u/ActuaryComplete9443 — reddlx

Hi all,

We've been very happily using Ableton Link to sync two windows laptops (one running Live 11, the other Live 12) to jam/rehearse and now for live gigs. We hooked the machines up with a cat6 ethernet cable. Most of the time it seems solid, works great and is super convenient. However very rarely (and of course during a gig lol) something strange happens and the downbeats of both machines get misaligned. Sometimes the down beat on the second machine suddenly happens on the second beat of the first and similar.

Was wondering if anyone else is experiencing this and knows how to fix it? Or maybe you could share what sort of smooth workarounds you developed to resync the machines during the set? Or maybe it's just not reliable enough to use not in a rehearsal environment?

Thankfully, for us it happened at the very end of our live set, so it was all good (plus our sync is pretty loose anyway). But in case it happened sooner, we had planned to simply stop playback for both machines in between tracks and resync this way. Ideally it would nice to not have to do that lol.

A while ago we attended an online workshop ran by Brian Eno, hosted by schoolofsong. It was great, he gave plenty of very interesting insights of his writing process and life philosophy. As one would expect it was very inspiring. He also shared some of his writing techniques, like oblique strategies and so on. One of them was called Awkward Landscapes - a play on the drawing squiggle game kids often play. One person creates a strange soundscape (the awkward landscape) and the other fills in the gaps.

We tried this technique on one track of our debut experimental electronic music album we released last week, called Re-001. One of us took a bunch of resonating pipe recordings and morphed them into a soundscape, which was heavily processed. Then the other took the work and reinterpreted it into the finished track. Interestingly when the second person re-pitched the already pitched down pipe recordings, this strange texture appeared, which to me resembles some sort of rather ghostly human voice. If anyone would like to listen to the track it can be heard here: bandcamp link (I hope it's okay to make post like this, sharing some of our work!)

Has anyone else ever tried it? If not, we highly recommend it as an exercise, especially if going through writer's block. Cheers!