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Performing with Push

Lesson 17 from: Ableton Push Fast Start

Josh Spoon

Performing with Push

Lesson 17 from: Ableton Push Fast Start

Josh Spoon

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Lesson Info

17. Performing with Push

Lesson Info

Performing with Push

Lastly, so performing which push, um, so what I'll say about performing with push it's really fun, you've got tio get used to it, um, just like any other, uh, device and the way that it works, I was pulling in the audio from but so, like, I was saying, when you're trying to navigate from volume to clip to, uh, two device and then you're trying to mute and solo different things, it takes a while to get that saved in your memory, and then it also even, you know, I've had pushed for two years of sometimes I'm like, wait, you know, so you just got ah, keep practicing and messing with it, and it becomes pretty easy, like I bought it and then I did a live show with it that weekend, I just forced myself was like, I'm just going up on stage with the push, and I'm going to figure this out, so, um, you know, just spend some time with it and play around with it when I perform live, I perform live a lot of different ways, so it kind of depends on what said I'm doing, but what I usually like to do ...

is, since the push has the ability to, um play a middie, I try to have as much media's I can it has no reason, not no reason, but, you know, it's kind of like, ok, you have a push and then you show up on stage and then he just lunch clips on lee um, it's kind of ok, which is fine s I try to have as much money as possible and you could even have clips with stuff in it. And then if you want to just stop the clip and just start playing live or you can manipulate so, like you can now have a media fact that you can manipulate play with either while you're playing like a clip or you're playing live uh, this kind of live thing in in general, but I usually like to leave all my effects, my general effects on the master us. I know some people do like tracks that were out everything toe one track and then go to the master, but I just put all my stuff on there, so I'm pushed just like we've seen before. You can just go and select what you want to effect, and then you have those for amateurs right there in front of you for your live performance, and then you can just hit track and then go back to like kick and device and then get into the different things that you want or you can just press over and then get to like this one's the snare drum that I have here then I can get over my different effects s o I still all of these air omid e and I'm able to affect them in any way out warned and some of them have extra effects on them I don't use those too much I usually stay in the master view so when I'm trying to do effects but what I'm trying to do midi specific um effects I'll go to each individual track so that's usually how I set it up I try to keep it a ce medias possible so if I want to change it I can um and um let's see only make sure you have everything make sure nobody housing all the questions um so I wanted to play a little bit of a performance that I have um set up now that I've been playing off and on for like two years eso you can hear kind of, uh and see kind of a way that I use it and make sure this isn't too loud here, so I'll stop all clips and as you can see, I have a lot of clips in here so I can now navigate around and jump up and down by banks of eight cool not too loud so I'll just play something here so you can kind of see so I could start and this is just a mini club if I click on it it just has just to kick singles at it so I've I've broken them up s so that I can easily get two different parameters for live performance and there are times where I use ah full on rack it just kind of depends like I said on what I'm playing so they could start other sections and I have on here um iraq that I built where I could change the sink rate of the aarp educator I can change the transposed uh distance so go down or up by one or play the same one steps if you remember we can still get teo I shall go to track I can get to my sense so my send I have e if I open up the io here uh uh my send I have a um I save got unloaded but ah I have reverb in here to re verbs and space echo this a max for a live device that came I think with the plug oh siri's which is also free if you have sweet ah this is an old set so I haven't actually change this out by now used dubbed machines for all my space cycle stuff and so that's what you're hearing when I playing the snare when it's coming through then I haven't routed through a b and c so it comes in and has like weird sounds that I could pull in and out but it's all based off of this stare so I don't have to do like a ton of work um it's pretty easy well, I just have I deleted these by mistake sell this place if I can get this back I was looking away I deleted and I won't start all right, so let's say I want to start the sad so I start to kick drum right then go to the snare and go to device I had the sink rate turned all the way up solves us turn that down turn all that down like the whole clothe affect all of that I could change it like it's attack have ah clipped down here lower but I'm apt tio so you just start gotta play with all the sounds that you have you can mix and match these like I built this set so they're all the same tempo and they all have like the same field so I could even go like so I, uh have different colors here so I remember um I once saw a lecture with the guy wrote the music to nightmare on elm street which was really crazy because he was the guy sky was made me the most scared that's freddie like the music was a big part of that so I told them I'm one of the things you spoke about though was when you're writing tracks try to think in what kind of temperature you're trying to go with like so hot or cold and you can do juxtaposition so you could have a song like he even mentioned drive and drive is a very kind of dark gritty