Well, currently I’m creating a live act based on renoise/reason. I use renoise as an sequencer/sampler/rewire-host and reason for sound design. I also got apc40 and I use it via duplex. So far I’ve came up with something like this below, and I say it works quite well:
-I assigned apc’s control knobs and sliders to many different things in different songs(renoise projects), yet they have some things in common. In one song for example, a slider controls the volume of drums group along with fx, and in other one drums with hihats. Or in one of them one knob controls hpf cutoff of 3 synths, and in other one the same knob distortion gain on 2 synths. You just have to assign it to something that does something spectacular with a chosen type of instrument.
-I keep all the patterns in 16 step (4 beats), because there’s an 8 step sequencer made from stop clips buttons on apc40 if it operates via duplex, and it’s super-cool for some stutters and beat juggling, ableton can’t do that even if apc is designed for it.
-The controller’s matrix is for the mute tracks.
-Master effects, and some global commands like play, stop and so on are under the same knobs/sliders/buttons in every song.
Fortunately I play along with my friend who writes music and plays from ableton live, and we just sync two laptops via midi, one song from one computer blending with a song from the second and so on, just mixing it dj-style in other words. I couldn’t find a way to hook up one song to another so I could play two or more songs in a row from few instances of renoise.
There’s a lot of fun playing like this, people ask me what’s the software I’m using and if I’m looking into matrix source code right now if everything flows vertically
Any thoughts on it? Or maybe somebody knows how to split a big pattern into smaller 16 step patterns without tediously copying everything? It’s a little difficult if whole the song must be built up from the beggining in almost only 16s patterns.
And yeah, duplex is bugged like hell and you should figure out what not to do during live act or it will crash.