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Deluge for Ableton-style track stem reconstruction
Elemental
Bristol UKPosts: 2
I've been looking for an "Ableton in a box" hardware solution for about 10 years now. I just bought an MPC Live which seems to almost fit that bill, for most of my needs anyway. I just discovered the Deluge... it does a few things I wish the MPC did (sidechain!), although extra audio outputs would have been good too.
My main use case is playing back track stems - I used to do Ableton laptop+MIDI controller sets, dubbing out and arranging my tracks live. I want to be able to do this without a computer. The Deluge looks like it can do this. I have some questions:
- Can it play audio samples/loops of different lengths? E.g. if one of my songs has an audio track the full length of the song. I'd also want this to be able to do polyrhythmic stuff. I can see tracks can be odd lengths so assume this is possible.
- Is it possible to have a global delay send effect? E.g. for sending the odd snare or stab off to a delay and then tweaking its feedback dub style.
- Switching "songs": I see there is some discussion around this; for the moment I'd be fine with playing some interlude ambience between songs via the audio input (?) but would be good to be able to do a whole live set seamlessly.
Thanks!
Post edited by Elemental on
Comments
Hi @elemental! To answer your questions:
1) Yes - it's possible to set each track to loop at different lengths.
2) Delay works per track (in synths) and per kit row (in kits), with an extra, global delay that can be applied to the whole track. To send the odd snare etc.. to a delay on the Deluge, you wouldn't use a send (like you would on a mixer), but instead the kit row's delay effect which you could program with recorded automation, live automation (a.k.a. twisting the delay knobs) or by holding down a note/sample at the position you like and turning the knob to the desired position for that one note (referred to by many users as "parameter lock").
3) Switching songs should be seamless, unless each song uses particularly large amount of memory. With the optimizations made in the coming 2.0 update, this threshold for this should be raised by a considerable amount. In regards to live input, it works as a type of "oscillator"/synth voice, in a track of its own. This means that each instance is tied to the song it's created in, and relies on the track's note data in order to pass audio through it. This has a number of advantages and disadvantages - unfortunately one of those is that, if a song does take a while to load it might momentarily cut out. That said, though, this is fairly unlikely, as switching between songs is designed to be seamless. For more info about live input through the Deluge, I'd recommend checking out Ron's video (which I've linked at the bottom). It's based on an older firmware version, now, but the concept and processes are still the same.
Hope that helps!