thing but then is this like eighties soundtrack that was done by cliff martinez used to be in a chili peppers but it has like this juxtaposition and so I thought about that and I just got in the push and was like oh like these air all I could change the colors are all my clips I can use these clips not only two tell me where I am in the project but also if I wanted to tow have certain colors to be like the red is the one that's like super intense and the white is like the chill and then different colors in between there so I don't have to look at the screen and I could know like oh if I want to kind of chill out I could play these clips together on as you could see the clips that are playing are green so those are the ones that are activated so I could just hit that one so this is a different sequence set of sequences I did and they all work together and then I could just go into the next one I go to my master you just go down that's normal I want to if I don't want to change anything I have a couple of things that I made for fifty shades of grey rack that I have out so if I could do like weird transitions on you know I could do all the different effects and things that I want right on here I have a drop which is also another max rely device and so it'll stop it you could do it kind of in time you know I get to switch to another one I just hit track to go back to whatever track I wants like the snare I've been going back to their and I could go in and affect all that in real time so when you're working live think about that like what can I build midi wise um that can make it an expressive performance so you're not which is fine I'm not knocking just loading just launching clips I do that also had some performances but take advantage of the unit and now you have the ability like mess with the midi and all that type of stuff easy and you could see everything on here and then if you want to for example I can hit stop turned the snare off and then go into note mode and so this is just, uh, loaded up one instrument into the incident rack even though it's a snare and you can play along to the track he could do it lives you couldn't show people like hey, you know, I can play this and I could do that on top of the tracks and you have that that beauty to be able to do that and then you can just go back um and go back to your session and then start back up the snare if you want to or if you're in here remember you can hold down session and then and then you can go right back into your tracks you can come in and out you can solo a track, you know, mute s so don't be afraid to like use these mutes and solos especially if you have a drum mac it's really cool you can have a sequence going and then inside of the drum rack just hold down mute and then hit whatever drum pad you don't want playing or solo you khun solo that out so you have a lot of options performing live with just like mute solo stopping clips playing on top of other clips if you just start there that's like aa lot of options that you have not to mention volume and then talking about turning on effects and things like that so that's a little bit about performing live what pushes anybody any questions before we round out? We've got to wrap up questions and take those now and then we'll yeah, we're we're at the final thoughts now. So how do you deal with cps cpu usage, especially when playing live, uh, problem with, like, a modern laptop. Is this the same guy with the bad lot different? Uh, I've never really had a problem, which is weird. Um I tried to make sure for one I need to, you know, like I said about the late and see uh, that's one thing another thing that you want to take into account is always look, uh, at your your cpu usage right here for a live if you were practicing your setting it's going over fifty, you may end up with a problem. You got to try to keep your cpu usage just lois possible. So you know, if you end up with, like, twenty eight tracks or twenty five tracks and it's over fifty, may need to consolidate down, uh, audio usually uses less cpu than midi. So that's one thing and there's a couple of things you could do, like using iraq to kind of turn off affects you're not using at the current moment, and I also would say try to keep if you're using in iraq's keep your racks as simple and expresses it as you can because you know, you want to be like I want this rack and turn the stop and all that stuff happens, but that may be at the expense of your cpu, so try I did a one a moment the guy and he had one rack that had, like twelve or fifteen effects in it, and that was asking what they did and he was like, I don't know I like put that one in and then I did bob and I was like, do you need this one? And so we just went through and kind of found which ones he didn't even really need. They were just kind of in there, and he thought they would be cool to have so growth through iraq's and seal, especially get third party ones, which what's going on inside of them and maybe pull out what you don't need and then, um be able to turn off on and off devices and helps us well that'll cut down cpu and then it's just some that run high, especially like that thing was the divisive saying dubbed machines the max for a live device just runs really hot there's a lot of stuff going on in there, so I usually can only put one in on the live performance yeah what while we're on the topic of affects what effects would you advise to put on a master track while performing live what do you have um be repeats a good that's what that one that was kind of playing the same quarter noted everything over beat repeat e cues I do have any cue on there I don't use accuse too much but just do like a high low pass you actually look there's quite a few people have made high low pass knobs so you just it's kind of if you're d j you know there's a in the twelve o'clock position nothing's happening into the left two goes low pass to the right it goes high pass so if you look just like able to live high pass low pass rack I would advise doing that um I like the