New clips are effecting automation (even with there is none)

[simplemusic]

This is driving me crazy.

My set-up for a live gig:

I have a midi track with multiple instruments in a chain. The chain is used to select which instrument plays, which I drive off dummy clips in the track. i.e. when slot 1 plays in the attached file, the piano is selected. When slot 5 plays, bass is selected. I also do preset changes in these dummy clips, but I don't think that is having an impact.

The instrument selection is working fine. What is not working is when I, after selecting an instrument, go to record a clip on the fly, either by clicking the clips record button or right clicking, insert midi clip, then the resulting clip is effecting the chain selection, even though there is no automation in that clip.

In the attached project, there are 2 clips in slots 2 and 3. 2 was recorded by clicking the slots record button, 3 was done via insert clip. You can see in both that there is no chain automation (it is showing as a red dashed line without any break points). In both cases the red dashed line is at the bass setting though.

a few questions:

1) how is the chain selection being effected when there is no automation in the clip
2) what is the effect of the red dashed line without any breakpoints
3) ANY ideas how I can get around this.

Here's the dropbox link to the small project file I put together to demo this:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/187 ... mation.als

[peeddrroo]

yep, that's a major hassle that was introduced with Live 9.
the concept behind that is that when you start recording a clip, all automated parameters will go to the last value that was set manually.
in some cases it's helpful, but sometimes it can be disastrous: you can be playing an instrument fine, and as soon as you start recording, the sound will go havoc, there can even be no sound at all (if for instance the cutoff is automated to rise up, but the last time you touched it, it was set to 0).
so if you want to really record what you're hearing, the only solution is to manually set all automated parameters to their current value (i obviously love to do that when i'm on stage!).

we've fought a long war with ableton in order to change this, but apparently we lost this war, they don't want to change this behaviour.
i wonder if they'll listen to us someday.

[simplemusic]

Ok - thanks for letting me know it a feature rather than a bug, I was going mad trying to work it out. I'm guessing that if I never manually set the instrument rack chain and always use dummy clips or a controller, then I should be ok...will have a play and see.

I cannot fathom why they wouldn't just have new clips have no new effect...ie automated parameters stay in their state as at recording the new clip.

[peeddrroo]

Ok - thanks for letting me know it a feature rather than a bug, I was going mad trying to work it out. I'm guessing that if I never manually set the instrument rack chain and always use dummy clips or a controller, then I should be ok...will have a play and see.

I cannot fathom why they wouldn't just have new clips have no new effect...ie automated parameters stay in their state as at recording the new clip.

the problem is that is you don't manually set a value, Live will consider that it is "0", so you'll still have your issue.
i think the only solution for you might be to split your instrument rack into individual tracks.