- Ableton Live is a number one worship leading software
that will drastically improve the musical and production
quality of your worship ministry.
I've been a worship leader for ten years.
I've been using Ableton Live for only three years now.
My only regret is I did not begin learning it sooner.
In this video I wanna give you in depth look
at my Ableton Live worship set.
This will give you an idea of the power of Ableton
to not only run a click and tracks in worship,
but how it can also automate lyrics, video and lighting
in your worship gatherings.
So, keep watching this video because by the end of it
you gonna have a firm grasp on how Ableton Live
can benefit your worship ministry.
And at the end I'll tell you about a cool opportunity
for you to begin learning this advanced software today.
(upbeat techno music)
My name is Jake Gosselin
with Churchfront.com, an online resource
for innovative and creative worship leaders.
Make sure you subscribe to the channel
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to help you grow yourself and grow your church.
Make sure you check out the show notes below this video
for some links to free resources for your worship ministry
and you can also check out my online course,
Lead Worship with Ableton.
So in the rest of this video,
I wanna walk through the gear and software set up
I use every Sunday at Mission Lakewood Church.
We're a small church plant here in Colorado,
so Ableton Live has been incredibly helpful,
not only in enhancing the sound of our band
but also automating our production elements
where we frankly just don't have all the manpower
to run lighting and lyrics
to the level that we want them to.
But Ableton Live takes care of that.
So the rest of this video, I wanna show you my set up
and how it works.
So here in front of me I have all the gear and software
I use to utilize Ableton Live
to its fullest potential in worship.
So I have two computers,
this computer right here is my Ableton Live laptop,
this one sits on stage, usually right next to our drummer,
and then I have my other computer
which is back in our tech booth
that's running Pro Presenter
for lyrics and video on our screens
and then also our lighting software, myDMX 3.0.
And then the third piece of major hardware I use
is the Looptimus MIDI foot controller
that I have right here.
And here's kind of a general overview
of how all this stuff talks to each other
and how this all works during worship.
So at the beginning of worship,
when the countdown gets to zero,
I cue up song number one by pressing this button
and then I press play on my Looptimus mini right here
and then what's gonna happen,
this is gonna send the signal to Ableton Live
through a USB cable,
and remember this computer is on stage
maybe about 15 feet away from me
so the USB cable goes from the Looptimus to this laptop
and then this laptop runs our click track
in Ableton as well as our backing tracks,
so I'll also have an audio output
that goes to our digital snake on our stage
that then goes to our sound console.
Then another thing that happens
is once I trigger a song using my foot pedal
and it starts playing in Ableton Live
then Ableton Live sends midi signals over wifi
to the other Macbook Pro running Pro Presenter and lighting
and that's how Pro Presenter
and my lighting software are automated.
I also have a Samsung 256 gigabyte solid state drive,
I store all of my Ableton Live media on,
I love how small and compact this hard drive is
and it performs really fast,
and because it's solid state it's gonna be reliable,
I don't have to worry about it failing anytime soon.
And then right here I have my Looptimus
and my Looptimus mini foot controllers
and what happens is I have these foot controllers
near me when I'm leading worship
and then when I'm ready to queue up the song,
I press the button to queue up the right song in Ableton
and then I press another button on my Looptimus mini
to play the song, and then the magic happens.
So now let's dive more into Ableton Live
and what's all going on any given Sunday when I use it.
So what happens is when our band is finished rehearsal,
I'm gonna press a keyboard command on Ableton,
it's gonna bring me to this locator right here
and I'm just gonna press play,
that's gonna bring up our pre-service settings
in Pro Presenter and in our lighting software,
so you'll hear there's some background music
we have playing softly,
we just have the logo up on our screen,
so this is what the look and feel of everything is like
about half hour leading up to the worship service,
and then we do do a five minute countdown as well.
