Advice on improvised playing

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danbevan
Posts: 1
Joined: Wed Nov 30, 2022 3:09 pm

Advice on improvised playing

Post by danbevan » Wed Nov 30, 2022 3:29 pm

Hi, Im fairly new to Ableton having recently moved over from Logic, so it's all a bit overwhelming. The music I play isn't really "songs" in the traditional sense, rather I like to press play and let it run for an hour and let the music evolve naturally by triggering bases, leads, drums etc as the mood dictates. The session view is so perfect for this as you can jump so easily between clips and change follow actions and so on.

My main problem though, is sometimes I want a clip to play on loop for an extended period whether it be a specific drum loop, or bass line or whatever, then I want to be able to decide when it moves onto a new clip via a follow action, be it random, next, any etc. I thought there maybe a way to MIDI map this so that, for example, my drum pattern will loop continuously until I send a MIDI message (either a MIDI note from my controller keyboard, or any other way of transmitting MIDI), then it proceeds with the follow action at the end of the bar and changes to another drum pattern. That way I can have that same pattern playing for perhaps just one bar, or maybe 100 bars or whatever and it only changes when I send the MIDI command.

I know you can have two follow actions and adjust the probability of either, but I wanted something more definite than probable, so I can have it set up that every time I hit C1 on my controller for example, my drum pattern changes to another drum clip via a follow action, if I hit D1, my bassline changes to another bass clip and so on. That way I can easily keep the backing changing in an easy, controllable and interesting way, leaving me free to focus on improvised leads and queueing samples etc.

Thanks in advance, and sorry if this is incredibly basic to the more seasoned users on here!

pottering
Posts: 1800
Joined: Sat Dec 06, 2014 4:41 am

Re: Advice on improvised playing

Post by pottering » Thu Dec 01, 2022 12:14 am

Maybe you missed that the square Stop buttons can be removed from empty slots?

That allows triggering a Scene with a fewer Clips playing in fewer Tracks, without stopping Clips already playing in other Scenes.

https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/sessi ... op-buttons

Also, there is a concept called "Follow Action group", which are "Clips arranged in successive slots of the same track", actions like Next only work within a group, they will stop or loop when it reaches an empty slot.

For Clip by Clip control then you may need to get a Push or Launchpad.
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