Remixing full tracks on the fly

17.16

As well as the arsenal of live sampling, synthesis and processing options at his fingertips, Darren’s rig also enables him to work realtime remixes of full productions into his set. “These presets are tracks that I’m working on that I play live,” he says, before demonstrating the system in action. “You can endlessly sample things back into themselves.

If you want to go deep and techno-y with this stuff, you can; and if you want to do quick and dirty, you can. You can also use it as a production system as well – you can just record a bunch of stuff, and snip bits out of it and stick it in the other parts of Ableton Live.”

The Ableton Live set 20.21

Moving to his laptop, Darren shows us around what can only be described as one of the biggest Live sets ever. “This is how the session looks,” he grins. “I did have everything grouped into Groups, but I kind of got it in my head that the Groups were adding latency. I don’t know whether that’s true – I probably should have found out. But also, there were some quirks in the way this was working, which meant it was more straightforward just to colourise sections and manually group them. So, for example, these channels here are all bass, and they all feed into there [another audio track, rather than a Group], so it’s just manually routed in Ableton.”

Managing CPU usage 23.05

“As you’d imagine, stability and extremely low latency are crucial to Darren’s monumental live setup – indeed, without those two things, the whole thing just wouldn’t be feasible.

“There are way better effects than I have in this system that I actually own, but I can’t use them in this live rig, because they either introduce just a little bit of latency, or a little bit too much CPU,” he confirms. “There’s nothing in here that takes up more than a percent or two of CPU. I’ve spent a good year optimising the hell out of this, so it’s just 64 samples of throughput latency, which, considering everything it does, has been difficult to achieve. If it’s not a live performance set, you can use expensive plugins, and it’ll sound sweeter and you can do better things. But there’s always going to be a compromise when you’re trying to reduce the latency and the CPU usage. There’s a lot of native Ableton stuff that does the job, is stable and doesn’t really introduce latency.”