Ableton will never replace turntables. It just won’t; they really are apples and some other fruit that isn’t apples. That said, we can use Ableton to do things that are very difficult with traditional turntables. And one of those things is to quickly load up different snippets of the track that you are playing in order to create new variations. While I think the term “Live Remixing” is often unfounded, this is the same idea. I have a few techniques for doing this, one of which is shown in this here video. To sum it up: I create two tracks for each side of the crossfader (analogous to turntables in this case) and load one with my main, perfectly warped clip and the other with small clips of pertinent parts of the same track (hits, vocals, etc.). Then I use some good ole’ side-chained gating to duck the main track out of the way when I play the track snippets. This, so that my levels don’t go insane in the membrane. Confused? That’s why I made this rad video. This is excerpted from the insanely rap Ableton Cookbook Live Course, where I cover different aspect of Live Live Performance, including DJing.
Ableton Tip, Tricks and Tutorials for Producers of All Levels
