andrew dodson

Some time ago, I posted that I wanted to make loops for every song done by The Point’s band. Wisdom soon set in and I realized this was silly. Not every song needs a loop in the background. And, occasionally, my loops get shot down (wink, wink John Bennett!). But, I’ve still enjoyed programming simple click tracks to every song. Since a few of the band members are on in-ear monitors, this helps tremendously with tempos. Plus, I’ve never had a big enough drummer ego to assume I’m always spot on with tempos. How’s that for modesty? If help’s available, I’m not going to turn it down.

For a while now, I’ve been using iDrum to program my click tracks. Ninety-nine percent of the time, it’s a simple eighth-note shaker/hi-hat sound. I’ll occasionally get adventurous and program a more complex loop. The advantage to using iDrum is that I can switch between click tracks from song-to-song pretty quickly during our worship set. But, there is a drawback.

On the few songs where we actually run a loop through the house, it means I have to use a different program to control the loop. I usually create my house loops with a combination of Tracktion and iDrum. It gets even more complicated when I need to fade out the loop or stop the loop at the end of the song. Since I have sticks in my hands, it leaves me wishing God would’ve given me a third arm in these situations.

To get around this, I started using Ableton Live (the “Lite” edition) this past week. It’s very well-known for being a great, live, on-the-spot music tool - hence the name. I was able to program click tracks and loops together in a set, including fade outs on the loops. It worked like a dream. Switching click tracks and/or loops from song-to-song is even quicker in Live than in iDrum. I programmed the set to switch to the next click track/loop with the press of a button on my keyboard and we were off to the next song.

There is a learning curve to Live. I’m normally pretty good at figuring out programs quickly, but I’ll admit that I had no clue how to operate Live. My buddy Jeremy helped me a bit and I’ve figured some more out on my own, but it’s taken a good month or two to get to this point. But, if you’re looking for an efficient way to manage programmed parts of your music in a live setting, I highly recommend it.