In need of an arrangement/midi lock button

Discuss music production with Ableton Live.
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loaub
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Oct 10, 2017 9:29 pm

In need of an arrangement/midi lock button

Post by loaub » Fri Nov 26, 2021 11:56 pm

I make ambient and sometimes rhythmically complex music where the tempo is usually very hard and time-intensive to find, which leads me to the thought process of “I’ll be creative now and lay down a sketch of what I’m thinking while it’s fresh, and I’ll lock in Ableton’s BPM after and get everything perfectly in time then”. Generally, I use warped and unwarped audio samples, midi, and lots of arranging and editing in arrangement view to sketch down my basic ideas; obviously things that are locked to Ableton’s BPM absolutely. So there is no ability to allow me to change the tempo later; as a result I have a buildup of hundreds of abandoned Ableton projects that can’t be edited until this feature is added, or unless I bounce each individual stem and re-create the songs in a new project as only audio files. If I want to finish a song the latter is generally what I do.

This issue has been the bane of my existence for the ten years that I’ve been working with Ableton and I’ve never found anything to make it easier. My music still is comprised of elusive and hard-to-find tempos that can take me hours to totally lock in, and as a result tracks are still being abandoned. I’ve always fervently wished for an “arrangement lock” and/or “midi lock” button that could lock midi or the arrangement in place while the master BPM was being adjusted, rather than altering the speed of the midi with it or moving the clips in Arrangement view out of sync with one another. That way, I could change the grid to match the arrangement/midi clip rather than the other way around — I’d adjust Ableton’s BPM until Ableton’s grid lines up with the timing of my midi or the structure of my arrangement, and then once things look relatively aligned I'd then begin using warping/nudging to get everything snapped to the grid perfectly. Boom, much easier, and could take only minutes. Yes, midi-generated instruments might sound different as the tempo change would have altered some of its parameters, but personally I could adjust that with far more ease than individually dragging and dropping the midi notes into their original places/speed as I generally freestyle on my midi keyboard and usually have complex midi compositions.

I’ve been thinking more and more about this “arrangement and midi lock button” since I found that Logic already has this feature, known as “Lock SMPTE Position". I know that Logic users really like to use this feature to help get their more free-styled compositions in time, and that someone has made a python script to allow this feature in Ableton 9 which people seemed to enjoy and of whom I’ll be contacting for an updated Live 11 version. I’d be absolutely overjoyed if this was a feature that would be added to Ableton soon. I love Ableton (I have 11 Suite, Push 2, the works) but damn, I definitely can’t keep adding to my massive and depressing graveyard of out-of-time projects, so my next step is to begin the switch to Logic even though it is something I really don’t want to do. I'm also contacting Ableton directly to see their thoughts.

Would anyone else like this feature? Does anyone know of any talk of this feature being added?

Look at this guy doing this with so much ease in Logic... absolutely incredible.
https://youtu.be/GcoTroF8QRc

note; I posted this in the "Feature Wishlist" forum as well.
Last edited by loaub on Sun Nov 28, 2021 7:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.

chapelier fou
Posts: 6012
Joined: Mon May 15, 2006 12:15 pm

Re: Really want an arrangement/midi lock button

Post by chapelier fou » Sat Nov 27, 2021 8:03 am

Not sure I get it, but do you know that you can have a « master » clip that sets Live’s tempo ?
You could render your take and make it an audio clip, then set this clip as master, and put the warp markers manually.
That’s what I do when I start a song with a great click-free take of an acoustic instrument.
MacBook Pro 13" Retina i7 2.8 GHz OS 10.13, L10.0.1, M4L.
MacStudio M1Max 32Go OS 12.3.1

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