frequency shift to really like kind of the stuff I was doing on that uh fifty shades of fade to gray those air fifty different fate to graze putting groups of five and so you can toggle through the five of them changed the shape and then changed the way that effects that gives you five times the five kids shapes times eso some of those have like frequencies shifters and weird things and I like really weird sounds so frequency shift or a lot simple delay um it's also a good one uh and then I like to do like the the fake side chain with the autopen and then you change the amount, so I have it turn from like, zero macro is ah, no, uh, no. It's the device off and if you go up like over five, it starts in like, quarter, you know, eighth and all that. So if you put that on your whole track, that is like about that, but, um and if you ever seen like deejays, they'll do that though, like, play with the fader and so you can kind of do that with your whole track as well. Do you last? Maybe last question. Do you store your files on hard drives or are they all on your computer? It looks like they're all on your computer. Yeah, eso handle files? Yeah. That's still something I'm still trying to figure out because I would like to have all of my, um, there's ah there's, I would say it's a theory because not everybody does it and it's not like proven because, well, it is proven that's a theory because I have everything on here in my works just fine, but people say you should have your programs on your laptop and then have another drive that has your samples and then have another drive ahead your projects, you know it that sounds expensive so you know if your doctor dre that sounds great but somebody who's like I barely got this laptop you can how's everything within you just got to kind of manage your space and don't go preset crazy with like simpler or sampler presets usually that's when the file size that's getting kind of crazy but I have I have a lot of samples and a lot of different stuff um so it they're kind of all over the place I have a lot of stuff on drives like I have like um sixteen gigs of drums on one drive and that's like sixteen gigs of some other samples and then I'm like one hundred forty somewhere else and then I have I think this laptop has seventy gigs because live sweetest fifty five and I have a bunch of others and I just downloaded that like roland thing that was like three gigs in the model polly samples so um the biggest thing is a really just managing all of that and figure out where to put put it so I've have him in different spots but I want to get to the point where they're all separated and then my programs just on here and other stuffs on other drives yeah cool you have final thoughts forces were wrapping up so yeah last thing I'll say the final thoughts here uh be patient with yourself I try to tell all my students that like you know you get push, you get whatever you get and you're like I wantto be the best and I want to you know, it's going to take time and you're going to get frustrated and you may feel like oh this boba but just spend time with it spend time with the push play with it try to back yourself in the corners you know, do stuff like, you know, lay down a nice funky little lead lick and then try to put a melody over it like I did and then you'll figure out ways to get around things like that uh and you know, just have fun um I think that's the biggest thing you know, it just takes time um also if you have other friends that use push like have a push party and share different ideas you know, share this with your friends um and be like, hey, you know, I found out this I found out that and you will learn different things I know other certified trainers I've taught me quite a few things that I'm showing you guys come here today and even some people it able to show me one or two things when I first was uh getting through push I was like, hey, I knew this thing was like, hey, did you know this? I'm like known we're both kind like oh interesting that's cool so you know definitely get with your user group in whatever city you're in if you don't have the user group try to start one and then you can build a community where you can learn push and you can learn live and you can kind of move a lot faster I know I'm originally most of my life I'm born in new york but twenty years I was in dallas made a dollars dallas uses group show that the orbit if he's watching he really helped him help with that group todd also helped out with the group hey actually think started it and we were able to meet every month and share ideas and thoughts and learn different things from each other and that's why it started presenting was that user groups I was just like another guy was just using live and then I just started presenting um you know, if you have any questions or things you want to ask me if you wanted deuce one on one through the internet or if you live in l a I want to meet up with me or comes to me play or kid lunch and you're not weird uh ok, I had a question yeah um uh no offense anyone sounds like that um so you uh at just food on twitter um at the producer's kitchen without the ease in it because it wouldn't fit eso that's my so I I was doing everything on the josh boone, and it was getting kind of strange, because some people want to hear my music. Some people wanted, hear me teach them things, and sometimes they don't mix, and so it's, like, why are you talking about how to make awesome racks? I don't know what that is. So I started the producers, kitchen it's, a blogged, where I'll be putting up on the educational stuff going forward, and so facebook just phone music, and then just boom dot com teo, you know, see my music and all that type of stuff. So, um, yeah, it's, been fun, that's been good. I hope you guys learned a lot. And, um, yes, have a good time with the rest of your day.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Push Dummy Sheet.pdf
Push Chord Sheet.pdf
Beat Sheet.pdf
Read Me.rtf
TPK Files.zip

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