How to Organize Your Ableton Live Session with Andrés Páez

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In this episode of the Worship Keys Podcast, Music Director Andrés Páez from Abundant Church in El Paso, Texas, shares his inspiring journey from growing up in a small church in Spain to leading modern worship with excellence. He recounts his moves from Spain to Denmark, then to Florida, and finally settling in Texas, where he honed his skills with Ableton Live and developed an efficient workflow for organizing worship sessions. Andrés offers practical advice for music directors, insights on keys sound design and VST selection, and tips for balancing keys playing, running tracks, and directing a band. He also encourages beginner players with heartfelt reminders that growth takes time, and walks viewers through his Ableton setup for today’s worship environment.

Andrés Páez

Andrés Páez Ableton Template

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Transcript

Speaker: 0:08

Welcome to the Worship Keys YouTube channel. My name is Carson Bruce, so glad you're here. We talk all things music theory, gear, industry and ministry for your worship keys playing. If this episode is beneficial for you or you have any questions as you continue to watch, feel free to comment below and I'd love to hear any feedback that you have along the way. So let's get into today's episode. So excited to have Andrés Andrés . Yeah. Dude. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. It's an honor all the way. Originally from Spain. Mm-hmm. But now you live in Texas, you spend a lot of time in Florida. Your family's in Florida. Tell us the whole story, man. How did you get from Spain to Florida to Texas. And right now we're recording here in Nashville, Tennessee. And so excited to have you on the Worship Keys Podcast, man. You're with your MD with Abundant Abundant Church. Abundant Church, yes. In el Paso. El Paso, Texas. El Paso, Texas, apostle Texas. And, man, love your content online. Thank you. And it's an honor to have you, man. It's The honors are mine, I promise you. Well, dude, tell us about growing up. How did you learn the keys? How'd you come to know the Lord and how did you end up in your position now? Yeah. Full-time at a church doing keys in MD world. Yeah, for sure. I was born and raised in Spain. My parents are pastors, both of them through Assemblies of God. So they had a church in a little island. It's where I'm from. Grand Canada is the name of the place. So I grew up in church every single day. Like I was living, uh, at church, around the worship team. It was a small church, like 75 people to a hundred people. Um, nothing crazy, but I was always passionate about worship and like playing. So my first love was the drums. Awesome. Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. I'm a drummer at heart. I'm not a good one, but I mean, I can do like a few things here and there if needed. Uh, like I always say I can save the day if necessary. But yeah, so I started playing the drums. It was really fun. Uh, I grew up, obviously, like I run musicians. There wasn't many of us at the church, but enough where like I could like, ask a few questions about guitar or about the bass or about like the piano. Yeah. But it was a small church. So like we didn't have like a big production either. Like most Sundays it was like acoustic drums and the Holy Spirit. Right. Acoustic girls the Holy Spirit. That's what you need right there. Yeah. That's how I grew up. , Eventually, uh, obviously things got a little more complicated in Spain, financially. So my parents decided, that it was, uh, not necessarily for them, but for me and my siblings. I'm one out of four. Mm-hmm. Uh, I'm the third one. They decided that it was best for us to move out of Spain. Mm-hmm. And they decided to go to Denmark in northern uh, Europe. Okay, nice. We were there for about four months. Okay. But it didn't really work out 'cause Danish is a very hard language to learn. Oh, I bet. And, my parents thought that with little English, that they knew they could get around and like get a job, but that wasn't the case. Okay. So then God, crazy things happen in the back and like open a door for us to move to Florida. Awesome man. Um, and then that's how we ended up in the us. Yeah. Great. After four months in, after four months, four months in Denmark, um, we ended up here in Florida and then from there we started going to this church called North, north Side Baptist Church is a Spanish church in Miami. Awesome. And that's when I got introduced to Ableton. Awesome man. And I just fell in love with him and yeah. I thought it was so cool. It was something new to me 'cause I didn't, I have never heard of like a band playing with a clique. Right. Or like with backing track tracks. Yeah. Yeah. The level of musicianship of that church was like also like. To me it was like off the roof. Right. Right. I'm like, you guys practice, because in our church, like I told you, like you would just showed up and like you played the three tho the three songs that you knew. Yeah, yeah. And you would call it a Sunday. And so I was like, well, you guys learn parts and you guys like have all these things and like, I thought it was so cool. Yeah, man. So I got really into the track sport of it. I was still playing drums. Um, and then we moved to a town at called Fort Myers. Okay. And in there they already had like a, like a drummer. Okay. It went back to the same vibes of like my parents' church. Like not a lot of practice, no tracks, no anything. Right. Um, but I knew that I wanted to keep going with what I had learned at the church I was just at. Yes sir. So I pick up the keys, um, which at this point is about like seven, seven years ago. Okay. Okay. Um. I picked up the keys 'cause they already have plenty of drummers. Uh, so you've only been playing keys for seven years? About, about seven, eight years. I mean, like That's awesome. Since I was a kid, I knew like c major, like a Right. Two, three chords. Yeah. But it wasn't until like seven years ago that like, I actually like got to, uh, a study. I remember, I saw this video on YouTube, uh, called, um, I, I thought it was like a, a Piano for Dummies I think it was called. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it would, uh, it was a guy just basically saying like, if you wanna sound like a pro, all you have to do is play these four chords. Right. And play any white keys. Right, right, right, right, right. And uh, it would show, I think that guy's still on YouTube. It's probably, probably, but I remember it was like, uh, he showed a minor. Yeah. F, C and G. Yeah. And. At the time, like I started trying and I'm like, it was like magic to me. I'm like, how is this working? Mm-hmm. And I'm a very curious person, uh, person by nature. Yeah, dude. So I was like, how is it that by playing this four chords, I can play any, any wiki and like virtually song mostly good, like Right, like 90% of the time. Yes. Uh, so I was very like, curious about that. So I went into, I went more in depth into like how that was working. So that's how I got introduced to skills. Okay. Major skills. I was like, oh, that's awesome. This makes a lot of sense. Right, right, right. Because growing up, like, uh, some people at my church would like pick up a song and just play the courts by ear. I'm like, how do you do that? There's like a million courts you can pick for 'em. Right, right, right. I thought they would pick like random courts. So when I got introduced to Skills, that's when I learned, oh, you're just picking. The six chords that you have in that scale. Right. So that things just started clicking in my head, like, absolutely. Oh my God, like this makes so much sense. So then I started practicing like, okay, if I can do this in the Y keys, what would it look like to do it in that means the Q of C, what would it look like to do in the key of F? Right. Or G or D. Yes sir. Or E Uh, so I started like learning my major skills. Absolutely. And, uh, I, I truly fell in love with the piano. Like, uh, I love the way it sounds. I think it's such a, like a beautiful instrument. Yes, sir. So I decided I wanted to take a little more serious, and then, uh, with my little knowledge of Ableton and like that discover passion for keys, um, at the church I was at, they, they were not using tracks they were not using. Um. Anything really. So I was like, there's gotta be a way for my piano to sound bigger. Right. Without tracks. Absolutely. So that's when I discovered main stage. Yes sir. Yes, sir. And I discover, uh, the Sunday Keys. Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great, great resources. So I started buying like their, like their specific patches for specific songs that we would do Absolutely. At my church. And I just remember like, uh, being so like, uh, like mind blown, uh, about like the whole like, uh, music worship industry. Yeah. I'm like, oh my God, there's a bunch of guys like doing all these crazy stuff and like Absolutely. I've never heard of this. You know? For sure. Like I said, like we would just show up and do like our three songs that we knew. Right. So I got very passionate about it and I started like really digging into. Uh, piano and stuff like that. And eventually, uh, after like, uh, um, after high school, I, I didn't wanna go to college. Yeah. 'cause I wanted to be a computer engineer. Oh, cool man. Yeah. But then I discovered that, uh, you had to do a lot of math. Right, right. It's like, that's not for me, but not me is not free. Uh, but, but, uh, my family kinda like, still told me that it would be nice if you still go to college. Yeah. Even if you do whatever you want, but like, get a degree or something. Mm-hmm. But I wasn't convinced on anything really. So after like two, two and a half years of like, just working, traveling, um, uh, having fun. Yeah. You know, uh, God opened a door for me to go to Southeastern University. That's awesome. Uh, and I didn't, at the time, I didn't really like, knew the pur the purpose of it. Right. Uh, but I went there and I was, god was gracious enough to give me a spot on I see worship. Yes. When I learned a lot from really, really good people and very talented people. Yes, sir. And that's when I really like picked up like the more like, I don't wanna say professional, but the more advanced part of like doing tracks and practicing your parts and MD Yes, sir. And stuff like that. While I was, my freshman year, sophomore years, I was, able to get a few part-time jobs as MDs at different local churches. Awesome. Because I've always, again, my parents are pastors and our church was really small. Mm-hmm. So if there's always been like a big passion for me for the local church. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. So that's where like, I feel like I thrive like in a church with volunteers, uh, helping teams and stuff like that. It's what I'm really like passionate about creating systems. So yeah, so I got those, uh, two part jobs and towards the end of my college career, uh, I got married to my beautiful wife, Sophie. And then got open an opportunity in El Paso, Texas to go full-time, into md. So, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. That's where I, and you have, you have a baby that was born last year, so she's about, or he, he's about, he he 1-year-old. Andrés ? Yeah. Okay. The fourth. The fourth. The fourth dude. Wow. The whole dynasty. That is exciting, man. Wow. I'm sure another musician in the making, right? Yeah, hopefully. I mean, I, I, I always say that like, I don't wanna put the pressure to him that if he wants to play music, I would encourage it. Yes. But if he doesn't, like, I wouldn't be hurt or anything. There you go. So it's good. Wow, man. And you have another one on the way? We do. That's amazing. Yeah. No, man. Congratulations. That's so great. Thank you. What a cool story, man. Starting in Spain. Denmark going to Southeastern University. Yes, sir. In Florida. SEU. Mm-hmm. Which I love. SEU Don't y'all love SEU? Yeah, they're good. Um, if anyone's listening from that area, just let us know in the comments. If you're listening on podcast, glad you're there, leave a review on Apple. But if you're watching via YouTube act, I'm actually curious where people are watching. Mm-hmm. Bro. 'cause um, I know we have people, you know, few people from Canada, some people from Brazil, a lot of people from Southeast, you know, in the, in the United States. But, let me know where you're listening from, whether that be Nashville, Birmingham, Alabama, uh, Dallas, Texas, El Paso, Texas. Florida area. Spain. Spain. Yeah. Just let us know where you're listening from 'cause it's always just interesting to know. Where people are listening and dude, all the way from Texas. I can't believe that you're here. So you're actually with your friend Ant? Yes, sir. Anthony. Anthony. And aunt's a youth pastor Anthony? Yes. And we just had some lunch earlier. Great guy, man. Great Hartford. God. And, it's really cool that you guys are here. So you guys, you just, did you just play at a youth camp or did both of y'all just do something? Well, he played a few days. Okay. I did the whole thing. Okay. He was playing keys to, with us. Awesome, man. Just for fun, with a group of friends. Tell us about the camp, man. How was the camp experience? It was great. It was really cool. We got to play. It wasn't like a necessarily like a specific band. It was just like a few guys that came together. Yeah, man. , My friend Maya, she's the one that put us all together. A great leader, great vocalist, Brendan, also another great vocalist. Shout out to them. They put us all together. A four piece band. Nothing, nothing crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, but with my buddy dozen, and Brendan playing drums. Yeah. And then, and a guy that I just met named Griffin on bass. Yeah. And it was really cool. We got there on Monday and you know, at first, like we don't really, we haven't played with each other in a long time. Yeah. We haven't really led worship with each other, like vocalist and back line. Yeah. So like, we were like a little bit shy. But then Tuesday after the morning session, we had like a really honest conversation about like, Hey guys, remember we're not here just, for a paycheck or like, whatever it is that we're here, we're here to like, not just lead people into worship, but also to worship ourselves. Yeah. So we had a very honest conversation within the group, and I think that just clicked something within us, , to like actually stepped into with confidence on stage. Hey, like, we're here. To potentially change lives, you know? Absolutely. Like you don't know who's listening. A hundred percent. So, uh, this is important for the kids, even though we're tired, like, uh, getting here was crazy, right? We haven't played with each other, but, right now we need to come together and make the main thing, the main thing, you know, which is, , to worship Jesus. So I think after that conversation, uh, it opened a, a big door for everyone to like be more vulnerable, to speak up, to feel comfortable with each other. Right? Right, right. So then after that, I feel like we saw like truly the hand of God, in the camp. Worship was awesome, but I think it wasn't awesome because of us, obviously. Like of course, I think like collectively we decided to make room for Jesus and like, yes, that, like, that made the whole difference, you know? Praise God, man. That's awesome. Yeah. Well, dude, , welcome to the Worship Keys podcast, the worship Keys community. We just share lots of great tips on all things Keys tracks, md, and you do a great job at MD man. So thank you man. Appreciate it. For this episode, we really want to get your thoughts on sound design tracks world and md mm-hmm. All of it, um, that you. I've obviously spent a lot of years mm-hmm. Practicing and doing, and now you're full-time at Abundant Church. Yeah. In El Paso, uh, Texas. So let me ask a few questions. We are gonna hear you play. Yeah. We're gonna hear