Best live setup

[Andre Graciotti]

hi there. I've been making music for a long time now, and for the first time I'll try to make it live, so...I'm looking for the best way to build my setup for a live gig (I'm a solo artist...so it will be all by myself)... but since my technical knowledge is far from great, I'd like some help from you guys.

I build my songs mostly on Reason, Sonar and Cubase. What I'm planning to do is: play the recorded drums and most synths programmed, and play live the guitars, vocals and some synths.

Here is what I have in mind, and what I've been doing so far:

- I'm exporting everything I have on Reason to .wav file (except the synths I plan to do live) - drums pieces in one file, and each individual synth in its own file.
- I'm importing them into a DAW (firstly on Cubase, but most people say it will be best on Ableton Live. you guys agree? Gotta learn it before saying so).
- And then using Reason as rewire only for executing the synths I wanna play live with a MIDI controller.

then it will be just me, my guitar, my midi controller, a microfone, and my latptop.

and that's it.

Am I doing it right? Or, better saying, is this the best way? what would you recommend me to do and use?

 

[b3maniac]

HI Andre, welcome to the forum.
Why not consider recording them and converting them to MP3 format? Then you don't need a laptop, just a small MP3 player. MP3 quality is fine for live performance. Don

 

[Andre Graciotti]

HI Andre, welcome to the forum.
Why not consider recording them and converting them to MP3 format? Then you don't need a laptop, just a small MP3 player. MP3 quality is fine for live performance. Don

thanks for the answer. Yeah, it will probably be the best solution to put everything pre-recorded on a single mp3 file. But....I still want to play live some synths I created on Reason with a MIDI controller. So the laptop will still be necessary...

anyway, don't you think I can have a better live control if I have everything (drums, synths and pre-recorded instruments) on different tracks? What is the best software to organize that?

 

[b3maniac]

I haven't tried using multiple tracks live, so I don't have a suggestion for a particular software that might work best. I had thought about trying that in the past using Cakewalk Sonor on my laptop. But, I found that after I had mixed and mastered those tracks I really did not need to worry about the individual tracks in the mix out front. In my case, I panned all of my music to the right stereo out, then put a click track on the left stereo out....the click was sent only to the drummer. The music was in our monitors, so everyone else could just play/sing along. Given all the work that went into creating the music, this was the easiest for me to manage live on stage. Don

 

[EvtonB]

i would suggest ableton live for this. You can have multiple tracks triggered at the same time as well as load vst instruments onto a midi keyboard. This is what I do