Looping Independently of Set Tempo

[freerobby]

Hi guys,

I'm new here. I bought Ableton to replace a completely hardware-driven looping setup. I'm about 90% of the way there and loving it, but there seems to be one gotcha that I just cannot get around:

With my hardware loopers, I could play a really long drum recording (say, 1:30), set that to loop on itself repeatedly, and then overdub on top of that.

The problem I'm having with Ableton is that I cannot find a way to lay down the initial track (typically a drum beat, but could be a guitar, vocals, whatever) without having to sync it to a tempo in the song. I don't want to work with a click track or anything like that; I really want to be able to just record free-form loops, and then if Ableton wants to take the tempo from that loop, and make it my song's tempo, so be it.

Is there any way to do this? Is there any way to record one really long beat and just tell Ableton "Okay, now make my set's tempo such that that whole thing I just played is one bar." (or 12 bars, whatever)?

I have a ProjectMix I/O surface/interface and a FCB1010 foot controller, so automating the right solution is no problem for me.

Thanks in advance for any ideas/replies.

[kanuck]

yes it's all in the drop down menus. check the user's manual.. ableton's looper was made specifcally for this purpose.

[freerobby]

yes it's all in the drop down menus. check the user's manual.. ableton's looper was made specifcally for this purpose.

Sorry, I should have specified... I'm trying to do this with individual tracks rather than the "looper" plugin so that I can have more granular control of each track that is recorded later in the song. (example: record drums, then bass, then guitar, then vocals, then turn off bass, rather than be limited by the one-step undo/redo functionality of the looper). I did get things working with the "looper" plugin as specified in the first post, I was just hoping there was a way to do it outside of that plugin so that I can use the more advanced tracking features of Ableton along with it.

[palewine]

One suggestion might be to use Looper to lay down the initial track, then drag it into a clip session slot. Then record all your other parts in other clip slots. You don't have to use looper at all except for that initial take, and it sets Ableton's bpm for you.

Quite nice, really

[DJRY]

You need to select "start song" as the song control setting and "set and follow song tempo" as the tempo control in the drop-downs. If you add additional loopers select "none" as the song control and "follow song tempo" as the tempo control in order to have them follow the global tempo established by the initial looper.

P.s. check out the Max4Live plugin binkLooper by BinkBeats.. it's the best way to control a really diverse and evolving looping performance.

[Valiumdupeuple]

You can also use Session Looper, or its Push-ready version SL4P.