Live set track arrangement problem....

Live set track arrangement problem....I hoping you nice people can help me fix, its doing my fecking head in!
 
In short, with the list of tunes  below, is it possible to keep a groove going / keep the mood going.
 
I'm setting up my 2nd live set, based on some feed back from the first one. I'd like to be able to keep the "groove" going though out the set with a minimum one or two stops (I'd rather have none). I'm using Ableton live, and APC40 MK I, a Launch Pad (MK I) and a Behringer 802 mixer (the one with FX out). I have £150 I was thinking of buying a ER-1 or Mini-KP (or both) to help with the transitions and to make things more interesting when I play (and I also like them!). My sets are vst and midi based. I just drag the tracks into an uber set. I'd like to keep it that way if I can.
 
I have spent many few hours trying different ways to make this work, but I feel even the small transitions (90-96) are just to much to do straight. I've tried bring in synths from the next tracks, but speed up or down on the effects when I make the tempo changes make them sound utterly shite.
 
I have tried slowly bring up the tempo and I felt that sounded pants too.
 
Thanks for reading, your time and your help!

P.S Some of the slower BPM tracks sounds faster then they are. BPM's listed below are from Ableton.
 
Track Name                                                BPM     Speed    Emotion   Order
Sun Shine and Fresh Air to Cheese           69         Slow       Bright       1
Internal Cascade                                        90         Fast       Bright          2
During Synthesis                                        96         Fast        Bright         3
Rodger row the boat                                 102        Fast       Bright           4
Old Blacklist                                              102        Slow       Bright           5
Rubisco                                                     126        Fast        Dark            6
xxf4-sgg5                                                   96         Fast        Dark            7
Not Much                                                   122        Fast       Bright          8
Stewart Is Still Inside                                 94          Slow       Dark           9
Octan-Boctan                                            120        Fast       Bright         10
Summer Grass                                            99        Fast       Bright        11
 

Most people say you should only work with stems in a live set, but that's so boring. Much more fun if you build a set from scratch and tweak parameters and mute/unmute drums and turn sends and push faders live, imo.

Never had a live set longer than 30 minutes but the best ones were when I just jammed a single ableton set and played live synth stuff with push. If you ever make music in the jamming format, you just find a way to extend that into a whole set.

So you're basically DJing a set at pretty varied BPMs? I'd think you've got three basic options:

1) change the track tempos and running order, putting the most similar feeling tracks/BPMs next to each other and increase/decrease the BPMs. I'm guessing you don't want to do that for a dozen reasons that I'd likely agree with.

2) just accept breaks between the tracks. if you're not making people dance then it doesn't really matter, generally.

3) manufacture transitions between tracks, which is what you're asking...to which I'd suggest lots of reverb/delay outros and intros that sort of wash into one another and or get straight cut off when the new one kicks in at a different BPM. Looping final bits of small parts, extending sequences, cutting parts out of the tracks even, all options on the table, and it'd (I guess) take a lot of work....These could be automated in Ableton so that's good that you can plan them ahead of time and make sure they'll work live. But at that point how much are you really playing live if even the transitions are automated? If you've got some other live aspects, then great, something like that might work.

Ultimately DJing your own tracks 'live' seems a bit constricting how you're doing it. If you wanna DJ, keep the BPMs locked with minimal changes, basically. If not, you're just spinning track with some tweaks, silence between is okay to some extent. But it's your set and all that dude, no clue as to your music or audience and all that. Good luck with it for sure dude

when in doubt, mix to noise, adjust bpm and away you go 

(I find that nudging bpm by 0.1 in ableton (shift + up) sounds way better that going up a full bpm at a time.  Over the course of a few minutes you can move up 2-3 bpm quite easily without much of a discernible effect.  I tend to save full bpm increments for a drop)

Thanks for help so far, sorry I should have mentioned In using scenes only during a set, and I want add more live elements rather the just track and scene launching!

When I used to play live I would have tracks all spread over various gear and would have to set so many things up pre track so I had an MPC and would put a short segway interlude on each pad in order.

  On 7/28/2017 at 10:57 PM, hardwired said:

Live set track arrangement problem....I hoping you nice people can help me fix, its doing my fecking head in!

 

In short, with the list of tunes  below, is it possible to keep a groove going / keep the mood going.

 

I'm setting up my 2nd live set, based on some feed back from the first one. I'd like to be able to keep the "groove" going though out the set with a minimum one or two stops (I'd rather have none). I'm using Ableton live, and APC40 MK I, a Launch Pad (MK I) and a Behringer 802 mixer (the one with FX out). I have £150 I was thinking of buying a ER-1 or Mini-KP (or both) to help with the transitions and to make things more interesting when I play (and I also like them!). My sets are vst and midi based. I just drag the tracks into an uber set. I'd like to keep it that way if I can.

 

I have spent many few hours trying different ways to make this work, but I feel even the small transitions (90-96) are just to much to do straight. I've tried bring in synths from the next tracks, but speed up or down on the effects when I make the tempo changes make them sound utterly shite.

 

I have tried slowly bring up the tempo and I felt that sounded pants too.

 

Thanks for reading, your time and your help!

 

P.S Some of the slower BPM tracks sounds faster then they are. BPM's listed below are from Ableton.

 

Track Name                                                BPM     Speed    Emotion   Order

Sun Shine and Fresh Air to Cheese           69         Slow       Bright       1

Internal Cascade                                        90         Fast       Bright          2

During Synthesis                                        96         Fast        Bright         3

Rodger row the boat                                 102        Fast       Bright           4

Old Blacklist                                              102        Slow       Bright           5

Rubisco                                                     126        Fast        Dark            6

xxf4-sgg5                                                   96         Fast        Dark            7

Not Much                                                   122        Fast       Bright          8

Stewart Is Still Inside                                 94          Slow       Dark           9

Octan-Boctan                                            120        Fast       Bright         10

Summer Grass                                            99        Fast       Bright        11

 

i'm sorry but...so you made the tracks, you know them better than anyone else, you know how they sound, you stand behind all the feelings in them and yet you assume that we can answer the question based on a single post, knowing 0,001% of what you know about your tracks? it's hard for you to solve the problem let alone to us who haven't heard the tracks.. i'd really like to help you but to me it's impossible to say anything worthwhile based on the given data

Thanks for the positive responses. I managed to get the first 5 tracks tied up the way I wanted them to this afternoon.  In the end I think I will have used just about every suggestion! The time I have saved I'll put into actually getting more confident playing keyboards in front of people, other they that I tempo matched two pairs of tunes in the order I wanted too. Excepting the breaks between the really big tempo jumps.  I "played" though the first fifteen minutes and I'm delighted. I'm bidding for a KP mini at the moment which will help the effect based transitions, and I'll construct/play a segway between the 2nd to last tune.

I cant thank you guys enough for your help. I'll be recording the set when I'm done so if your interested I'll post the results!

One last time! Thank you!

Do some improv theatre bits between the tracks.