Hi Everyone.
The subject of long samples seems to have been discussed a bit on here but i couldn’t find anyone who was trying to do something similar to myself.
My songs have long sections and live instruments, they are locked to a tempo but aren’t suitable to be made entirely of short loops. Ideally I’d like to be able to have 8 or so songs (an hours worth of live set) in the octatrack, separated into 4 stems for each song that i can switch between in an interesting (mix) way, changing order of songs depending on how i feel, how the live set is shaping up etc. It is essential that these stems for each song are locked together for the songs to make sense, so they always need to start at the same time.
I tried a few things. Setting up different songs on different banks, sample locks etc to get round having 4 stems for each different track. The problem was there was no margin for error at the end of a track and no room to improvise. There would be a panicked scrolling through and one shot triggering all the stems for the next track and rather than being able to mix the songs in an interesting way, they would chop between each other rather boringly albeit in the same bpm. If you were to miss a trigger live or something there is no way to rectify as that sample will only play from the start.
What I’ve ended up doing is exporting a set from protools where my entire live set is split into 4 tracks that I assign to 1 shot trigs. So i have samples on trigs 1-4 all of which are an hour long. Basically a glorified DAT player. My midi instruments are synced to the Octa so thats all good for sequencing live etc.
I thought prior to doing this that i would be able to set slices in these hour long samples that basically translated to song changes rather than sections of a beat as they would normally be used on a short loop. Then i could maybe choose different starting points for the set or alter the order of playback. That doesn’t seem to be a possibility or at least, i can’t figure out how to do that.
At the moment if ‘worst case scenario’ there was a a power issue on stage and the Octa cut out, it would be impossible for me to do anything other than start the set over again from the very beginning.
What I’m basically asking is, is there a better way of doing what i want to be able to do? Play over an hours worth of music, made up of songs that have 4 stems each, with the ability to be able to mix between songs and change the order of playback?
Thanks.