The main sequencing host of the setup is Ableton Live complemented with a series of MaxForLive plugins, which make instant control of all functions possible from the drumkit. Live wasn't designed with drummers in mind and is lacking some key features which are vital for the instant control from a drum kit.

„A quick word about what the features I missed most were: most people I know use Live on stage with the quantize value set to one bar and trigger the next clip or scene during the last bar of the currently playing part.
This approach might be good for most instrumentalists, but certainly not very convenient for drummers, for two main reasons: during the last bar of song parts we often play fills, when we don't really have a free limb to launch new clips and because anything we hit in a drumkit reacts instantly, it feels kind of awkward that you hit a pad and nothing happens until we get to the next bar.
I wanted to have a solution where everything I do on the drum pads would be instantly executed in my Live session. If you're familiar with Live you might think this is no big deal, setting the quantize value to None would do exactly this which is right in theory, but wouldn't work in a real life situation.
When you hit a drumpad, the impact of the drumstick virtually immediately creates a trigger signal, but this signal has to go through a number of processing steps before we can actually hear anything. A lot of things must happen before we get any sound and what makes things even worse is that the latency is different for each action type, so the delay of the signal will be different when launching a new scene from the delay when triggering a sound of a VST sampler instrument.
And we mustn't forget that we're humans and we play with minor inaccuracies which is a very good thing for getting that signature groove but it's definitely no good for triggering loops, which in most cases should happen precisely on the beat or on an other point of the quantize grid and this is especially true when you want to layer multiple loops on top of each other and all these little inaccuracies add up and make the whole texture sound very sloppy." Endre-eNerd

Max For Live plugins

SCENECHRONIZER This plugin was designed to make up for the latency and human inaccuracy issues. It makes possible to trigger everything instantly without losing sync. When triggering a new scene or clip it starts to play back immediately and then the plugin makes up for the latency and makes the playback of the newly launched parts aligned with the grid. And because we're talking about very tiny inaccuracies in the few milliseconds range, in most cases it's not audible at all when the plugin is in effect and makes these minor adjustments. Download plugin *

 

128-LOOPS This plugin makes it easy to program what the drum pads do in a specific Live scene. It collects all incoming MIDI notes and translates them into other MIDI notes which correspond to the currently playing scene within the Live set, so the right note assignments are always recalled at the right time and all setups are stored in the Live set. This workflow makes it unnecessary to maintain multiple kit assignments on the pad to MIDI converters and keep the setup changes in sync with the currently playing Live scene. Download plugin *

 

PLAYBACK STATUS DISPLAY This plugin that gives visual feedback on the currently playing scene and the playback pointer and it can also display reminders before hitpoints. ... So it's as if I had the scores for the whole show but only the current row would be visible which saves me a lot of space and it's always in sync with the playback pointer. Download plugin *

 

The Looping Setup

There are so many great videos on YouTube on how to use Live as a looper, so I'm not going to cover that in full detail, but will show how my looping setup works.

 

* Please note, that the plugins were not made for commercial use, so they have no fancy GUI and they're not accompanied with a user's guide either. We'll try to answer support questions as time permits.