My scripted looping Abelton setup

In an effort to recreate the album versions of my songs as a solo act, and inspired by the live sets of Jack Garratt, I've discovered the world of scripted looping.

Scripted looping is great because as long as you take the time to program your Ableton session, you can do almost anything in terms of your live set.

Here is a video that explains my new live setup which melds together some of the things I've learned from people like Binkbeats and Anamolie. Below is the list of tutorial videos on YouTube that I used to learn this.

First off, I started with being SUPER inspired by this video:
   • Jack Garratt - Worry - Berlin Sessions   - I had played with a loop pedal inspired by Ed Sheeran but I had never seen the level of looping that Jack was doing and it blew my mind.    • Jack Garratt on becoming a one-man ba...  

Next, I came across this video of Anomalie walking through his band's Ableton setup which is the first time I got to see inside a live session.    • Ableton for Live Bands: Setting up a ...  

After that I daydreamed about it for a couple years. I started dating Nuya and she and Zeromsum (her brother) were using Ableton and talking about it so eventually I thought I'd give it a shot. There are a bunch of basic looping tutorials on YouTube that I started learning but you can find those by typing Ableton looping into YT.

Nuya and I got asked to play an environmental music festival in Orlando and I decided that would be my first Ableton looping gig and I started down the rabbit hole of advanced looping setups.

The first channel that really helped was FromStudioToStage - I knew I wanted to sync midi controlled DMXis lights to my live set and I came across the video that really helped me imagine what my set could be like.    • Ableton Live Controlling Lights, Lyri...   Then I realized Will had a TON of other really useful tutorials which put me in heaven.

One of the biggest was how to route a click track.
   • Routing Ableton Live’s Click  

Also basic midi mapping in Ableton was new to me
   • Creating Custom Keyboard Shortcuts fo...  

But the biggest godsend from Will's channel was learning about the IAC driver    • Using the IAC Driver with Ableton Live  

I also learned this "Stop track" idea from him    • Creating a stop track in Ableton Live   and this really cool method of automatically stopping and moving to the next marker (I didn't show this in the video but I should have)    • Creating a pause and go to next track  

Originally I was using the IAC driver that I saw on Will's channel to trigger the Looper plugin in Ableton until my friend Punkowski mentioned that the 'State' parameter for the Looper plugin was able to be automated. I switched to this because it seemed like it was more reliable.

As for the light setup I really got a lot from this video    • CREATE A CUSTOM SYNCED LIGHT SHOW | D...  

For that first music festival Nuya and I both programmed our sets with lights but she decided to go the route of session view instead of arrangement view. I saw that Binkbeats was using session view and a lot of other people    • Binkbeats: Live Setup   but I still have trouble understanding what the advantages of this would be for me given that I'm also doing patch changes and lighting automations which Bink Beats might not be. Here's a cool video of someone explaining Bink's setup    • BINK Looper Tutorial – Scripted Looping   Here's a cool video that shows his journey    • Binkbeats: It's not about looping  

It seems like the advantage might be more flexibility in terms of the song structure and being able to quantize. But I'm able to write in vamps in arrangement view and I don't really want quantize now so imo both work great, if there are any advantages I'm missing though, I want to know about them so lemme know :)

I just watched this as I wrote this description but it's a cool update from Jack Garratt on the latest iteration of his live set:    • Jack Garratt: How My Live Setup Works  

If you have any more questions let me know and I might do another video or write more notes for you!

You can find all of my stuff at danemyers.com