It's really simple actually.
iTunes.
After last weeks Abelton Live fiasco I decided to try and find a simpler way to play our loops/click tracks.
Our previous set up was using Abelton Live with an MAudio 410 interface.
We ran 6 outputs from the 410 to the FOH (front of house). 1 for click and the rest, pads, loops, strings, synths, percussion etc....
It's a great, no wait, fantastic set up. however it's complicated and i'm the only one on our team that currently knows how to run Live.
It'd take me about an hour or more every week to set up the Live tracks.
Anyway - this past weekend we hosted Aaron Shust, Chris Sligh and a few other artists at our church for a concert. The drummer had a macbook pro setup running loops so I ventured up to find out how he was running it.
To my surprise I saw his laptop w/ an 1/8th stereo cable split to 2 1/4 inch cables going into 2 DI's.
I couldn't believe it. I asked him if he was really running it like that and he said "Yep".
He then went on to tell me his story. It was exactly the same as mine. He wanted a simpler set up that he didn't have to use "out of the box" gear (i.e. audio interface etc...).
Here's the deal. You take your tracks in ProTools, Logic or Garageband for that matter. Send the Click to the Left side of the master output channel and then mix all the other tracks to your liking and then pan them all to the Right master output. Bounce the files down to AIFF files and dump them into iTunes.
It's simpler for the FOH engineer as well. You don't have to worry about them not pushing up certain sounds in the loops at certain times etc...
We rehearsed w/ this setup tonight and it worked awesome.
I'm not saying we won't use Abelton again - but considering the time this saves... I could see us using iTunes a lot more in the future.
How do you run loops?
