One of the things I like to toggle a lot during live Ableton performance is quantization. You can really apply this to anything you can think of that has a keyboard shortcut, and even a few things that don't have keyboard shortcuts, to boot. (For a free solution, I believe MidiStroke may still work) One of the magical features it has is the ability to convert MIDI messages into keystrokes, enabling you to do stuff like duplicate clips in Ableton (⌘-D) with the press of a button, instead of touching the keyboard. Like I've mentioned before I use Bome's Midi Translator for a lot of automation and chained MIDI message handling. There are occasional tasks that are unavoidable, but certain things that are keystroke only, I did manage to work around into my MIDI controllers. One of my cardinal rules is a sort of "laptop-as-a-hot-potato" thing, essentially trying to make interaction with the physical laptop as minimal as possible. It's what led me to continue to explore looping for my live performances. It occurred to me that I could be doing anything up there, checking my email, looking at porn. I essentially was doing just that, sitting in front of my computer and occasionally hitting a couple of buttons. Part of it stems from the first couple of shows I did, that weren't live loop based. One of the things that has always drove me crazy with live performance is getting tied down to a laptop finding yourself hovering over the machine and nodding your head, instead of losing yourself in the moment and engaging both yourself and your audience.
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