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I write/compose all of my music in Apple Logic and I would like to use Ableton Live to sequence different scenes of audio from it.
What is the best way to export?
I am familiar with bouncing stems of tracks but the sound always changes when the audio effects are baked in. Perhaps a better idea would be to slave Ableton Live into Logic?
If so is there a way of creating scenes that pull from logic tracks?
If what you want to do is perform a live act with Ableton of your tracks produced in logic i would recommend a method that is kind of slow and tedious but once you got it going it will give you a great number of possibilities to play with during the live act..
I use two groups of 7 audio tracks in my live act, you can use whatever number of tracks fill your need but always have the same number of tracks for all your tunes (picture this like if i where to have a deck A and deck B )
The worst part is that you have to export all your tracks from logic bouncing them not once but seven times! and separating or grouping your sounds to match the tracks you will be going to use (in my case Kick, hihats-claps-snares, bass, bass2, synth/Piano,Percusions, Ambient) I don't bounce them all at once because i want all the effects in my master channel to be applied to all of the separated tracks so the sound of the original track doesn't change.
After you have done that you should have 7 different tracks that played together make your original track
Now it is time to go to Ableton and import those 7 tracks into your arrangement view, i usualy set ableton's tempo to the tempo on the tracks that are being imported to make the warping process easier. Warping your tracks correctly is another whole subject and there are plenty of tutorials out there explaining how to do this, i usually adjust the first warp marker to be on its place and live does a good job warping the whole track correctly.
Now that you have your 7 separated tracks all lined up and warped, you should be able to play them and hear your complete original song perfectly, and hear it correctly even if you change the tempo of the live act.
The next step is to chop all your tracks in 8 bar or 16 bar loops (using comnd+E with a selection will do the trick) and then select all of them and drag them to your Session View (drag and click tab).
Now you have a list of scenes that played sequentially play your original tune but you can fool around with all your sounds and have complete control on the tune.
Make this with some other tracks and you can start combining all your tunes in a whole new way!!..
a great tutorial explaining this can be found at:
that tutorial doesn't use logic, but it explains all the basics of the technique
This has changed the way I perform live...
Rendering stems is the usual way to transfer an entire mix from one DAW into another. However, you may be able to use ReWire to achieve what you want.
It looks like Ableton Live can act as a ReWire client ("Device") and Logic as a ReWire host ("Mixer") allowing you to treat Live like a virtual instrument in Logic. Have a look at this tutorial. I'm not sure the same can be done the other way round - Live can be a "Mixer" but I don't think Logic can be used as a "Device".
Here's a video we've done just about that! How to export tracks in Logic 9 and X
How do you like it? :-)
You might also try bouncing from Logic in real time? I've noticed certain automations bouncing differently than I've edited them, but bouncing correctly when I bounce in real time.
