginning, and this is how this works. So basically, all of these down here are different sounds, and we can change that with the click type right here. This is one. This is two, three, and so on. You can also put in your own custom click at the bottom here. I'm going to use number ten because I like the woodblock. With that, we can then change up here the different essentially volumes. So the accents now gone. It's back. We're going to add an eighth note. 16th note, and it starts to get ridiculo. I'd like to have a little tickle of the eighth note. And now we have a custom click that we can essentially copy and paste for our entire thing. And not only that, we then have control over what we hear, how we hear it. We can automate that to change the click sound or to add an eighth note, and take away an eighth note and it starts to get really, really fun. The other thing you'll see on Tableon project that you've just downloaded, is the QS device, and this is wonderful. So again, I've just pre made and saved a little middy thing, super simple, as you can see. But what it is, is this. One, two, three, four. Perfect. So now if I use that with the track. One, two, three, four. We now have a queue. And the best the best bit, everybody is that you can change language. So if I change that top, I think it's one quatro have at Spanish if you want, change it to two q to another language and not to offend anybody listening to this. Ah, do. It's beautiful. It's only the three of them. But I like to automate that every so often in a full set. Just to spice it up a little bit. Sometimes it's going to be in Portuguese. Sometimes it's going to be in French, you know? Who knows what could happen? You can add your own custom one. But that's how you can look at custom clicks. It's completely free. Like I said, once you're on the device for both of these, when you download the project, it'll be empty, and you want to include this on your backing track. So just hit the little save button here. It'll appear in your user library. You can save it to whatever you want it to be. And now that will appear in every single project, so you can just create a middy channel, drag and drop that on, and now you've got this custom. Which is incredible. But there you go. With all of that, you should be able to create your own custom Ableton rig. You can do a lot more with Ableton, which I'll look to do in the next course, which is stuff like lyrics, videos, lights, lots of different midi control. It starts to get really complicated. But for now, again, if you've used this course to open Ableton for the first time, just get used to everything that I've taught here, because even with this course, it's a lot. In the next chapter, I go through two Ableton rigs that I've used, so you can see what two different live Ableton rigs are. One of them are built, and one of them is given. That's in the next chapter. They're real life ones. I'll see you there. 11. Extra - Breakdown of Real-Life Rigs: So this mishmash of wonderfulness, this is a full Ableton rig that I built for a show that I do. This is a two hour show all in one Ableton rig. I built this before all the knowledge that I've just taught you in this Ableton course. So there's a lot going on here. There's a lot of songs. There's a lot of things happening. So if I zoom in here, let's break it down. At the top, I've got four score stop and go to next. These are my three IAC drivers. Essentially, four score that is I can plug in an iPad via USB, and that auto changes the charts that I'm using on an app called four score. It's incredible. It means I can put the iPad anywhere on a drum kit and I don't have touch it. As I go through the gig, it automatically changes the page, which is why the IAC driver is really cool. Then I've got the automatic stop. So at the end of a track, it automatically stops. But I took it a step further, and then I built a go to next. So when it stops, it automatically goes to the next track. So if I go down to here, There we go. Its stopped. It's gone to the next track. Within this, there is also AableSt I'll just open AableSt so we can see it. I don't use the go to next because I'll see that's then controlled by AableSt. This is how I control this Ableton rig, so I can just do the whole thing. From there. Anyway, I can't actually play any of these tracks as well. Again, because of copyright, really annoying, but we can pretend. We can pretend. As I move down, then I've got my click and Q tracks. Now, these are audio tracks rather than the custom click that I built in this course. That's just purely because I didn't know about the custom click before I built this. Now, I do. I might change it, but sometimes it's also nice just to have the audio there. It's one less thing for Ableton to do. But it does mean that I cannot change any of the clicks. So there's a click track. There's that female Q that goes one, two, three, four. She's fantastic. Underneath that, I've got stems. So I've got all of these, as you can see. Underneath there. I've got two SPDSX channels. So the live SPDS x is when I have the SPDS. On stage. And that sampling claps different percussion element that's automated throughout this whole Ableton Rick. The lazy SPDS x is when I'm on a stage that I can't fit both the laptop and the SPDSX next to me, I take away the SPDS x, and it basically means that I've recorded all of the midi input from the live SPDSX and then I've just copied and pasted it into the lazy one. So it just basically means I can turn that on, and I don't have to worry about. The SPDS x. Have I said that too much? I might have said that too much. Then I've got live. So this is a little bit of a noo, but it's worked so far, and, you know. So there's two things I can do with this. The first