And you'll notice, it also triggered up
the right lighting scenes in myDMX 3.0,
so we have pre-service house lightings
and then we black out the stage, pretty simple,
but you could really configure it however you want
and then at the beginning of our service,
this is what happens.
We have a countdown in Pro Presenter going,
and let's just drag this
to the end of the countdown right here.
So there's five seconds left in this countdown,
and our band is on stage, ready to go,
so I'm gonna let this play through
and then I'm gonna make sure song one's queued up
and then when it hits zero, I press play.
You can see the play head advancing,
it starts fading in our tracks,
it blacks out the screen, brings up the first song.
And then we're in business.
So this song was Glorious Day,
you can hear the actual lyrics here.
(Glorious Day by Passion)
So look what's happening here as the play head advances
in Ableton Live, on the top track,
I have my markers track which is just some empty midi cues
to label different parts of the song,
then I have tempo clip here underneath this second track
and a tempo clip is an empty audio file
that simply sets the master tempo of Ableton Live
so that the metronome here is at the right tempo
so this will switch when I go to different tempo clips
for different songs.
I also have a track for just the plain old audio file click
that sometimes comes with multi-tracks,
I have a guide track to give us cues
to count off different sections of the song,
for example, if I were to zoom in here for you,
you can see this is the guide
that's gonna count off the intro.
- [Intro Track] Intro, two, three, four.
Verse, two, three, four.
- It counts off different sections of the song
so my band never gets lost.
I put an MP3 track in here
so I can hear the original arrangement,
I'll solo that for you.
Then I have these green tracks here,
which are all of my Pro Presenter cues.
So I create a couple of tracks for Pro Presenter
in case if I wanna stack cues on top of each other
like I do here,
and then I have my lighting cues midi-track right here,
so you can see I have my house lighting cued,
my band stage lighting cues,
different cues for LED lights
for the different colored looks
that we have throughout worship,
and as the playhead advances, it's gonna hit those cues
and then it's gonna queue up those right scenes
in my lighting software
and the right lyrics in Pro Presenter.
And then I have a couple of cool tracks here
for running pad, so sometimes,
like at the intro to this song,
I just wanted to have a little bit more
of a beefier pad sound at the beginning kind of fade in,
so I have Churchfront pads right here,
and then I also use pads,
like sometimes we just wanna
be able to spontaneous in worship,
so what's gonna happen is at the end
of the third song we have in our set,
the song's gonna fade out and then it's just gonna be pads
playing in the background with our click track,
and I have a loop marker right here,
then I have a midi cue that triggers the loop locator
so watch what happens when the play head hits this midi cue.
It's gonna loop back to the beginning
of that section right there,
so it could keep going on and on for however long I want it.
When I press pause, the pads fade out,
I have lots of reverb applied to the pads track right here,
then I have a stop track down here,
so that's whenever I want Ableton to stop by itself.
A good example of this
is when I queue up my pre-service settings,
I wanna press play
and then not have to worry about pressing pause,
it'll just automatically stop right there on the stop cue,
so Ableton's really powerful in how you can map midi cues,
like from the stop cue track right here,
up to the actual stop button and transport.
And then of course I have all of my backing tracks.
I'll zoom way out here for you
so you can see what's going on.
I have song one, song two, song three is A Miracle,
song four, Spirit of Living Gods, song five's Reckless Love,
and then we have a post-loop,
and it's all set up in arrangement view
so it's a chronological timeline.
I think arrangement view is the best way
to set tracks up for worship, and then it's cool
because I can perfectly time my transitions here,
so you can see how the tracks of this first song,
Glorious Day, are fading out
and then I Lift My Eyes will be fading in.
- [Computer] One, two, one, two, three, four.
- And then if I wanna go in,
say like I'm looking at Reckless Love here
and I want to mix the sound of my backing tracks,
that's really easy to do on the fly.
I'll turn off the MP3 for you.
These are all of my tracks,
this is the mix that I used this past Sunday.
