Ableton for theatre production

[par with dots]

Hi everyone,

I'm a music producer since many years, but super new to Ableton. Was hoping that some of you who has been using Ableton Live for theatre production could help me get on the right track. Please excuse me in advance if I ask questions that has already been discussed here before! I tried my best to find answers to my questions online, but a couple still remain:

1. Is there a way to start playing at the end of (or anywhere) in a certain scene? During rehearsals the director often wants to work on the very transitions between scenes. Optimal would be if there is a way to start by the end of one scene and then let Ableton run and switch to the next one once the timing on stage allows - and at the same time be sure that exactly what would have happened if I played that whole scene from the very beginning will happen now as well. For me problem is that I can't find a way to go to a certain point in the "master" time line and start there. I have worked in session view as there is where I can program scenes - when switching to session view there is nothing showing. Why? I was guessing that that would be were I could find a "master" time line. Hope you sort of get what I'm asking for! Forgive me if this question is stupid.

2. This one is kind of related. Is there a way to wind back and forth at a specific place in the timeline? Let's say that we are working with a complex scene (not a Ableton scene, but a scen in the theatre play) with music playing in the background, atmos coming and going, and lots of special FX cues happening all the time. Ideal for me would be to be able to stop all sounds on directors command, and then be able to "rewind" for example 20 seconds and go over that exact passage again. When I manually mark an earlier scene (Ableton scene this time!) and start playing there, Ableton not only start to play the samples that triggers with that scen, but also a ton of other samples that didn't reach their stop-point when I pushed stop on my directors command. This is so unbelievably annoying! I'm pretty sure there must be an easy way to go around this?

Thank you so much in advance for your inputs!
best,
Pär Hagström - currently working on Alice in Wonderland at Staatstheater Braunschweig, Germany which I composed new original music for

[S4racen]

What controller are you using to play Live?

Cheers
D

[par with dots]

Hi! None. I only use the return key to skip scenes forward. All samples are pre produced in Reaper, and I use Ableton for programming music, atmos and FX: loops, fades, pans, rooms, automation in general.
Pär

[S4racen]

You can use locators in arrangement view then.

Cheers
D

[par with dots]

Hey! Thank you so much for helping me out here. Problem is, when I switch to arrangement view there is nothing. Empty. Why?
Pär

[fishmonkey]

you would have to radically change the way you use Live to use the Arrangement View instead of Session View. Arrangement View is linear, so any looping Session View clips would need to be "unrolled" into long clips in Arrangement View. my guess is that you would lose many of the features of Session View that you are finding handy for developing show music on the fly. it would drive me crazy working in Arrangement View for a whole show, as I find navigating long time periods in Arrangement View pretty tedious....

[par with dots]

Thanks fishmonkey!
Then I guess I forget about arrangement view and try to find other solutions.
You seem to have experience from working with live theatre shows.
Can you grasp my problems and suggest how I could proceed?
best,
Pär

[par with dots]

Hi again! Update.
I was helped by a very nice German guy!
He revealed the MASTER STOP BUTTON to me
This was the only thing I needed to make sure nothing else than the clips in the marked scen starts to play when I hit return.
I knew it would be something easy peasy.
Thanks anyway for trying to help me!
Pär

ps. now I have another issue though: is there a way to replace soundclips but keeping the automation data?
(For instance: I have a long song with lots of complex automation but realize that I need to update the mix of the song, it's too low-mid-heavy. I would prefer not to have to rewrite all the automation...) Let me know if you know something!

[pottering]

You can replace audio using Live's File Manager, the same people use to fix missing samples. It is not only missing samples you can replace, you can also replace samples that are playing fine.

https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/manag ... sing-files

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gu9tng4ERGg

You can right-click the waveform in the bottom editor and select "Manage Sample File", then click the hot-swap icon (looks like a recycle icon, with circling arrows) in the File Manager panel.