Anyone use Ableton Live

[Screamingdaisy]

Anyone use Ableton Live? I have a bunch of (probably dumb) questions as I have no experience with it and neither does anyone else around me.

What I'm looking to do (to start) is put a click track for each song and send that to my mixer for the drummer's monitor. I assume I can use it to do this?

Is there a way to start/stop/advance the program from the stage? Via a footswitch or something?

Later, I'd like to add a couple samples. An example being the bell in the intro for Hells Bells or something like that.

After that, I'd like to program lights to track the song.

I'm sure it can probably do more, but that's where I'm at at the moment. Is Ableton able to do this? Is it the right choice? Or are their better options available?

 

[Crungy]

You could use a laptop or small midi keyboard. That's what a drummer did in one of my bands ages ago... He'd run a click and use it to control any backing tracks we used.

He also assigned different keys to stop and start playback as well as skipping to the neck song in the set list.

I know ableton can do lights but I have no experience with that. Or running it really, my drummer did that! I just watched when he'd set up the session for our gigs putting track stems or other things for our live shows.

 

[l1ll1]

I use Ableton professionally (live, FoH, theatre, sound design, some production tasks) a whole lot and you can do almost everything with it, including lights, vid cues, etc. Just dive in, it's one of the best documented pieces of music software around and the community is amazing.
Their own tutorials are great, the handbook (pdf + website) is for real, the user vids on youtube are very helpful.
There is nothing like Ableton for live purposes (multiple timelines, dynamic tempos, modularity, connections, etc.) and you get the Lite version with basically every shitty MIDI-controller.

 

[Dante94]

I've been using Ableton Live 12 for my music stuff, which suits your interests. You can make a click track for each song and send it to your drummer's monitor, no problem. And yes, you can control the tracks from the stage using a footswitch or something like that.

Adding samples, like the bell sound in "Hells Bells," is accessible in Ableton. You can play these sounds right in your live shows. Plus, you can sync lights with your music, which is super cool for live performances.

Ableton Live 12 has some great new things, like a mixer where you can arrange your music, which makes mixing easier. It's got a way to organize sounds better, tools for making astonishing musical patterns, and some fancy sound-making tools like Roar and Granulator III. If you check out an Ableton Live 12 Overview, you'll see how these can help your music setup.

 

[l1ll1]

so you're using the beta or what? 12 isn't out yet...