Our band doesn't have a bass player,
so I made sure I kept bass in there.
We have our electric guitars,
I can of course adjust all of the different levels,
the volume of each track, really easy.
Let's say if I were wanting to change a key of a song,
really quickly, all I'd have to do
is select all of the tracks for that song,
I probably don't need to select
the percussion tracks though,
and then what I'll do is go into warp mode,
and then I can just say, let's transpose this up
two semi-tones, so here's what it sounds like first.
And then if I wanna go up two semi-tones,
let's go up six semi-tones.
But I'm gonna undo those
because I don't really need to transpose the song that much.
Let's pretend that I wanted to actually speed up
the tempo of the song,
I don't really know why I would wanna do that,
but that's also easy to do on the fly.
So I'll select my master tempo clip I have over here,
that sets the metronome in Ableton Live
but it's also gonna adjust all the audio files
and speed them up without distorting the sound too much.
I'm gonna go down here and I will switch the segment BPM,
it's at 83 beats per minute,
let's switch it to 100 beats per minute.
- [Computer] One, two.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
Intro.
- So it's super easy to adjust both the key of songs
and also the tempo of a song in Ableton Live.
Lastly, I just wanna kind of show you
one of my favorite ways
that Ableton just kind of
makes the different transitions in worship really seamless
and this is when we're coming out of a sermon message
in our service and at our church,
we do two songs after the sermon.
And towards the end of the sermon,
what I'll do is I'll enable some pads,
just kind of have some soft, subtle pads,
playing in the background
underneath the end of our pastor's sermon
and then when he starts praying at the end
and of course, the pads will just continue to loop
in the background until we enable the next song.
So our pastor gets to the end of his sermon
and then after he prays, he talks about how,
hey, we're gonna transition back into worship now,
so he invites people to stand so we can worship together,
and then when he invites people to stand
and he starts exiting the stage, watch what happens.
I'm gonna press number four for song four in our set list,
which in this case is Reckless Love,
it's going to jump to that locator
and it blacks out all the lights,
and then it also sets the house lightings to dim
for when we sing our worship songs
and then it also gives us
a couple measures to do all this,
so that we don't count off the song immediately,
but now, as you can see, the song counts off
and then in Pro Presenter we have a title slide
and the background's queued up,
we have our new lighting scene queued up
for that song as well.
It's just really seamless when you program all of this stuff
ahead of time with Ableton Live.
Yet despite all the programming we're doing ahead of time,
there's still room to program in flexibility
into our worship set, as I already showed you
with those looping pads,
but you can go through a song,
you can create repeat cues,
so that, say you're going through a chorus,
you want to sing it one more time,
you just press a button on your foot controller
and it will repeat that section of the song,
and then it will just keep going
through the end of that song,
so there's just so many different advanced little tweaks
you can make to your Ableton Live set
to allow for that flexibility in worship.
If you're new to Ableton Live
and implementing this software in worship,
I highly recommend you check out
my free training linked below this video,
you're gonna learn all about
the benefits of this software,
some I didn't even cover here,
you're also gonna learn about myths to avoid,
you're also gonna learn about the tools to get you started
and finally I'll give you my ten step blueprint
for implementing Ableton Live at your church.
If you're convinced that Ableton Live
is the right solution for your church,
'cause you're excited about all the benefits it offers
and you wanna implement it
the quickest and easiest way possible,
then check out my online course,
Lead Worship with Ableton.
That's also linked below in the show notes.
In this online course,
I'll walk you step by step
through my implementation process
for Ableton Live for worship leaders.
You don't have to be a techy worship leader,
you don't have to have any experience
with Ableton Live,
even if you do have experience with Ableton Live
or other digital audio work stations,
this course will save you a ton of time
in developing an efficient workflow
that's gonna fit into your worship planning routine.
So click whatever link below is best for you,
I look forward to seeing you inside the training
or my online course.
Thanks so much for watching,
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