From the course: Live Looping with Ableton Live

About the controllers - Ableton Live Tutorial

From the course: Live Looping with Ableton Live

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About the controllers

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- [Instructor] When thinking about the looping scenarios in this course and when designing my own performance setups, one of my goals was always to see how much I can get out of standard, inexpensive controllers. The ones you'll see me using in these videos are my trusty old PCR-500 by Edirol, and a quick appearance by the Novation Launchpad Mk2. All I'm after is as much tactile, easily-mappable access to Live's parameters as possible, which means as many faders, knobs, and buttons or pads as I can get my hands on. That's what these are. Even the Launchpad is only used in User 1 mode, which makes it simply a collection of pads that send MIDI notes. I'm quite confident that most standard controllers will be sufficient to make use of this course. Being able to customize the MIDI messages sent by each control is often useful. And again, most controllers make that possible. As long as you have enough things to press, slide, and tweak for your particular project's needs, you should be fine. I've built these sets around the use of a single foot pedal, although I'm breaking that rule once to expand to two. I'm plugging them into the expression and sustain inputs on my PCR-500. It can be any regular foot switch at all, or even a sustain pedal. If your controller doesn't have inputs like these or you decide that you want to put more controls at your feet, I can recommend an often-overlooked product called MIDI Expression by AudioFront. It connects up to four pedals of any kind to your computer via USB. With a highly-customized software editor included. Happy looping!

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