This post came about because of a discussion on CDM's article about Live's new API. A poster on there expressed what they felt were several shortcomings of Live, which really are nothing more than lack of experience with the program.

Apparently, unbeknownst to me, visually lining up tracks in Live is the holy grail of digital djing. Wow - how could I have been wrong all these years? ;)

Seriously if you want to line up audio for a dj set using the waveforms (which is the wrong way of doign things in Live regardless), you could potentially do it in the arrange window, and using markers to jump around the track. While playing some clips of course. And setting the quantize to something sensible like 8 bars.

Ultimately, if you want to live out your "wikki wikki wack" dj fantasies, you could use soundflower on a mac (or some other virtual audio driver on the PC), run Traktor or whatever other DJ program into Live, and satisfy pretty much any silly thing you might want to do. Works great for Richie Hawtin.

Another point that was mentioned was running 2 instances of Live. Which is pretty pointless. I can't think of a single thing you could accomplish that you couldn't do more effectively and easier with one copy. Aside from satisfying some obtuse desire to "see 2 waveforms". I should get 2 cars - one for turning left, and one for turning right. Maybe I can tow them one behind the other? ;)

See the little radial indicator in the channels in the session view? that tells you where in the clip you are, and how long it is. If you prepared beforehand, you don't need to see the waveform - unless you want to. And that's a simple matter of double-clicking on a clip.

If you're resistant to the idea of pre-warping, then enable auto-warp, and let Live do it for you - it will do a reasonable job with minimal 4/4 electronic music. Of course, results are much better if you do it yourself, before hand.

With a little bit of practice, you can warp most dance tracks in less than a minute. You ONLY need warp markers every 8/16/32 bars depending on how steady the tempo is.

But then again, I wouldn't know anything about this stuff, since the over 200 people who have paid me to learn about Ableton Live and who take my classes must all have been fooled by my charm and good humour. :)

In the spirit of always trying to offer something of value in all my posts on teh internets, here's a quick breakdown of how I set up my live sets for DJing:

I pick my music, then convert it all to aif or wav if it's mp3. Live CAN play back MP3s, but it's actually just converting it to wav in a directory somewhere. Once that directory fills up, it starts deleting some of the older files. Also, it's much quicker to analyse uncompressed audio. And guess what, I keep a folder of uncompressed, analysed, and warped files ready to go. Considering a 250gb HD is about $100 these days, it's not a big deal.

Once I have my wavs/aifs, I import them into live. I usually disable auto-warp, and instead do it by hand.

I set up my performance environment. This means that I figure out the minimum number of channels that I need to play back everything I want to play. You really dont need too many if you're DJing/mixing complete tracks. Of course you can add as many as you want to play back midi clips, samples, etc. If you have to scroll horizontally, you got too many. ;)

Think of each channel on your Live set as a virtual deck/turntable/etc. Think of how many decks a vinyl DJ can realistically use. 3 if they're good, 4 if they're PHENOMENAL. And 4 complete tracks playing on top of each other is a lot of noise. Too much even, unless that is what you're looking for.

My preferred way of working at this point is to use a multi-channel audio interface (Presonus FireBox if you want to know) and run at least 2 pairs of high-quality audio cables to whatever DJ mixer the club provides, or I happen to have on hand.

Using an external DJ mixer gives you some nice options - easy cueing, EQ/Kills that are not dependent on a plugin, and more importantly, if it's the mixer that the OTHER dj's are mixing from, it gives you the same visual relevance to your audience as the other djs.

A good controller is pretty useful too. I use an x-session, with a couple buttons mapped to move the scene selection up and down, and a couple buttons to trigger the channel playback of my "a" and "b" channels in the live set up. I map the knobs to do things like sweep high-cut and lo-cut EQ on each channel, and control a couple of sends.

I should say that I am not a fan of doing all the mixing in the box, as there is always latency and the poor performance of the xfader in Live. Also, its better to use multiple D/A converters instead of forcing a bunch of loud signals through a single pair. Yes you can make it work in the box, but it will always sound better if you mix out of the box. :)

So - what I like to do is break up songs into pieces. Intro, verses, breakdowns, etc. This allows you to control the structure of the song, and move ahead, or back. I dont always split a track into multiple clips - actually a lot of the time, I just set it up as one, and adjust the loop points and playback offset in real time. One thing that Live newbees are usually unaware of is that there is no penalty for using LOTS of scenes. But there *is* a penalty for using lots of channels. I find that when there are lots of channels in someone's live set, they've usually been using live for a short period of time. My rule of thumb is never have more channels than you have fingers - and that has to include the sends, and the master. The human brain isn't really wired to keep track of that many things during a performance. Just because you can pull it off in the studio, it doesn't mean you can do it Live. remember, there's no undoing sounding like a rank amateur, and wandering around muting and unmuting trying to find where that annoying sound is coming from. ;)

I like to have a controller mapped to the tempo - not a huge range, but something so that when I want to really push the set, I can slowly work it up.

One last important and oftern overlooked detail is that you should make sure all your tracks start on a sensible beat - meaning that if there's a 7.3 bar intro, you add some silence to the beginning, or cut it off and make sure it all rounds out to a nice even number.

If all your tracks are multiples of 2/4/8/16 bars in length, then they will automatically loop and fit with each other. For the most part, unless you are mixing more free-form music. Of course someone is going to pipe up about how they only mix Northern Maximal Vocal Tribal IDM at this point and it cannot be divided by even numbers. ;)