- All right, guys, I have to tell you something.
Jake just left the room.
He's gonna be super mad if I tell you, but, I just have to.
I have to get it off my chest.
Jake does not build the--
- [Jake] Hey, Ashton,
what's goin' on, man? - Hey, Jake, oh, hey.
- What are you up to? - Oh, I was just, you know,
doin' intern stuff.
Just checkin' on the camera while you were gone,
and makin' sure it was still--
- Yeah, the
record button, the record - workin'.
- light's on.
Are you recording something right now
for the YouTube Channel?
- No, well, I was just telling 'em,
that you don't build the Ableton Live sets.
- Oh.
It's right, it's right. - I had to.
- I'm exposed, I'm exposed.
I'm a fake, I'm a big fake.
You know, I make all these - He is a fraud.
- videos, I make all these videos
about Ableton Live on my YouTube channel,
and I, guys, if I'm honest with you,
I don't even build Ableton Live sessions
on a weekly basis for our church.
Now, don't worry, I don't use Prime.
I don't use Playback or any of those other apps
(Ashton exhales) to run my tracks.
But tell them what we do do.
We still use Ableton, right?
- Yeah.
- So, I--
- I do it, I do it, yeah.
- Ashton, Ashton builds all of our Ableton tracks
for our church, our Mission Lakewood.
So, Ashton is my worship intern.
I guess we'll give you that official title.
- Unpaid intern.
- Unpaid, of course, I feel like
most interns should be unpaid.
That's the whole point of being an intern.
Anyways, a couple, it's probably like, almost, like,
a month and a half ago, now, I think,
you worked through my
Lead Worship with Ableton online course
and, dude, you were, like, up and running with setting up
those weekly sets in no time.
Tell folks, like, what that was like,
like what was the learning curve.
Like, maybe and talk about, too, like,
what was your experience level like with Ableton
or even any other
- Okay. - digital audio work station.
Well, I first started, well, I got to watch your course.
- Yeah, of course. - That's where it all started.
- Yeah. - And when I first pulled up
Ableton, you look at it,
and it looks like you're tryin'
to run a spaceship or something, like, it's impossible,
but, after the course, after, like,
practicing a little bit, you know,
the first set, I think, took me, like, five hours total,
maybe six, like, coming in two days
and it just took forever just figuring out,
like, how to troubleshoot little things.
And then, this morning, the set
that I build took and hour and a half.
- Yeah. - So.
- Yeah, so, there's definitely - Yeah, right to the top.
- a learning curve at first,
but, especially going from, like,
zero experience with Ableton Live,
or, you don't really have much experience
with any digital audio
work station. - Mm mm, none.
- you know, doing any audio production
in that form or matter,
but, yeah, like you say, I think that first,
you know, maybe probably took you
a good, solid half day to, like, really work through it.
And then, you know, once you started doing that
on a weekly basis, it seems like
you just, you've gotten more efficient, more faster,
because, eventually, you start to memorize
all the different steps in the process.
And, yeah, those first couple weeks,
there's a few times where I had to come in
and tweak things a little bit to my liking
and troubleshoot things,
but that has drastically reduced over the past couple weeks.
And now you're at the point where, like you said,
this is about a month and a half
after doing this on a, pretty much, every week basis,
- Basically, yeah. - I've done it a couple times.
Like, you've been out of town,
but, now you just set up the whole set list, right?
So we have mostly individual songs all made.
We didn't do any new songs this week.
We didn't get to add to the library,
but you built out the whole weekly set list
with all the pro presenter cues, all the lighting cues,
in less than an hour and a half.
So, which is about average. - Yeah.
- It's usually what it takes me,
if, like, I could probably do it a little bit faster,
but, especially if I wanted to be thorough,
take my time, get all the detail stuff done.
Sometimes it can take as long as we want, right,
like, as far as how many lighting cues
do we want to put in, right?
And just, kind of, however much time we want to put into it.
It's kinda up to the programmer.
- Like, I don't like to be thorough and check anything,
so it takes a little faster.
- Yeah, exactly. - Then, you go.
- But then I tell you. - And probably things
go wrong. - But then I tell you just
(Ashton laughing) go through and check it again.
You know, and then I'll also have, like,
a checklist for you that you can work through
to make sure you have everything in there.
But, yeah, I wanted to really just
make this video for you guys to explain to you, like,
as worship leaders at your church, you know,
sometimes learning Ableton seems really daunting,
but you don't have to be the only one
to do the programming on a week-to-week basis.
I still like to do it.
I don't necessarily want Ashton to do it every single week
'cause I like to do it once in a while.
'Cause it's enjoyable.
I mean, you have to enjoy, you have be
a detail oriented person and kinda enjoy that process,
but, then, once it's done,
it's like a completed piece of artwork.
And then, you know, when you arrive on Sunday morning,
Ableton just takes away so much of the stress
of, you know, what's going on,
running a click, tracks and automating lyrics
and lighting for our worship services.
What was I gonna, what else.
Good thing we can edit this, obviously.
♪ Do do do do ♪
- [Ashton] What do I do with my hands?
- So, remember about.
(Ashton laughing)
So, about three years ago, in 2015,
that's when I first started using Ableton Live.
And Ashton and I knew each other back then.
I used to be his music teacher
at the high school he went to and I taught at.
And, he was hangin' out with me one day
at the church I was workin' at at the time,
and I was full time worship leader,
which, probably, was the only reason
I had time to actually sit down
and do what I'm about to tell you to do,
but I decided, hey, I want to use Ableton Live.
And, Ashton was there the first day
I tried to build a worship set list with Ableton,
and it was funny, like, 'cause I was, like,
ah, hey hang with me, just check out this cool new software
I'm tryin' to set up for our worship service,
and, next thing we knew, like,
five, six hours go by--
- No joke, it was like
(Jake laughing) five hours just sitting
in the silence, like, watching Jake
try to figure out how to get a click and track to work.
Like, nothing else was in there.
He was figuring that out.
And we were just both just sitting there.
- It was painful. - Yeah.
- Like at that first - It was miserable, yeah.
- week I built my Ableton Live set list,
it took, literally, the whole week,
like, a full, like, 40 hours of work.
And then, that Sunday it kinda worked out right.
So, do not do what I did.
Do what Ashton did.
You know, walk through a process and a plan
that's gonna save you a bunch of time and headache.
So that's all we have for you guys today.
If you're serious about getting started
with Ableton Live in your worship ministry,
then I want to encourage you to check out
my complete online course that walks you through
step-by-step how to utilize
Ableton in your worship ministry,
the same online course that Ashton
walked through a month and a half ago,
and now he's prepping Ableton Live sets
on, pretty much, a weekly basis.
If you found this video helpful, hit that thumbs up button,
and share it with your friends.
You can check out some other Ableton Live
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