But seriously, this is IMO superbly thought-out practical stuff, and really well explained too. A very clear way of organizating the contents of a whole set with the Force. The other way would be using two Forces, loading a project on one while the other plays. But here, all parts or mini-songs are loaded into the same Force project, and jumping between parts can be done live by scrolling to a different part and starting to play stuff from there.
I summarized some of the main points.
Responsibilities between The Force vs. Novation Circuit- Novation Circuit plays main melodies (pitched synth lines) and some drums, through the Force's mixer
- The Force handles the main drum patterns, but also some melodic stuff and vocals. The exact splitting logic between what kind of melodic elements are kept on the Circuit vs the Force, wasn't explained, as far as I could tell. Is it maybe something like, the Circuit has theme melodies that can reoccur across parts, throughout the set? If not, that could be useful or interesting at least.
Akai Force setup- The Force works as the main mixer, bringing the Novation's signal into the mix with a pass-through audio track
- All tracks are Drum Tracks (if I understood correctly?), and basically everything is samples
- The most important tracks (kick, rumble, hats) are placed in the middle tracks, on tracks 4-6, so they are always kept in view even when scrolling fully to the right. Less important tracks are on the left side.
- All samples are prepared in Ableton, with some pre-mixing, EQing, and warping to project tempo
- An entire set (show) is in a single Project, so there's no loading of anything in the middle of a show
- A set consists of "parts" with different energy levels
- A part of the set of 4-5 launch scenes grouped together, with an empty separator scene between parts
- Parts are color-coded (with the clips of the most important middle tracks) like this: RED=high-energy part, CYAN=lower-energy part, BLUE=break-beat part
- Scenes inside each part are arranged in order of increasing energy like: (1) intro, (2) build-up, (3) "drop", (4) outro
- Q-link macros 1-3 are for creating variations of the drum tracks, by
- Q-links 4-5 are for controlling "exit delays" for the ACID loops, with smoother transitions when cutting out clips
- Delay effect returns are side-chain ducked with Mother Duckers
- There's a limiter as a final safeguard in the Force's master output channel
Novation Circuit setup- Novation Circuit works as clock master (in addition to playing the main melodies and drums), and start/stop button
- No notes or program-changes are sent via MIDI from the Novation Circuit, only clock (and start/stop)
- The Circuit's master filter knob is used to fade the Circuit's lead tracks out with a low-pass filter
and additionally
- the Force's cross-fader is used to control a high-pass filter in the audio input channel where the Novation Circuit's outputs come in the Force
- the high-pass filter (with the cross-fader) is also used to clean away bass frequencies, if they clash with the Force's rumble track
Here's a picture showing the clips and scenes overview, with the color-coding and empty separator scenes
From what I can tell, since the Novation Circuit is a master clock, if an external mixer was used, instead of routing everything through the Force, then the system would be immune to the Force crashing. Should the Force crash, you would still have the Circuit running and you could dial in some emergency backup drums from there, and keep the show going. But of course the show would still stop if the Circuit crashes.
Thanks for sharing!
