Daniel Mintseris

In this article, St. Vincent's keyboard player mentiones that he uses Ableton during live shows.

"Listening to the sonically dense albums Strange Mercy and St. Vincent, for which Mintseris has been a part of the touring band, it’s easy to imagine the difficulty in translating these sounds into a live setting. Mintseris gives much of the credit to Ableton Live, which he began using from its first version.

“In my experience, Ableton has made everything pretty seamless and stable since day one. The only time anything has ever gone wrong is from human error.”

In Ableton, Mintseris loads several racks of virtual instruments, including Arturia MiniMoog, GForce Virtual String Machine, and a newer analog modeled synth called Diva by U-He. He also adds a rack of Reason synths, and sounds he has sampled with Ableton, like Clark’s guitar.

By creating an individual Ableton “set” for each song, he can group the sounds he needs and assign them to different octaves of his keyboard controller however he sees fit. “I just try to figure out which limb is most available and go from there,” he says.

Mintseris also wrote a script for Ableton that enables it to change the set of instruments and effects when the song is done, without him having to touch the computer. During each song, he’ll switch his synth effects and patches manually, or rely on pre-programmed automation within Ableton when he doesn’t have the human bandwidth to do it all. If the band feels like extending a section of a song, Mintseris can loop the automation with his pedals, keeping the current effects going."