If i’m doing something on the fly I’ll just tap the tempo in, and even if it’s not exactly right I’ll live with it, which has worked fine with me. Granted all this is dependent on a band being able to consistently play with a click and if we don’t do a tune with the click then I won’t use any “tempo based” effects, loops etc.

Live needs have a coarse tap tempo function. It has fine tap tempo, but it’s not very practical.

While I don’t play drum loops, a lot of the instruments/synths I play in Reason are sequenced and therefore dependent on proper tempo and time signature.

I write down the tempo for all our songs on my sheet music, so I just enter it when I need to play an instrument that needs it. When I started playing synth, I had to ask our drummer for the tempo of every single song as we played them over practices and services. Every once in a while we’ll play something I don’t have.

When that happens, or when we start playing spontaneous worship, I have to use tap tempo to find out where we are at. Since Live’s tap tempo is fine, it measures to the nearest hundredth. So if the tempo is 120bpm, I’ll be tapping around something like 188.45 to 122.76. I usually watch it for a few bars and then enter it manually. It’ll usually come up 119.50+ so I round up to 120. As I play, sometimes I’ll add/subtract a bpm or two if I feel like Reason is rushing/lagging.

And then, sometimes our drummer turns off the metronome, which leaves me dead in the water when it comes to tempo-dependent instruments. I found our band will fluctuate 2-3 bpm up/down when we play without. Just some kinks we need work out!

That being said, I’d love to be able to tap to the nearest whole number. I even went to the Ableton forums about this. They recommended I have a another control to adjust fine tempo. So I assigned that to one of the faders of the K2500 to do so. But even that is still impractical. It’s easier to just type it in manually.

Still, keyboard players probably want something like the following in a host:

1) Ability to completely change MIDI routings, enable and disable instruments, change instrument settings, and so on, in response to a single program change.

2) Ability to rechannelize or map MIDI based on the current preset – sometimes I want my upper keyboard controlling the laptop since it has the better keybed; other times, I have a piano up top and want the lower keyboard to control the laptop.

3) Ability to easily create a set for a specific service without having to recreate everything from scratch – this includes changing the order. Having everything for all the songs we play loaded into Live and removing the things I don’t need isn’t an option – I’ll run out of memory long before loading all the settings I have.

So here’s what I do. The Kontakt instances are easy to configure; it’s not hard to load the specific samples I need. Kore’s pretty easy too; I save a Kore Sound for each song we do, and just drag out the ones I need. Live doesn’t do anything else that I mentioned very well; I could use instrument racks with External Instruments to handle some of those needs, but that’s more work and it doesn’t offer a complete solution.

The trick is to use an external tool to filter and transform the MIDI coming into Live. I use Bome’s MIDI Translator. It listens to the master program change and activates a preset for the current song. The preset activates other presets to allow MIDI from my keyboards to be passed through to Live in the specific ways I need. I even programmed my own patch remain using variables in the software, so that if I’m playing, say, strings in Kontakt and I switch to a program that doesn’t use the strings, they keep sounding until I take my fingers off the keys that were already down, BUT I prevent future note on events from getting into Kontakt.

This is certainly more complicated, but unlike other dedicated performance hosts (most of which are Windows only, like Cantabile and Forte), this gives me the tools Live offers for playing back loops in a convenient way plus it means not having to learn both a DAW for recording projects and loop creation AND a performance tool.

I play with 2 keyboards. Using 2 keyboards in Reason is a pain. I have one controlling the selected patch in Reason. I use Live to tell the other what to play. Switching between Reason patches in Live is kind of a pain since Live reads all the devices within Combinators, so what I’ll do before service is create multiple MIDI tracks in Live and have them set to whichever instruments I need, then I Monitor In/Out each track at the appropriate time during service.

As stated in the article, the MIDI controls are fantastic. This alone justified the purchase of Live for me.

I use an old Kurzweil K2500 and that has four inputs for sustain pedals. I have one for sustain, one for tap tempo, and another to control Live’s looper (although I never really use that).

My church is recording a CD soon. So I have a session file for each of our songs already set to the right instruments, tempo, and time signature.

I used Reason 3 for so long, so Live was a no-brainer when it came to choosing a sequencer. Reason 4 is much better, but it still isn’t as flexible.

When it comes to actual loops, I do use a few. I try to play as much as I can, just because I like to. If I use loops, a lot of times I’m already alternating between two other instruments in the song. I have a Novation Launchpad, so launching/recording clips is easy.

Although, I’ve been eying Cubase for a few months. They have this new feature called Loop Mash which looks really cool, especially for drums. I don’t ever use drum loops so I really don’t see how I could use that in a worship setting.