some tracks, stuff we're gonna see inside your Ableton world. So y'all stick around for that. Um, it's coming up. Or you can just skip ahead to that. If you don't wanna hear this just ahead, feel free. Yeah, yeah. But, what are your best advice for MDs in today's modern church worship culture? What's your best tips for MDs? Music directors, we should say? Someone asked in another episode, what does it MD mean? I, we forgot to intro it again. MD Music Music director, as the subject or music directing as, as the verb. Um, but yeah, man. What's your best advice for MDs? I think from my perspective, the most important thing as a music director that you need to keep always present is that you are not there to. Like, push your agenda or like your own arrangements or like your own, which I mean, like, I love when, like I give an idea and we do it, but ultimately we're there to first do worship and second in the professional part of it, the, the job side of it. Yeah. We're there to make sure that the vision of your worship leader, it's being casted properly into the set. So like Right, right. Transitions wise, arrangements. Like, uh, you wanna be, uh, faithful to the style of whoever's, leading worship. So I think like that's the main, like the most important part as an MD to like, know who you're leading with. Yeah. Yeah. And then, know how you're leading the bend, you know? 'cause like they're following you. Right. But ultimately we're all following the worship leader. So make sure like you have a good relationship, that you trust each other. Yes, sir. And that all that it's present while you're playing. It's not just like, oh yeah, let's do a drum break here. 'cause I feel like it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know? Right. You have to make sure that like that. In tune with like what the Holy Spirit and the worship leader are like doing in the moment. That's good, man. Yeah. What's the most challenging part that you've found with playing keys? Running tracks and m ding because it's one thing to play keys, it's one thing to play keys and run the tracks. Mm-hmm. And then it's another thing to run, run keys, do the tracks. And MD of course, usually the person firing the track is the person m emptying as well. 'cause it makes sense. Hey guys, we're about to start. Yeah. Uh, who else, you know? Mm-hmm. Here we go. Mm-hmm. Intro, 2, 3, 4. Uh, but, but how is it multitasking like that? What's the best advice for, for that? I think, I think the best advice I can give for that kind of situations is to be super comfortable with everything you're doing. Uh, I mean, I've heard, uh, a lot of times that multitasking is not really like a thing. You do one task and then you do the other. Yeah. And you try to do it simultaneously, but your brain actively switches between the two. So the more comfortable you are with your equipment. The better you're gonna be at doing it. Absolutely. Uh, so for example, even MD and just playing without the tracks involved, if there's a part that's like really complicated, you usually tend to talk less 'cause you're like locked in into what you're playing. Right. Right. And vice versa. And there's a part that you need to address the bend a little bit more and you simplify a little bit more what you're saying. Yeah. So same thing for Ableton. I try to simplify my workflow as much as I can. Absolutely. Do the work pre being on stage. Yeah. Uh, and then being as comfortable with my equipment as much as I can. So if something happens in service, I don't have to remember how to do things. Like, like I'm fully confident, like, if I press this button, this is gonna happen. Right. I cannot be double guessing, like, oh, is this gonna work? Like, uh, for sure. You know, like I have to be confident that like what I'm doing, uh, it's gonna work the way I set it up to work with a hundred percent. Yeah. How long did it take you to learn Ableton? I cannot really tell you like a specific like a year. Uh, 'cause I feel like it's been like a process. Of course. Yeah. Uh, but I would say since I started college is when I really started like, uh, working with Ableton. Absolutely. And it wasn't until like later on in college that I started actually like messing with like the arrangement view. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 'cause I usually, I used to do things in session view. Okay. So I would just like drag every track. Yeah. Individually, press play and call it a day. But in the past two years is when I really gotten into like. Or let me go into arrangement and like, let's chop this section. Like let's do this, like let's transition, let's do a fade in, a fade out. Sure. Whatever. So, cool, man. Because I want people to hear that because Ableton is a lot. Yeah. But it's a process, like you said. Yes. You've been learning it since college and after college, and it's been four or 5, 6, 7 years. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Out of learning Ableton. And, it's possible to learn Ableton guys. It is, it's so, if you wanna get into it. You can do that. Just jump right in. You see a lot of episodes here on the Worship Keys where we show Ableton. We'd have, we even have an episode on how to use Ableton in a live worship scenario with Zane Steffen. You can find that episode, but Ableton's great. There's different tools to use Ableton's, just another tool, just a different type of keyboard or mm-hmm. Or patch you might use. It's just a different, but Ableton's a very popular top of the line tool Yeah. For both sound design and Tracks world simultaneously too, which is amazing. So if you wanna take your keys to the next level, I feel like Ableton is that move. And if you don't mind me adding to that, go for, what's cool about Ableton, I feel like it, from my perspective, it's that it's as simple or as complicated as you want it right to be. Right. Right, right. Again, like when I started doing tracks, I would do session view. I would just drag my tracks and it was just. You press play and the song finishes. If you mess up, you just fade it out and like you don't do anything with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can do, you can do from just that to like running lyrics, running like lights all through Ableton. Absolutely. Even changing patches to your guitar players to like your keys players. Crazy, man. Something, I don't really know how, I know you can do it. I'm not very familiar with it, but it, it's as simple or as hard as you want it to make it. Absolutely. That's the, I think that's the beautiful thing about ableton, hundred percent that you can start really simple. But as you dig into it and you learn, you can do all sort of crazy things with it. A hundred percent. And so typically you're playing on a Nord. What Nord piano is your preference? Which one do you play on? I mean, mostly I use the Stage four. Stage four? Yeah. Yeah. Dude. Yeah. I'm spoiled. I have my, sadly it broke right now it's broken. Oh, no, no. She, she, she got hurt. Oh, no. Going too hard. Yeah. So we're using a piano six at the moment. Okay. Yeah. Cool, man. And what do you, what, what's your favorite thing about the Nord? The Nord, it's just the sound that it has, like, well, f first of all, the response of the keys, the key bed is amazing, man. There's no other key that feels like the nor in my opinion. Absolutely. And then their, their piano sounds are just so, like, uh, pure, I don't know. They sound very, like, they're very solid piano sounds, right. Uh, compared to some other vsts that I have mm-hmm. Or that I've used, I just think the Nor is just like, so. So versatile for sure. You can do so many things with them. And like, I mean, the Norths are really expensive, but once you have them, you have access to all their sound libraries. Yes, sir. So I think that's also something really cool that like, if you hear something, uh, at a church that you like how they sound, right. But they're using a North, you can sound just like them. Right, right, right. You don't have to go by anything extra. If