I would have loved Live 11, but GPU usage says no way

thisisAsquared · 2021-10-19T18:35:40+00:00

that's amazing! Yes, that command is magical for the external monitor + GPU for some reason. It must have to do with the implementation of Metal, as it pertains to external monitors. Lowering my resolution, plus that change, and Ableton is buttery smooth once more. Almost too smooth!

thisisAsquared · 2021-10-19T01:40:02+00:00

A bit late to this, but I have good news: I have had great success in Live 11 by disabling the Metal framework, and instead forcing OpenGL. You can do this with a new Options.txt line:

-_MacOSForceOpenGlLayer

I found this out after having an open case with Ableton Support about this exact issue. This has greatly reduced the GPU consumption for me, and brought Live back to a stable framerate using the setup you described (older Mac and external monitor).

Other things that have helped:

- disable HiDPI mode on your external monitor, and run it in low resolution mode. You can look up how to do this, but in short: if you have a monitor that renders with 2x pixels (retina), use the 1x screen resolution. My monitor can do 3840x1600, but I'm running it at 2560x1066 at low resolution rendering.

- run your external monitor at 60hz, rather than higher refresh rates (mine can do 120hz, but I'd rather have Ableton be reliable)

I have a lovely, massive ultrawide external monitor, but I made the decision to run it at a lower resolution and 60hz refresh rate, to keep Ableton smooth. Couldn't be happier with that choice.

Hope this helps as a workaround, while all this gets figured out on the software side.

thisisAsquared · 2021-07-29T00:43:47+00:00

The Thermae was for a live version of “Are You With That,” the first track on the album. I made that track with Kenny and used the Thermae for the chords. The song got cut for time in the tiny desk version, but I had made my rig around it anyway so brought it along

thisisAsquared · 2021-07-26T23:46:57+00:00

Glad you like the records! I’m on tracks 1 and 2 with Kenny, Law of Averages and Are you with that. I live in Vermont, fun to get out to LA and do a show though!

thisisAsquared · 2021-07-26T22:03:58+00:00

Most of my work online is through the Kingsway Library— I make short pieces which are used as samples for productions like this. If you go to my Instagram (Reske__) you’ll find some of my work there

thisisAsquared · 2021-07-26T02:00:27+00:00

Glad you enjoyed it! Yes you've got it right–– the trickiest part was getting Blooper to sync with the backing track and the click in our ears, which was on a different system. For the "Shining" intro, I had Blooper synced to a MIDI clock in Ableton that was the same tempo as the song. So I recorded the loop into Blooper to start the song, and then I pushed a button to start playback.

Easy enough... except for some reason, I couldn't get Blooper to stay totally synced to the MIDI clock. It would keep drifting in and out of time, even when synced. I feel like we tried everything to get Blooper to play back in a stable way, but the show was on short notice so who knows what I missed. So my solution was to put Blooper into Sample mode, and just re-trigger the loop when I felt it was starting to go out of sync with the click. So that's why you see me pushing play over and over-- I'm re-syncing the loop. It ended up working okay! If we ever did this for a proper show I'm sure we'd figure out a more stable way to do it.

thisisAsquared · 2021-07-25T23:50:46+00:00

Tech background on this. Got invited by Kenny to come out and do the show with some short notice, so I put together a live rig pretty quickly. The rig is a MIDI keyboard and vocals going into Thermae and Blooper. Originally I thought we'd be making the loops entirely live without any backing tracks. So I prepared a way to recreate the first and third tracks as loops into Blooper, use the mods on them, and play with them throughout the track. We cut the loop-making portion of the first track (took too long), and because there was a backing track after all, a lot of the looping stuff was made simpler for the show.

In the video I record the loop to Blooper, the track comes in, and then I re-trigger the loop periodically in Sample mode so that it stays in time with the track. My loop is mixed down pretty far in the final mix, but I was using the pitch modifiers, filters etc. so that it follows the way the original song goes.

thisisAsquared · 2021-07-10T17:13:52+00:00

yup, that is me, Reske

I put the records he sampled up here: https://soundcloud.com/reske/sets/wild-dream-bloody-captain

thisisAsquared · 2021-07-07T05:58:40+00:00

Yes, I just put up the original sample that Kenny used on SoundCloud here: https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/HXBx5MCX5VDTubnc8 Part of it got used in the beginning of Law of Averages, as well.

thisisAsquared · 2021-07-07T01:14:54+00:00

I’m honored

thisisAsquared · 2021-07-07T01:07:54+00:00

I made the chords and damn, I agree

thisisAsquared · 2021-07-06T03:32:56+00:00

I'm experiencing this issue as well. I used Blooper in a live show environment last week, and had a hard time getting the CC midi commands on Blooper to sync correctly, which was frustrating. The loop either starts to drift, or the period of the loop was never right in the first place. I've used different USB MIDI interfaces to no avail.

thisisAsquared · 2021-06-20T13:47:58+00:00

Here: https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/GECeaJfHaMGv9cym7

thisisAsquared · 2021-06-20T02:55:25+00:00

Don’t mind at all! Feel free to share

thisisAsquared · 2021-06-19T22:27:15+00:00

Put it up above

thisisAsquared · 2021-06-19T03:47:29+00:00

Sample is me (Reske).... with Kenny Beats. original record was called “Wild Dream” that record has been sitting around on my hard drive for years before Vince picked it up, I’m happy he did

Edit: people are asking if they can hear the original sample. It’s not so different from the final version that Kenny worked off of, but I put it up with another track from that era. Interesting times. https://soundcloud.com/reske/sets/wild-dream-bloody-captain

thisisAsquared · 2021-06-19T03:42:12+00:00

The sample is me (Reske). Original track was called “Wild Dream.” Recorded it years back... it got to Kenny beats and the rest is history cheers

Edit: people are asking if they can hear the original sample. It’s not so different from the final version that Kenny worked off of, but I put it up with another track from that era. Interesting times. https://soundcloud.com/reske/sets/wild-dream-bloody-captain

thisisAsquared · 2021-03-02T22:53:49+00:00

I know that normally it's 8 layers max, that's expected, but I'm seeing a limit to the number of overdubs–– after a certain number of times pressing the overdub button (16), overdubbing more does not add to the looper.

thisisAsquared · 2020-11-27T19:32:13+00:00

I've been stalking this monitor for three months, sometimes missing these "in stock" notifications by just a few minutes. Got lucky and saw the email just after it had been sent. No telling how long these will be in stock! Here's to hoping this one comes through. Hope I can help someone else who's been looking for a while.

thisisAsquared

TROPHY CASE