one is I can actually plug in an inner feed into the 18 in 20 and record my inner mix, and then that's what I can put onto, Instagram, social media, or just for my own use because it's fun to watch. Or I can also use this as my inner feed. So if the sound engineers can give me a monitor mix, I can just plug that straight in here. I don't use it too often because then I'm dealing with latency, and I've sort of pushed this mac to its limits, because as you can see from the bottom of the screen, This is my playback Mac, not the one that I've used for this course. And it's not as powerful. So it's a little bit risky. I sometimes use it. But so far, so far so good. And then finally, I've got fake people. So this is what happens when a member of the band is ill or they can't make it. Essentially, that's the keyboard player, singer, and then the guitarist. The guitarist is just more for reference. But, for example, if the keyboard player can't make it, then I can just turn on this track. It's a recording of their nod keyboard live. So it's like they're just playing with us, and then that can go out of an output if there's a keyboard player there, and we can carry on with the show. So it's a nice little redundancy to have emergency there. And it's also nice to practice. When I'm practicing, I can just turn all of those people on. And again, it's like I'm playing with them onstage because it's just live recordings except from the vocals. Because obviously taking a live recording of vocals, very messy. So that's this live rig hardware wise. I'm running this controlling it with the SDS x and the foot switch through able set. So normally, if I can, I'll hide away the laptop and have just the iPad on stage and that's how I'll control it. That's then going into the same hardware rig that I showed you on this course with the focus right 89 20, the like XLR Loom, and then the power switch with the USBC hub. If you want to see all of that, head back to the chapter, looking at hardware and outputs. For this gig, I only have four outputs. So that's one and two for stereo backing tracks. Three is click, and then four is for BVs, the SPDS x, separate things that will be nice for the front of house to control. And that is this full set. Now, the next Ableton rig, as you can see, my CPU is just through the roof. This is from a friend that I dipped in with. I covered for them on a festival, and it was incredible. But this meant that they sent me the Abelson rig, and then I learned this along with the music to play. And this is minus an SPDS x. This is using sort of the number pad. So if I just hit all of the different ones, you can see it kind of skipping ahead. There we go. And this is between all the songs. It basically means that you can just turn up with a laptop. And again, the same hardware that I was using for the previous rigs of the 18920 and all that sort of stuff, and that's it. The difference with this is that how they sell their Ableton rig, as you can see, in a lovely diagonal. So each track has its own group of stems, whereas I've just done it all on the same thing. There's no right or wrong. This is just another way of doing it. That's about it. So with this, They've got a lot of control in the sense of they've got a lot of the studio recordings, some instruments, and basically, you can replicate the entire band with this and then just take out whatever you need per gig. It's genuinely incredible. So if I go into this song here, this is the perform element, and that's where you've got piano and guitars. Here are the tracks, and that's what's going to go out in front of house. And then here you've got the backing vocals as well. And this is how every single song is set out. You've also got percussion, and then base. And it's pretty incredible. I can't get into it too much without giving too much of their show away, which I don't want to do. But again, it gives you an idea of how it's grouped, how it's set out, and how it's run. It's really cool. The last thing about this is they've got eight outputs where I've only got four. It doesn't really make a difference. Again, it's just because they have their own front of house engineer who knows all of this as well. So they have basically as much control over every single channel, which in this case, is eight rather than me, where I've grouped stuff together and output it differently. Again, there's no right or wrong way with this. Eight outputs means that the front of house has each individual essentially track. So all of the backing tracks, the different instruments, the SPD, all on separate ones as if they're live there with you? Because I mean, they are. They're here. Whereas, again, like I said, what I've done is I've grouped it, it basically means all of the different gigs because we don't have our own front of house engineer. It just means they have pretty much all the control and then I level it in But there you go. There's two real Ableton rigs that I've used live just to give you an idea of what full shows looked like, because when I was first building Ableton rigs, there's a little part of me that felt like, W I doing it right? Was I not doing it right? Am I supposed to put every song in one Ableton thing? The answer is you can do whatever you want. But sometimes that's a little bit terrifying. So as you can see, here's two rigs that you have every single track in the Full Ableton situation. And yeah, it's pretty incredible. And this is running all off of a 2017 touch bar Macbook Pro. I think it's the seven. It's getting on a bit. It is getting on a bit. Whereas now the rest of this course was on the M one Max Mabo P, which is heaps and bounds faster and more powerful, and it's quite ridiculous. So they go. There are some Ableton backing track rigs.