you have the Nor, you can sound exactly like, like they sound. What are your favorite VSDs Uh, keys? Scape and Omnisphere Awesome. Are probably the ones that I use the most. We wanna hear some of that from Keys scape, Omnisphere World. Mm-hmm. Within your session, and we'd love to hear about Tracks World. Tell us a little bit about your workflow. What's your normal keys rig? So, I use the Nord by itself. I don't run it through my computer. It just goes straight to to front of house. It's one less thing to worry about for me. Right, right, right. And then, uh, on my tracks, I have my computer or the church computer. And then, uh, we'll do a specific way on, like we cut the tracks in a specific way, so then we just export it into the computer that we're running it. And then that simultaneously, uh, pairs up with an, a PC 40, MK two cool man, uh, mini controller that we have. And from there we can control everything that's going on in the session. It's systematic. So we have three campuses. So all campuses run the same play and it's done like that on purpose. So how much is that mini controller, by the way? It's about four or $500. Four or $500. Okay. But again, like that's designed for what we had. Right, right. So it's not necessarily what you have to use or what you guys have to use. I always say you, you can do. You have to do something that works for your church and the, the equipment that you have. Absolutely. If I didn't have that, I would make it even to like work with the, the keyboard of the, of the computer. Absolutely. Which in fact, everything that's like mapped out to the media controller, it's mapped out to my key Oh, cool. My keyboard as a fail safe. That's good. In case like the media, controller ever fails. There's, in my key, there's always like a command that I can quickly access it. I love that. Just to be sure, you know. Yeah. The redundancy. You can never be more, you never, you never know. 'cause uh, technology's great until it fails. Right. Right. So there's always gotta be a plan B. Yes. Um, and again, like we use Ableton as a tool. It's not like we don't rely on it 100% for sure. If, if it fails, we can, ditch it and like continue. We have metronomes and things like that ready to go. Yes, sir. To make sure that like, we're not fully relying on Ableton. Absolutely. What are some of your favorite, worship songs right now? Just in general, and then also some of your favorite ones to play right now. Ooh, that's a great question because I loved your, uh, the, the who else, who else Yeah. Is just amazing song. Who else is good? We've been playing a lot of church, at our church. What's the name of this? Uh, OU Praise. Okay, okay. That's why ou Yes. That one. Ou Praise. Okay. And then we do a lot of original songs. Awesome. I'm blessed enough to be at a, at a house that, uh, encourages, uh, creativity. That's great. Uh, so we do a lot of writing and, , we have a few release and our release songs that our churches loves. That's awesome, bro. And, um, and you did some writing with SEU during your time there. Yeah. A little bit to writing. Talk about that, man. So, the way SEU worship, uh, works, uh, they do songwriting camps. Okay. So they put, different students in different rooms and they, like, they stir creativity. Creativity, yeah. Man. And I was blessed enough to be part of a few of those rooms. I mean, I'm not like a main writer or anything, like, I'm just like, I was just happy to be there. Right, right. But, uh, yeah, and that was really cool experiences. Uh, they've, they've helped me a lot, uh, for what I'm doing right now. And then, uh, my church now, like they, I'm able to like, write a lot more frequently with like, really great writers as well. That's great, bro. Are you, when you're writing, do you, are you mainly there for producer hat chords, lyrics, or are you doing like melodies? What's your role? Are you kind of anything and everything, or are you one specific thing when you're writing? So the way we, we do writing at, like at my church right now, we don't really have a producer role in the room. Mm-hmm. We just kind of all come together. So in, in that specific atmosphere, like we're all, a little bit of everything. Sweet man. I mean, I tend to be behind the piano and like calling chords. Sure. But. I mean, if you ever, if you guys have ever written a song, you know, like the course that you choose in the writing moment is not necessarily what's gonna happen. Right? Right. So I just try to be there to like, uh, hopefully do something on the piano that will like spark something in somebody else. Yes. I don't think lyrics are my, like string strength. Yeah, yeah. Um, but I mean, like I do, I do give ideas obviously, and then they have to correct my English because sometimes I do crazy stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, yeah, that's how you say it, bro. Like, I'm sorry, but I try, you know, I try, I try. And I mean, the beautiful thing about songwriting, which it's something that you learn, the more you do it, you're not gonna finish the song in the first session or like in the something you do. Right? Right. Sometimes you write a song in five minutes. Some, there's songs that take months, uh, like you like the course, but you wrote a verse that you're not really happy with For sure. So then you like go and revisit it and then like, uh, you revisit it again and then like you're still not happy. Then you ditch the song for another few months. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you come back to it or sometimes you share with somebody else to get like a fresh pair of eyes. Absolutely. Like years into, into what you did. For sure. And that, I mean, collaboration is always like the best tool that you can Oh yeah. That you can have for anything. 100% man. So we're about to see you play Yeah. And hear, all things tracks, saw, things sound design. But tell us a little bit about what computer are you using? Some people are really interested in what's the CPU? What are all the specs of your computer? Are you using that? So I'm not super tax, uh, tech savvy, is that you say? Yeah. Tech savvy. Yeah. Uh, it's an M three, max. Awesome. It's a MacBook Pro that, was provided to me by the church I worked at. Perfect. Perfect. Uh. And Yeah. Yeah. M three chips, man, they, they can 4K editing. It can fly. They fly, fly. It's crazy. What year is that thing? Years old, right? I think he's like a year old. Oh, wow. A year old. Yeah. Just as, just as old as your, as your son. Yeah, basically. They were born at the same time. Very cool man. Any encouraging words to beginner keys players who. Maybe, you know, your younger self before you even got to college. What, what are some encouraging words you'd give yourself? Man, just to be confident. Like, don't be scared to fail. Like, don't be scared to mess up. Uh, nobody's perfect, and if they tell you they are, they're lying. Right, right, right, right. Yeah, I mean it's, it is a struggle, but like, having confidence in, in yourself, I mean, I'm talking, I'm preaching to myself right here, but just like be confident in what you're doing. Uh, accept that you don't know everything. Right. And also accept that there's different styles of worship. Like, yes, obviously like, uh, I don't have these crazy chops and stuff like that, but. Because realistically I don't need it for, for where I am right now. Absolutely. And you need to have everything in the spectrum from like super classic music to like crazy gospel. Yeah, yeah. Everything's needed. And just do whatever fits your church and whatever style fits you the best. That's good. Yeah. Dig into it and don't, don't compare yourself to like, oh, but like that other person does like these crazy runs that I cannot do. If you wanna do them, practice them and eventually get to do, but like don't, don't tear yourself down for like, not being able to do it. Yeah. Give yourself grace practice. Some people picks up things really quick For sure. Some people take way longer. Um, so like what? It took me seven years. Somebody can do it in a year and a half. Absolutely. And to somebody else, it might take 20 years for sure, but like everyone has their own journey. Just, uh, be, be grateful, be gracious with yourself. And again, keep Jesus at the center. 