Play live with your Mac
Burst out of the bedroom and take your Mac on stage
IN THE LAST few months, we’ve focused on creating and recording music on your Mac, but what about performing? Whether you’re a rock band or a bedroom techno overlord your Mac can be a really powerful tool when you want to play live.
In this tutorial, we’ll look at two big– name apps, Apple’s Logic Pro and Ableton Live. They aren’t the only options — most loop–based music apps can happily play live too — but they’re the most popular choices. Ableton is a familiar sight on big stages; unlike Logic it was created specifically for live performance. But with the arrival of Live Loops, Logic has now caught up.
Apple has another app for live performance called MainStage, which enables you to bring all your Logic instruments and tracks on stage, but our experiences of it haven’t been brilliant: for us it did the one dreaded thing you don’t want your live music app to do, and that’s crash mid–song.
When you’re using music apps on stage there are typically two ways to do it. There’s the electronic way, where everything is either happening in your Mac or controlled by it (for example, by playing sampled instruments and controlling MIDI instruments), and there’s the more traditional way where you have live instruments playing to a backing track, or tracks. With both versions you’ll need an audio interface to connect your Mac to the mixing desk or PA. CARRIE MARSHALL