Playing live shows with an MPC (my setup)

Hey all,
I haven't been on here in a year or two but I learnt a heap back here in the day so I figured now it's time to share some knowledge back to the community here!
I've been playing live sets lately and finally found a setup that is flexible, fun, simple and inspiring to work with - for me.
This is going to be different for each individual so its important to take your own direction and experiment!

The basic concept is using the mpc as my workstation where all the audio and sequencing is done. From here, multiple outputs are run into my soundcard and audio is manipulated and effected in ableton live using an mpc32. I then simply run a stereo output.

MPC Channel list:
L. Kick
R. All other drums
1. Bass
3 + 4. Loops/Keys A
5 + 6. Loops/Keys B

Ableton Live setup:
all channels have a limiter running.
Drum rack channel with some bleeps and bloops on the mpd pads to add in between tracks

Kick: dry, no processing. Midi control over volume
All other drums: Low cut EQ to clear up any muddiness. Midi control over volume
Bass: Light sidechain from kick to avoid bass frequency clashing. Midi control over volume
Loops A & B: Midi switchable sidechain compressor for effect. Midi controllable 4 Band EQ. Midi control of lowpass filter frequency. Effect send switchable to on/off. (effect send is continuously variable to either a delay or a reverb using a midi fader)

Now how all this ends up working is deceptively simple. I simply have two seperate programs loaded in the mpc - drums and samples. I pre-sequence the skeletons of tracks and build up around them, then I can mix on the fly using the mpd controls adding in filter sweeps, eq and volume control etc etc. It's really fun!

Important live MPC2000XL sequencing tips!!!
*To enter record or overdub while the sequencer is running, hold the overdub or record button and press the play button. Bam! Never need to stop the sequencer again!
*Hold the erase key while in record or overdub and press the pad you want to delete data for! No need to stop the sequencer to fix mistakes!

Here's a video example of me using this setup:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2w0AtNKinc

Hope this creates some discussion and is useful to anyone looking to perform live with the mpc!
Ben

Welcome back Ben, will check this out and comment later.

Clint

Do you have any latency processing that many channels within software?

Running that many effects, I figured theres got to be a significant delay between say hitting a pad and hearing it come out, through ableton, into the speakers?

What sort of soundcard are you using and what's yer latency / monitoring setting like?

tapedeck wrote:Do you have any latency processing that many channels within software?

Running that many effects, I figured theres got to be a significant delay between say hitting a pad and hearing it come out, through ableton, into the speakers?

What sort of soundcard are you using and what's yer latency / monitoring setting like?

I've got an RME fireface 400 and my computer is an asus laptop with 2.4ghz dual core running xp.
The beauty of this arrangement is live simply passes the audio - I'm not actually launching any clips.
Also, I'm using all live's native effects which to me sound great and are VERY cpu friendly

I can get away with a buffer of 128 samples which is nice & fast.. no problems & no noticeable delay.

thanks...i was over at a friends the other day, and he was struggling with live and latency - it couldn't even just pass unaffected audio through without a very noticeable latency which made it almost unplayable. we eventually switched to hardware monitoring...which of course doesn't allow ableton effects. so i was curious how it works for you.

he was using an edirol fa-101, which ive found to be a very good card, but i'm not sure on the computer he was using (hp though...ouch).

Thanks Ben, I enjoyed that.

Would have been nice to see the Ableton side of things.

Looks like a dope custom setup you got there fam...

Wow! amazing! Im kind of looking to build a live setup in a similar way (until now I have giged with my mpc1000 but carrying a lot of synths and just improvising live)... As you say, you are not using any audio from ableton? So you have all your samples inside the mpc? That sounds amazing! How do you go about using long samples? Is the mpc2000XL much powerfull in memory?


I need to spend some quality time with my mpc...

tapedeck wrote:thanks...i was over at a friends the other day, and he was struggling with live and latency - it couldn't even just pass unaffected audio through without a very noticeable latency which made it almost unplayable. we eventually switched to hardware monitoring...which of course doesn't allow ableton effects. so i was curious how it works for you.

he was using an edirol fa-101, which ive found to be a very good card, but i'm not sure on the computer he was using (hp though...ouch).

If he had a properly setup ASIO driver he shouldn't have any problems unless he's processing an outrageous number of tracks at the same time.