'cause like at the end of the day, uh, he doesn't care if you do a crazy. Diminished core or like you do like a simple, major core. Yeah. Yeah. He cares about your heart. And as long as that's in check, like, uh, that's. That's all he is needed. Come on bro. You're preaching now. Yeah, man. You're not even the youth. Pa Anthony's over there. Anthony's the youth pastor, but you're over here preaching man, right? Right. Yes sir. Well, that's awesome. Hey guys, so this is just a quick, uh, run through of how I do Ableton on Sundays. This is, uh, the workflow that we have, , at the church. I work at Abundant Church. It's a system that we created that works for us, but anything that you can pick from here, you can apply it in your own way to your own sessions, if any. I'm gonna go in depth into how I cut the songs, explain how do we make it work for live. Uh, so when you're playing live, you can like easily, navigate through different song sections. 'cause ultimately, um, Ableton is a tool that we use is like another instrument. It needs to be able to follow us rather than us follow Ableton. Um, so I'm just gonna show you guys how, how to do that real quick. So this is a quick view of my session. As you can see, I have a lot of things going on right here. Uh, I have a stop. Next song, loop clicks, loop pad, pads, locators, click Tempo Guide, and I'll show you guys what all that means in a second. But the, the quick overview here, I have all the four songs that I would do on a Sunday in this, in this case, starting with again and again, which is an original song of abundant worship. Uh, you have all the sessions, all the sections of the song right here. And then if you press play, you hear the click. Uh, I'm not getting this off, sorry. So that's why we're not getting audio. And that's how sound sound there. If I, if you open the group, you can see, you can see all the different things that we have going on. The way I I, we upload songs into Ableton. It's by leaving all the instruments, even the ones that we have on stage, and we just mute them in case we need to reference them during rehearsal or anything like that. It's very easy to just turn on and all of a sudden now you can hear the drums. I can turn them off. I can hear the bass if I want to. My guitars that I have on right now, 'cause this Sunday, uh, we didn't have a guitar player, so Ableton came in Clutch. Uh, but yeah, it's very flexible and again, it, it looks, it can look overwhelming, but I walk you guys step by step into how to get this. Then yeah, you have, uh, another song, holy Forever. And as you can see, the timeline goes and you have all the songs, not necessarily together. Um, 'cause this, this other, the template is built and, and I'll tell you guys when in a second, but yeah, so you have four songs and then if you keep walking, you have space for another song. And then here I have a bunch of pads. Um, this is how we do drone pads at our church. The reason, uh, you just go to any pad you want for any key and you press play and it's just a simple pad. But anyway, so yeah, so we, it's a simple pad. We have it and there's no click or anything. 'cause at our church, uh, we're able to run, uh, doing flow moments and we have, uh, a metron coming out of the drummer. So the drummer is the one in charge of, um, pulling the me, uh, the Metron. But you guys are gonna see, like, that's gonna loop. So it's a, so it's a short session. Uh, it is a short, short section. Sorry, I'll do that again. So it's a short section of the pad, but this little trigger right here is the one that makes sure it loops back to this to the beginning. And I have one for every key. And I have access with my meter controller that I don't have right here. But anything that you see in this sec in this session, I have access with my, with my keys on my, on my computer in case my media controller fails. Or in case you don't have a media controller. Uh, Ableton has the, this key function right here that you can basically map anything to anything that you see on your computer, which is great 'cause sometimes you don't have access to a media controller, and that's a beautiful. Thing that Ableton gives you. So as you can see, I have all my keys. So if I press C, it goes to the QOC. If I press C, capital C, it goes to C sharp. That makes sense to me. I don't know if it does to you, but that's how it works in my brain. D goes to D, capital D goes to D sharp, E, et cetera, et cetera, and all the keys. And then this little command just like loops my pad back to this little flag right here. So this, when I press A, a key, I press G, it goes to GI press play, it, fades it in, and then when it gets to the back, it loops to the very beginning. Pass the fade in. That way you don't hear the fading over and over again. Uh, so that's how we do pats at our church. As you can tell, I have a bunch of little flags at the top. They're called markers and, um. And they're like, associated with different sections of the song. What do we, where do we have then? Well, that's easily is to easily navigate through different sections. So let's say, uh, we're doing this pre-course of holy forever, and then at the end the worship leader wants to redo it. So one, so you have to trigger this flag right here, and it goes back to it. There's a few extra steps that I have, like, uh, uh, with my media controller, I will mute the guide. Let's say we're playing it in my worship leader code for it. So I'll mute the guy to avoid moving, and then I would just trigger the, the previous flag. And obviously that transition sounds a little wonky, but with a full bend, I promise you nobody noticed. Uh, the idea is to have Ableton do the same section, and once you back into the section, you just put the track again. Um. So, yeah, so the way I move through markers is with these little things right here, as you can tell, these little arrows, you can map them to whatever you want. I can map them right now to, uh, let's say for the sake of an example, I put the previous one I put K and for the forward I put L. And now if I pray that in my computer, you see it moves between the markers and, um, then Ableton had this function right here. To move in between bars, you can set it to non A bars, four bars, two bars, whatever you want it. I have it set to one bar that way. Basically all that does is like, uh, this little boxes right here, that's each bar of the song. So when I press play, Ableton's gonna wait until the end of that bar to retrigger that section. So if I go right here, I'm gonna wait past this little box, I'm press pre chorus, press previews, and it's gonna re at the. And I can do that at any point that I want. Ableton always gonna wait until the end of the bar to retriever. If I were to put two bars, it would wait for two bars. Pretty, pretty simple. Um, now like I said, this looks very overwhelming, so I'll walk you guys how to achieve all this. So I'm gonna pull up a song from scratch and show you guys how do you, how do I, my process of cutting a song and getting it ready for my template. So I'm gonna pull a song from our church, and I'm gonna put this, it's called Being Throne. And I'm gonna put the, the original tracks. This is why you would buy a multi-tracks or anywhere that you get your tracks. If you build your own tracks, that's great. Uh, you just open the session, and this is usually what you get from multi-tracks. When you buy the tracks, you get all these tracks. Individuals and these little sections come already, um, with, with with what you buy. Okay? So as you can tell here, you have what you buy with business markers. The first thing I would do is group all my instrument channels. So I put command G and I group them. If you don't wanna learn the key commands, that's okay. You can just select all of