GET LOOPY

In general, Live is used onstage to trigger prefabricated loops and samples on the fly. Its ability to launch multiple bpm-synchronized loops and trigger samples in a variety of ways (from simple one-shots to machine-gun-style fills) makes Live the ideal partner for loop-based music performances. Of course, the program can do much more than just trigger loops and samples. A less publicized but no less amazing feature is the program's ability to record incoming audio, then automatically loop the recording and add it to a track for playback and triggering - all in real time. It requires vision and some solid musical chops to take full advantage of this feature, but renowned beat-boxer, vocalist, throat singer and all around cool guy Kid Beyond of San Francisco has the skills. And you haven't seen Live's real-time audio-loop-creation feature at full throttle until you've seen one of his shows. To recall different songs during a performance, Beyond employs Startly Technologies' QuicKeys with his footpedal. "Normally, buttons 1 through 8 on my footpedal are performance cues until I press button 9," he says. "Button 9 switches me over to a special menu script and, now, buttons 1 through 8 correspond to songs 1 through 8. So if I want to perform my song "Mothership," I press button 9, then button 6 to open up the Live song file, along with a new MidiPipe file that maps the song's keyboard shortcuts to my footpedal. That's an example of a macro I created; it opens two files at once."