Best live organisation

[clydehm]

Good evening everyone,

As a new user of the tempest, I try to collect your ways of doing things.

We agree that we can not make project change without sound cut.

My goal is to do a live 50-60 minutes with the tempest as a centerpiece (alongside Octatrack, Nord lead and some others shit).

I think I need at least 3/4 beat/pattern to develop something and it at least 8 times.

I'm really curious to read you.

[natrixgli]

There are a couple cool tricks to maximize the use of one beat.

First bear in mind you have 32 sounds per pattern, and 16 of them are in "sound bank B". But you can mute all the sounds in bank B and use those slots to stash alternate sounds or sequences for the pads on bank A.

Then you can swap sequences between bank A and bank B. So effectively you could have a bassline on pad A1 and a different one stashed on B1 (which would be muted) and toggle between them using the Copy feature, and double-tap the pad. You can choose whether it swaps the sound, the sequence, mixer settings, or any combination of them. So this could prevent changing beats if all you're doing is changing a bassline or something like that. (along with what you can do by muting / unmuting sounds.)

[LucidSFX]

I ams still considering how to incorporate the Tempest. A good template is needed for sure to cover your uses. The good thing about the Octatrack is that you can sample loop the Tempest audio on a few tracks using flex machines. For example:
OT Input A - T voice 1- kick drum
OT Input B - T Mains - all other percussion
OT Input C - T Voice 2 - Hihats / Cymb
OT Input D - Virus TI2 - other instruments

***above my setup*** more instruments such as yourself means sacrificing OT inputs. If you have a 4 channel mixer with looping capabilities (Xone DB4..etc) then you could direct patch whatever voices you wish not to sample from the OT to the mixer. In the example above I would route the HH's to the mixer to use one channel one the mixer. The outputs from the OT will take up the 2nd channel.

I currently have the DB4 and am considering this an an option. So if you are still following along....

Set the OT:
- 4 thru machines to each input
- setup 1 or more flex machines to resample the Thru machines. You may want to use track 8 as a master fx channel.
- set scene 1 to play all thru machines at full volume and mute the flex machines.
- Then set Scene 16 for the flex machines to play out at full volume and mute the thru machines.
- assign crossfader scene A to scene 1. Then B to scene 16.
- create one or more playback triggers on the flex machine(s) tracks
- create a manual recording trigger on the first step of each flex maschine used to start recording when you select arm recording (function yes).
- create a new scene 2 where all OT tracks play at full volume

If you have done the above correctly then you should have the tempest playing a beat and being heard while The crossfader is moved all the way to Scene A. Then Arm recording channels (function + yes) to sample. Slide crossfader to scene B. The Tempest/gear is no longer being played out and the OT has now recorded a loop (1-4 bars depending on how many you have setup in the recording preferences and how many bars you have setup in the pattern lengths).  Finally assign scene A to scene 2.

Now you can select a new song or beat on the tempest (and other gear). For example you can have a full beat playing on the Tempest but have all elements muted except the bass drum. Assign Scene A to scene 2 then move crossfader to Scene A.  Then mute the OT channel with the bass drum and at the same time unmute the bass drum from the T. Essentially donthis for all the remaining tracks and you essentially just mixed elements of the track by swapping bass lines, percussion etc.

You can also setup scenes for more of a prgressive blend than straight swapping.  To expand on this and in consideration of the HH example being looped by my DB 4 I can use a K2 to mix the looped HH with the new HHT pattern from the Tempest.

Anyway, there are too many possabilities. Anybody else have more ideas??

[clydehm]

I just regret the fact that you can not write more than eight event notes by step, if possible, I might leave a pattern sleeping on one and the same beat.

also why this limitation? I fully understand the ways of philosophy voices stealing but it seems to me full software question.

[abique]

I went to the shop today to try the tempest for the third time, and just because you can't smoothly play from project1 to project2 I didn't buy.

If it comes in a next firmware then I'll be happy to buy.

[blewis]

Switching between Projects without stopping is, unfortunately, never going to happen. So your live setup must have something to help you transition. The good thing is Projects can be quite complex. Most of the v1.4 factory patches have 8 beats on the top row and totally different 8 beats on the bottom. So each Project almost has two songs worth of beats. 

Personally I am bummed that I can't even switch Projects via a MIDI bank/program change. The Tempest is the only device I have to manually switch on every song. Everything else switches via MIDI footswitch. I can understand they might not want to add it for fear people would expect it to switch smoothly while playing, but I just want to avoid: Load/Save->Load Project->scroll->Select Project->OK->exit between every song.

My Tempest serves up clock and click to the whole band, so there's guaranteed dead air between every song while I deal with this.

I went to the shop today to try the tempest for the third time, and just because you can't smoothly play from project1 to project2 I didn't buy.

If it comes in a next firmware then I'll be happy to buy.

[Sontag]

I use a jomox xbase for kick and clap and the tempest for hats, perc, and synth sounds and it also sequences a basssynth from the seqencer midi output. the tempest is master as i use the playlist function and it doesn't slave tightly when playlist is on.

[abique]

By the way what is exactly a playlist?
There is not much in the manual 1.4 about it.

[Yorgos Arabatzis]

Check manual V.1.4 on pages 18-21...You'll find enough info there

By the way what is exactly a playlist?
There is not much in the manual 1.4 about it.