them. Do the double click, the two finger click. I don't know how you call that. Uh, and then you hear and you go to group tracks, you select it and it groups them. Uh, what I do, it's, I name them by the name of the song, which in this case is B Enron. And then I put the key, which I believe is D Lemme double check. Yeah, it's KD that way I know, uh, when I pull into my main template, I always know which. A key I'm working with. So if I had to transpose or something, uh, I always have my reference. Uh, I like to color code things, so I put a purple 'cause it's the way I form my things, but you can use whatever color you want. The next thing I do, uh, and this is like a, a way that, uh, I saw, um, from stage to, from study to stage, from study to stage, do this. And I think it's, it's wonderful. Uh, the way he formats his stuff. It's by instead of, um, when you pull him to your Sunday, uh, rig, instead of changing each individual instrument track to the, uh, the outs that you have in your interface, you do, uh, like a send, like an ox uh, bus, and then you perform it. To send it to there. So on Sunday, I only have to change my buses. I don't have to go individually to every instrument and change it. So that's a game changer, especially at, uh, at our church, we're blessed to have multiple outs for our tracks. If you only have like one and two, or three or four, like that's okay. So it makes it easy. But if you have multiple outs, um, doing it this way, uh, helps a lot in my opinion. So I just create, uh, what Ableton code return tracks. So I create five of those. 'cause that's how many outputs we have at my church. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And then, uh, I'll name them, uh, in this case in my church. This is how we do it. Again, you can do this however you want or however you guys do it at your church. A it's for loops. So there we send all percussions, uh, synth bass. Usually we send it there. If we keep it in the tracks. Um, effects anything that it's like, not really like an instrument, but more like a, anything that adds movement to the song with, to the song, with having like a pitch reference and stuff. We put it there. Then rb. It's what we call solo channel, which is basically, uh, anything that makes a song sound like a song. So those like cool effects or like synth ARBs that you cannot really re uh, replicate on stage. 'cause you don't have like the, the keys two player that would do it or something. So we put it there is what makes a song feel like the song. It's complete. For C we do all our keys, and we call it, uh, sequence. I dunno if I spell that right. So hopefully I did. And then for d we do, uh, Vox. Which is, uh, usually like choirs. We, uh, some tracks, uh, bring Bg Vs. And choir. We explicitly only use choir stems 'cause we have BG vs on stage, but we don't have a choir on stage. So anything that's like gang vocals, we keep it in this channel. If it's like a 10 or on an alto or something like that, we don't, we don't live in the tracks. We take it off. And then in the e we call this ai, which is like an inside joke, but it stands for Ableton instrument. Basically. There we send anything that you would usually play live, but you don't have. For example, this past Sunday we didn't have a guitar player, so all our guitar, electric, uh, stems, we send them to ai. If we were to have a, an electric player, then we put their, like the organ or something like that, or sometimes empty. You don't have to use it simply because you have it. So once I have this, formatted, I go to my. To my groups and my instruments, and I start sending them to the buses based on what I said that we use. So my a is my loops. So all my loops I'm gonna send there all my guitars. In this case I'm just gonna send them to E but I'm gonna pretend that we have them. So I'll take, I'll turn them off later. All my keys goes to my sequence, which you see. And then, um, my vocals. Now, I didn't say anything to B 'cause in this case I have, uh, I haven't heard the song to know what it goes. So I'm doing this as like, this is a new song that we haven't played at our church, so I don't really know. So my next step would go to listen to the song and look for something that makes the song that, that particular song that I'm looking forward to send to. So, so that was really loud, so I don't really hear anything. This song. And again, like you don't have to send anything if you don't, if you don't have to. Again, like Ableton is an, is a, is a, is a tool that we use. Just because you're using it doesn't mean you have to use it. It's okay to not send anything for a particular song and just send a pad if the, if the song calls for it. So in this case, I'm gonna leave it empty and the next thing I would do is mix it. So I know I'm not gonna be using the drums, so I'm gonna turn them off. I'm not gonna be using the bass, I'm gonna turn, take it off. No, no acoustic guitar, all my electrics. I'm gonna turn them off my piano, I'm gonna turn it off. I'm gonna leave that piano there. And my choirs, like I said, I'm gonna leave it on and my bgv, I'm gonna take them off. So this is what we will use at our church. As you can tell the, the song originally comes with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, like a bunch of tracks, but we're only using four. 'cause again, like we want to use this as a tool. We're not relying on this heavily. And yes, maybe in service I can like turn on this guitar if we don't have an EG two player just to get those chunky chords in there. But, uh, and let the guitar one feel free to like, do more like lead stuff, um, and have a little more fun and not worry too much about holding the bed of the song. But once I have that done, I'm gonna create an audio track between my click and my guide. I just, that's very simple. I just do the double click and I put insert audio track that's, the purpose of that track. It's simply to give Ableton a tempo track. Like tell Ableton what tempo we're doing this song. Um, you can automate the tempo, but I don't like to do that 'cause it's an extra step that adds to my workflow and I don't like it. Uh, the cool thing about this, uh. Way of formatting songs is like, once you save it, all you have to do is drag it into your template and it's ready to go. Uh, all the, all the buses, all the assigning the buses and all that stuff, it gets done. Like you don't have to do it every time you put the song into Ableton. Once you do it like you do it once and you're done for the rest of your life, you don't have to touch it again. So since I don't wanna auto my automate tempo later on, I just create this tempo channel and I tell Ableton that every time it's going through, uh, in the space of this song, it has to follow this tempo. That way I don't have to automate it later. Um, that's very easy. You just have to like, insert any sort of empty audio channel In this case, I have, I have a bunch of them, um, ready to go. But again, you can just like create your own, like just record something that has nothing in it and then just, just put the, like, the tempo I'm gonna show you and it will like follow the tempo. So I'm gonna go here into tempo. In this case right here, you see, uh, the song is like 69 BPM. I'm gonna grab my 69, put it right here, expand it, and then I'm gonna double click on it. And as you can tell that down here, uh, get this menu and where it says follow, I'm gonna click on it. And now it says lead. And as you can tell up here, it changed to 60, uh, 67, 65 0.71, but when I click it, it goes to whatever tempo this is telling Ableton to go to. In this case, it's 69. So now that I have that, every time I pull this song into my Ableton Ableton's temple automatically is gonna change to 69. That way when you warp stuff, you don't have to worry about like things getting out of like control or anything. Like, it'll always follow that tempo as long as they follow and delete thing, it's activated. The last thing I do, I pull up this little, locator manager, it's uh, a Max four life