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Total Recall in Ableton Live - Kapture (revisited)



I just looked a little deeper into the Max for Live device Kapture.
This device offers instant recall. It lets you record and store
snapshots of the whole mixer plus devices settings. And this includes
looping plugins too! Can you see the tremendous performance power in
this for live looping musicians? You can totally design your own
looping interface like you want it. Simply decide on what control
commands you want, set up mixer and plugins for that and snag a
snapshot of it. For some snapshots you may deselect a lot of mixer
parameters and only have the snapshot recall the looper's settings, or
maybe just one of many loopers you are using.

Snapshots can be activated in two ways. First, you mouse the drop-down
menu of the Kapture plugin's GUI. Second, you launch an empty clip in
Live that has the same name as the Kapture snapshot it's meant to
activate. This gives that you can handle a very complex performance
setup with only three MIDI pedals: Scene Up, Scene Down and Scene
Launch. Compare that to the classic way of assigning one pedal switch
for each function. Over here I will keep my 80 pedals (8 Gordius banks
of 10 each) and just assign three of them for Kapture. Then I'll see
whee this takes me.

I just checked with Augustus Loop and every damn parameter in the
looper is captured by Kapture. Finally this is opening up a way to use
this wonderful looper plugin IRL. My issue with Augustus have always
been that I can't press all buttons for all things I want to make
happen at once. The EDP functionality design is easier to use but
lacks some cool stuff you can do with Augustus. With Augustus it
typically makes sense to keep a direct MIDI binding to the Freeze
Button, besides this Kapture Snapshot system.

Finally, you may rework your setup very quickly in a modular way. Just
move around the live clips for different Kapture snapshots. You may
put several rows of them in Live's Session View (the data
spreadsheat-like interface) so that one Scene (all clips at the same
horizontal level) will only launch these Snapshot Clips. Very  useful,
especially if you work on many projects and has an issue remembering
the different setups. Here you can simply read it on the screen, or
easily memorize it visually before a concert.

FYI I can tell that this total recall approach for many years has been
the base for the French software looper Logeloop as well as for
Numerology. In those two apps "saving a preset" takes a snapshot of
everything, just like this Kapture thing. One thing I will start
fiddling around with now, using Augustus Loop and Kapture, is to work
with long bows of slow speed shifts, as this looper offers
non-quantized continuous speed/pitch shift. I did some of that on the
album with Erdem but until this Kapture I've seen a live concert tool
that would allow experimenting with it on stage (except for Logeloop,
but I can't run many of my tone shaping plugins in that Max built
looper so Live currently works better for me).

Ok, signing off now. Just wanted to mention this if someone out there
also has been looking for these kind of tools. Oh, I should mention
that instant recall of everything is not all snappy. At least not
according to a discussion on the Max For Live forum. Some users there
report that not all settings change at the same time. But I'm not sure
that should seen as a showstopper, after all Plastikman uses Kapture
every night to coordinate both Ableton Live mix mashup improvisation
and synced video.

Greetings from Sweden

Per Boysen
www.perboysen.com
http://www.youtube.com/perboysen