Live Synth Setups

WiresDreamDisasters

If you were gonna play synths live and were happy to use a laptop... and wanted to quickly switch between each synth instrument in your daw and play it on a keyboard, as well as play backing track stuff alongside, as well as have a click-track for the drummer...

What would you use???

Danny1969

I use a Protools session, then you got the click including tempo maps, virtual instruments which change patch automatically and any additional drones, noises etc you want. Obviously any DAW will do I only use Tools cos it comes with some really cool VI's and nobody likes their interfaces so you can get an 6 in 8 out interface on Ebay for £45 and download PTSE for nothing and run it off an old laptop ... mines a 2006 macbook Pro

Branshen

Session (clip) mode in ableton live with a push 2 (which I know you have) and a midi keyboard. 

Push 2 would the control center. You can run backings from one track, and arm the preloaded synths as you need them. Routing the click track is a piece of cake too. 

Edit: This setup is probably overkill for your needs, but it gives some ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-kJaD6htbg

octatonic

Mainstage is better at this than anything else.

edit: maybe I should read more than the first line of the OP.
Use Ableton for all of this.

WiresDreamDisasters

Branshen said:

Session (clip) mode in ableton live with a push 2 (which I know you have) and a midi keyboard. 

Push 2 would the control center. You can run backings from one track, and arm the preloaded synths as you need them. Routing the click track is a piece of cake too. 

Edit: This setup is probably overkill for your needs, but it gives some ideas.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-kJaD6htbg

Wow.

Fucking loads of ideas in there. I need like ... 5% of it .... but that's hella useful. I think I need to add a keyboard to my setup too.

Strangefan

We use a sampler, a behringer arp odyssey and a novation mininova, we don't use a laptop as its just one less worry, it works well for us 

Rob477

We have run a stereo backing track, drummers click, a cue track for me, and my soft synths, using Ableton running on a very modest dual core Win 7 Dell for a few years now.  The soft synths are played via instrument racks and each is triggered by a "dummy" clip. I'm not really up to speed with Ableton's built-in synths (Synth 1 as a vst plugin does me fine most of the time) but I guess you could switch between them all and your own plugins using this method.  There's loads on Youtube about instrument racks and dummy clips if you get stuck. The backing, click & cue tracks are all audio files.  We use an old Novation Nio usb soundcard as it has 4 output channels which allows a mix of the backing and synths to go to my backline / FOH, the drummers click go to his headphones, and my cue track go to my monitor mixing.  And because they're cheap as chips s/h on Ebay. 

Rob477

Sorry - couldn't get this screenshot to show on the previous post - https://i.imgur.com/gzzvTGY.png