device that I bought off of a guy on YouTube. It was like eight bucks. This thing is the greatest invention ever done by men. All I have to do is double click this thing, and as you can tell, it gives me a locator manager, a hit show, and it shows me all the locators that I have, like right here, all the markers you see. Yeah. Verse, verse, chorus, verse three, whatever. If I hit right here, create clips from locators, it creates like empty clips with the names of those markers. And man, that when you're doing this live, 'cause again, like. These markers are embedded into this session. So when I pull out my template, those won't be there. So I would have to create those markers and like rename them one by one with this thing. I just leave it there and I visually know which section I'm going without having to do all the extra whatever, like renaming stuff. So just like that again, like I'm gonna color code things 'cause I like it. And once I have it like this, I'm gonna hit, save life set as. And then in this case, um, we call in at our church, we put it av, which stands for arrangement view. So I'm just gonna put that right here and then you're just gonna save it. Whatever you wanna save it. I'm gonna put it in my desktop right here. Save. Then if I go to my template open recent, I'm gonna import it and you're gonna see how everything that we just did is gonna come, is gonna translate perfectly into this new template. So I'm gonna go find the, the file I just did is right here. And this, I'm gonna drag right here. As you can tell, it drags it and it's formatted with the same colors and everything, that I just did in the previous session. When you drag something into Ableton arrangement view, it automatically drags it all the way to the left. There's no way around this. Don't think you broke it. Don't think like you did something wrong. Automatically does that. Like it just puts it all the way to the left. All you have to do is cut it so you select all of them. And you can press command X and you can see like they disappear. Don't worry about it. They're still there. It command X is like copy and paste, but it's not really like, like you're copying it, but at the same time deleting it. So you copy while this and, and they disappear. But technically they're still copy. So when I go here and I press Command V, there you go. They all reappear. Last step that I do, it's move this to the predetermined slot on my template. And the reason why I do this is because I want all my clicks and all my guides to be within the same channel strip. So like, if I ever mute my guide, it's one mute button. I don't have to do four mute buttons for four different guides. My guides and my clicks and my tempos are always in the same, , channel. So I can delete this ones and now this song is ready to go. So if I go to this other view, you'll see that all that we did previously, like all this sending to the buses are like translate to this format already. It's game changer. Like you, you only have to do it once you do all the work. Upfront. And then, when you're creating sessions for Sunday, you just drag songs. Drag songs. So like, even if like in a live content, like doing the message, your pastor is like, oh, can we do this song? And you didn't really have it in your tracks. All you have to do is drag it, put it where it belongs, and it's ready to go. You don't have to do any mixing, you don't have to do any muting. It's already ready to go. And, uh, like I was saying earlier, all these things right here, it's what I, what I change when, when I go into my interface. So if you can see here, I, my songs are being, are sending the audio to sense only. That means all the audio is routed to these five. And I just have to change these five channels so I don't have to worry about going and changing every instrument one by one for each song. That's too much, way too much work. So I just do it once and then when I get to my church on Sunday, I just change this five. I'm done. I don't have to do anything else. And like I told you guys,, when you press play in this song, verse one, the tempo is like following this tempo channel. So I don't have to worry about automating 'cause I'm lazy. Now as you can tell, the markers are missing. So the locator manager, it's very handy for that. I just open it again and now I do the opposite thing. Now I know this plugin, I mean it's $8, $10, something like that. It's really cheap. But let's say you don't wanna buy it 'cause you don't have the money or you simply don't wanna buy it. There's a workaround about it. It takes a few extra seconds, but you can just, uh, right here this button says delete. Or if I press this section, it's says set. I, if I hit set, it will create a marker for me. So if you wanna do the ator manager. You don't want to pay for it, then you can just hit each section and then just hit set. If you wanna make it faster, you can program that button to any key in your computer. In this case, I'm gonna do M for marker. And when I go there, you're just gonna see like, I'm just gonna press M and it's gonna create the marker for me. So I just can go for each section and create every single marker. Remember that the markers are the thing, the things that would allow me to move in between sections. Without the markers, I cannot do the triggering while I'm playing life. So it's very important if you wanna do that, to have the markers ready to go. Otherwise it's gonna get chaotic real quick, which is ha it ha it has happened to me in case you were wondering. So once I have my marker, my song is done and all I have to do is press play. And again, like I can move in between, uh, I can move in between markers with LL or K or whatever key mid controller thing that you want. Another thing I have on this, session, my template is like this, like loop things right here. I call them mid triggers. I don't, you can call them everyone, but for the sake of this video, I'm gonna call them mid triggers. So I have a bunch of mid triggers that are basically just like single midi notes that tell Ableton to do certain things. So for example, for transitions, sometimes while I'm playing, if we're crashing out, I don't wanna do the extra step of like stopping tracks, selecting the next song and then pressing play. So all I have to do, I have these pre-AP things right here at the very beginning. I'll close this and all I have to do is copy and paste. So these are, , pre mapped and I can show you how to map something. It is really quick, and easy, but basically all this does is like, it feels able them to go to the next song. So if I put this right here and I persuade it should trigger the next section, and as you can tell it didn't, which is great. I'm gonna show you how to do it so it, it works perfectly. So basically what I want this node to do is trigger this marker right here to star sunk two. So all I have to do is press play, and while that, before it gets there, I just wanna select the marker that I want that to be triggered as you saw. It, it detected the note into that marker. So now when it goes through that note again, it triggers the marker one and it goes to the next song two. So it's basically like playing a mini note on my piano, but I'm doing it into Ableton. Now, how does this work? Uh, I'm not sure about Windows, but every mic computer has something called IAC driver. Uh, you do that, you can, uh, get to it by going to MIDI audio setup and then, uh, in window show, MIDI Studio. And here you can see your IC driver. That thing is basically like a medic cable inside your computer. I don't know really, I don't really know the technical terms for it, but it's basically like a. Ableton sending a meta signal to the computer and then sending it back to Ableton. So it is like a, I call it like a meta cable that communicates within the computer. If you activate it, you just have to hit devices online, make sure this is on one time in your life. You can buy your computer, activate it, and you don't have to worry ever again about it. And then