Ambient live set tips and suggestions

The Lounge
1

Hello, I am so sorry to ask you this but any help would be amazing and much appreciated.
I have a laptop with FL Studio and Bitwig, an akai midi keyboard and my guitar.
I’ll do an ambient set of about an hour or more in the next days in the month.
What do you suggest as starting points and any tips to prepare it in the fastest way?
I do love making ambient music but this is my first approach with live sets.

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Martin Stürtzer could be your first port of call. He has a ton of material, some of it hours long. But I will give you a link to a 16m video that uses a looper to create a set. He uses an hardware synth, but you don’t have to. You can get pretty far just with bitwig own polymer synth, and I’m sure you will have some options installed in your machine already.

Enso is a paid plugin, but there are other options, from cheaper to free.

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  1. Are you preparing for a particular event or venue? Ambient music should work with the space where it’s happening, so this can shape your set. There’s a big difference between being at the front of a stage in front of people watching you play versus sitting in the background at an event, noodling away on your laptop.
  2. Prepare some long background samples (nature sounds, street noises, NASA broadcasts, etc.) that you can use under your music. You can always bring these in and out to make your set sound more coherent and unified.
  3. Decide what you want to be controlled automatically, what you want to be randomized, and what you want to play directly. Realistically, you can only do one or two things at a time in a live set. For your case, that could mean launching some 10-minute clips of synth pads and samples with automation while you focus entirely on your guitar and its effects.
  4. Record a practice run of your set and listen back to it the next day. Notice what works and what doesn’t, what passages are too long or repetitive, what parts you can extend, etc.
  5. Definitely check out State Azure on Youtube if you haven’t before. His livestreams of building up ambient tracks on Bitwig are a masterclass.

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