[Yorgos Arabatzis]

What OS version do you have?

the tempest is master as i use the playlist function and it doesn't slave tightly when playlist is on.

[Yorgos Arabatzis]

I feel you on that...It has been discussed extensively on the old forum and the reason for not been there is because of the limited memory on T so it won't happen sadly Lucky for me i got me an Octatrack

can't smoothly play from project1 to project2. I didn't buy.If it comes in a next firmware then I'll be happy to buy.

[LucidSFX]

Yorgos hit the nail on the head. I dont think the T can be everything to everyone. I have the OT as well. Between the two devices much can be acomplished. 

As for switching playlists...if you have a sampler you can sample the loop. Stop the T and reload a new playlist.

My thoughts are if you are interested in playing full length tracks why not just record the song in tge studio and play it off a CDJ....save the hassel of bringing a truck load of gear.

For live setups my thoughts are more inline with saving 32 beats to program with preconfigured drums / perc for live playability.

Thoughts?

[abique]

Switching between Projects without stopping is, unfortunately, never going to happen.

 
How do you know that? Is it a technical limitation because the machine does not have enough resources or just the firmware which does not do it yet?

If we could have a "next song" feature which could load the next song without stopping that would be enough for me and I would buy Tempest tomorrow.

[Yorgos Arabatzis]

Not enough memory as i said so it's a technical limitation.

Switching between Projects without stopping is, unfortunately, never going to happen.

 
How do you know that? Is it a technical limitation because the machine does not have enough resources or just the firmware which does not do it yet?

If we could have a "next song" feature which could load the next song without stopping that would be enough for me and I would buy Tempest tomorrow.

[Shea]

Yorgos hit the nail on the head. I dont think the T can be everything to everyone. I have the OT as well. Between the two devices much can be acomplished. 

As for switching playlists...if you have a sampler you can sample the loop. Stop the T and reload a new playlist.

My thoughts are if you are interested in playing full length tracks why not just record the song in tge studio and play it off a CDJ....save the hassel of bringing a truck load of gear.

For live setups my thoughts are more inline with saving 32 beats to program with preconfigured drums / perc for live playability.

Thoughts?

Tempest project + mixer + a couple return effects is enough to go for an hour or more.

Mutes mode + mixer fades/sends gives you soooo much space. Even without going into the B bank, there are many variations. One tactic is to save the project with sounds strategically muted on each beat, so you can transition without the beat coming in full stop. The mutes is by far the most useful mode for live.

I hear people saying tempest can't do everything and it makes me think people haven't really tried. At most you need a simple sampler for backing.

Most of the full tracks on my T are all one beat and performed/recorded live using mutes and some filters tweaks. Playlist mode is useless to me so far.

If you listen to classic tracks, it's easy to hear that they are 3 or so variations on a single beat, which 32 sounds can easily cover, especially with mod matrix.

My guess is the majority of people are using T to maybe 25% of its capacity as an instrument. You just have to keep focusing on it.

[LucidSFX]

Great answer. You are right you can do quite a bit for an hour or more. To me it depends on the genre. The 32 sounds per beat can be quite extensive so yeah totally possible. For me as a 6 voice synth though to add enough tonal variation to a complete track the T by itself is not enough.  Again this is my personal view and I am relativly new to the machine but not new to performing live pa's. I admit over the last couple of years I have slowed down a bit though. I still have quite a bit of practice configuring different setups. I am on holidays now but my next step is to use the T independantly for a month to really dig into the machine. I was first put off by the dynamic voice stealing function. However the limitation will force me to analyse how I create beats. I used to play drums (20 years ago) abd learned quickly that less is more. Besides...how many drums can a drummer hit at the exact same time? Of course technology has opened up polyphony to allow for layered percussions and some crazy patterns. So, the Structure of the T forces me to restrict my workflow in a positive manner.

In terms of live performances you are bang on! I agree with setting up beats and adding or taking away sounds as I go along.  I think itnis a great philosophy and gives a jazz style mentality to electronic music. That's the point of a performance machine in a performance setting. This way you dont have to load up complete songs just load a project and bang away. My biggest thing is to create enough variety in real time control tonavoid each track sounding the same. Even when I DJ Indo not over use the same trick to mix more than a sparce amount of times so that the crowd cant identify each time I throw in an effect or anticipate my transitions. It is hard to be so creative because some things just work very well and some predictability is good to have.

Do others here perfer to polish their tracks and press play with minor tweaks or perfer the improved setup?

I am curious how much time is prepped prior to a gig. Do users prefer to write up a new performance for each gig or have a goto setup of beats and sounds to trigger for the same gigs?

[abique]

From a theoretical point of view, the tempest could play with half of its resources (16 patterns) while loading in background 16 patterns from an other project onto the other half. That procedure does not require any additional resources to what's already there isn't it?

[clydehm]

someone can explain to me why we can just write 8 notes event by step?

[Sontag]

What OS version do you have?

the tempest is master as i use the playlist function and it doesn't slave tightly when playlist is on.

I'm on 1.4. It slaves perfectly when i switch beats manually but with playlist on there seems to be a little lag.

[CHROMATIC]

Old thread I know but I am sure I was loading in "beats" via sysex without having to stop. Need to check again but it seemed that if a beat was playing and I sent another beat via sysex it just switched as soon as it loaded.