if you go to this media right here, you just make sure that it's remote is selected, and in the out the track is selected. If you do that, it like, it will work a hundred percent of the time. There's no failure, as long as you do that. So now I can make transitions happen automatically. So if I'm playing, this will like work by itself. And that's how I do transitions on my track. So that's one trigger that I use to transition. But you can get so creative. Basically. Basically anything that you can think of for Ableton to do, you can do it as long as like you assign a made note to whatever thing you wanted to do. You can do one of these mid notes to trigger a chorus or a pre-course or a bridge or the chorus of two songs ahead of the set if you wanna do that for some reason. Basically anything that you can think of, as long as it uses mid triggers or a, an actual manual trigger, you can use it, by creating like a mid clip. It's super easy. Like you just like put a note, a random note, in it, and then they just put hit mid and once it goes through the know whatever's things that you selected for it to activate, it would, it will do it for you automatically 100% of the time. So once I have my set, all I have left is really to play. Again, like in this case, uh, I don't have my norm with me, which is what I would usually use. It's a great thing to talk about. 'cause like sometimes you don't have the equipment that you're comfortable with and you have to improvise or something. For example, the youth camp that we just had,, this week that we were talking about earlier, uh, I wasn't, I didn't have access to what I usually play. And obviously like you feel, your comfort zone, but at that moment you have to improvise and you have to do something that you are some somewhat familiar with and still get the job done. So for that, I use vsts. So I'm fortunate enough to have some really great vsts, but, um, which in this case I'm using scape and, uh, contact a I'm using, the double felt. Then I'm also using the LA custom C seven grand piano and the Giant, so again, like these are more on the expensive side, but basically the reason why I'm using these vsts specifically these three stacked to each other, it's for the specific sound that I'm using. So my fell piano, it's giving me like that warmth of the piano. Then the giant is giving me like the top end, like really like punchy, uh, high pitched sounds. And then my LA Grand is kind of like the glue in between those two. So I don't have my nor with me, but this is what I'm using. And again, these are very fancy, but if I didn't have this, I would find sounds that would, give me that specific tone. So I would find something to give me a little bit of warmth, to get that, like nice, , low end, robust sound. Then something like to cut through the mix, something like a high pitch within pianos, like it could be, maybe an EQ or like a different, like maybe an upper piano, and then something more like flat to like glue between the two. So like, it sounds, nice and full, and then you achieve a really nice sound. Uh. So, yeah, so if you can tell like the piano, like. Moves with me into what I'm doing. If I go high, it cuts through. If I stay low, it feels like really warm and like soft, gentle. But like, if I were to dig in, you still like, it doesn't get muddy. And if I go back down, like it still, like it, it, it comes with me to when I play hard and it comes like with me when I play soft. Even with my nor like, uh, with the Nord, not mine, with the Nor that I play with, I try to find a sound that's like warm and another one that cuts through. So as I moved through the piano and as I, walk through my different dynamics. Uh, I'm able to provide, a good body, but I'm also like cutting through the mix and making, uh, my front of house, uh, engineer's life easier and they'll thank you for it. Uh, 'cause sometimes like we put like this one sound and sounds like super, like muddy and like ugly and like you go up there and like it still sounds muddy and it doesn't like, so you wanna think of like, how as a piano player, how can I like, glue the band together? 'cause you have the, this guitars, uh, doing like this really crazy lead lines and like bass is like keeping it in the low frequency. So you, you wanna stay in the middle but still cutting through. 'cause you want, you want where you're playing to be heard. So you do that by like finding sounds that would allow you to keep the bed of the song there, but also being able to like, move out of that whenever it's needed, uh, to play a, a certain line or to. Just add some embellishments that you want in there. Um, so yeah, uh, I don't know if that's helpful to anybody out there. So, um, in this case, uh, I'm not really using Pats, uh, underneath my piano. I'm just using piano. Um, 'cause I personally don't like to use Pats a lot. 'cause I feel like, uh, when I'm playing behind a pastor or something, uh, it can, it kind of gets in the way. That's just my personal opinion. You don't have to agree with it. Um, so I usually like to have a drone pad underneath me, and then I just kind of like go and like, uh, especially when like, I'm there. Uh, if I'm in, in between a song, there's other instruments filling up the space. But if it's just me, I'm also like, uh, I'm comfortable with silence. Like if I play a chord and it kind of dies. Because there's a path going. I'm okay with that. Like I don't, I don't feel like I have to fill in, like fill in the blanks all the time. Especially 'cause like if a pastor's talking, I don't wanna be distracting. I don't wanna get, uh, I don't wanna get in the way of what he's saying. I don't want people's attention to be fixed on me rather than what he's preaching or praying about. So I usually, uh, when after worship, when it's just me or like after the message when it's just me, um, I would just like, uh, let a pad like carry like that silence and then I'll just play on top of that. Uh, usually, um, I don't like to follow a structure. I kind of just do. Random things until it's time for a click to come in. Once the click come in, uh, I usually just like switch to, uh, like a core structure. So if the band joins, they can follow me. But if it's just me and like, I know nobody's gonna come in. Whatever core you feel like in your heart, man. Uh, no tempo. Uh, you can switch from six A to four, four to 12 A to five, four, like whatever it is. Like, uh, just, uh, I think a beautiful thing as piano players is like, uh, knowing how to minister from an instrument. So if there's a pastor talking, it's really cool to not focus so much on what you're doing, but, uh, kind of like following them to where they want to take the room. So if they're praying and they're like getting excited so you can like build with them, they bring it back down. Like you do that by leaving more space, playing less busy. And, uh, I don't know. I feel like, uh, even though like they're preaching or praying and just playing like random stuff, I feel like the Lord can still use that to help what he's doing. Or even like, uh, touch somebody's life. You know? Like you never know who's listening to what you're, to what you're playing. And if you let the Holy Spirit use you, uh, I believe that he can truly like, um, use random things that you're playing, uh, which to us might sound random, but like, I think if you put your heart into it, there's, there's purpose behind it, you know? So this is what it would sound like. Guys, thank y'all so much for watching this whole episode. If you made it to the end, you are doing great. Congratulations. 'cause most people don't make it to the end, so shame way to make it to the end. Um, Andrés , thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Of course. Thank you for having me, man. It's been an honor, truly. I can't believe this worked out, so thankful. Just you have such crazy good talent, on the knowhow with Ableton in the keys world. Yeah. And I know you love the Lord and just congrats again. You and your wife baby. All that might