The Simple Way for Church Worship Team Volunteers to Run your Worship Multitracks on Sundays
Running Multitracks on Sunday mornings doesn't have to be complicated.
In fact, building a system to run multitracks can be simple and once you build it the maintenance is minimal. In this blog, we're going to share 4 steps to simplify running multitracks so that any volunteer can do it.
There are many ways to run multitracks, but the one we most recommend is using Ableton Live to run multitracks. If you aren't familiar with using Ableton Live to run multitracks, read our brief introduction on how to run multitracks with Ableton Live. We cover this in more depth in the multitracks masterclass, as well.
Once your Ableton Live session is all set up with the multitrack stems, here's an easy and reliable way for a volunteer to run your multitrack session:
The Simple Way for Media or Sound Volunteers to Run Multitracks on Sundays or for Worship Events at Your Church
1. Purchase the Akai MPK Mini - $130
That's an easy step 1 right? Buying stuff is always easy!
2. MIDI Map Your Ableton Locators
MIDI Mapping is simply using a MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) controller device to perform functions; in this case within Ableton Live. Within Ableton Live you’re able to assign different functions within the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) to a MIDI keyboard.
So for instance, you can tell Ableton whenever you hit “C1” on a keyboard, that specific MIDI note can trigger a certain function within Ableton like "play" or "stop"
Based on your view in Ableton, whether session or arrangement view, you can simply MIDI map your song starts and transitions with using Locators within Ableton Live. For our usage, we use arrangement view within Ableton so the following suggestions will be consistent with the arrangement view.
3. Label your MIDI keyboard for an easy to use experience for your volunteer
On your MIDI Controller we use these basic functions on a launch pad:
Click (on/off)
Back
Stop
Play
Next
The Keyboard part of your MIDI controller represents the timeline of your set. So we use the labels like this:
S1 = The start of song 1
P1 = The pad at the end of Song 1, before Song 2
S2 = Song 2
E1 = The ending that has a natural fadeout
You can customize these as you see fit.
4. Test Your Set
Once you assign the Locators to your MIDI instrument and the basic functions to your launch pads, go ahead and test your set from the volunteers' perspective.