Momentarily pausing MIDI track to create a fermata?

[SpaceJake]

I'd like to find a way to momentarily pause a MIDI track to create a fermata during live performance. Ideally MIDI play would resume at the next quarter note or bar when the pause is released, but that's just gravy.

Dumb example: suppose I'm playing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" with live guitar and vocals and a pre-made MIDI track that thumps a bass drum every quarter note. When I get to the final "felloooowwww / which nobody can deny!" part, I want to step on a control pedal to pause my drum track. After a moment or two, I release the pedal (timed with "nobody"), which restarts the rhythm, ideally matched to the next quarter note. (If that isn't clear, sing the song to yourself and clap on the beats. You'll see what I mean.)

If recording, audio tracks should continue recording during the fermata. Only MIDI playback gets temporarily paused.

Any brilliant ideas? Thanks from a relative noob.

[jestermgee]

Would you be running from session or arrangement mode?

Arrangement mode would be out of the question. It's based on a timeline and if you need to stop/pause playback of a channel, you need to stop transport. Same as askiong if a multi-track tape player can just pause music on a single track while the others continue recording.

However, if you work in Session mode you may be able to utilise Scenes as a way to have your song play through using "Follow Actions" (look it up) and at the point where you wish it to stop, you simply don't have it follow to the next scene automatically, instead map a pedal or button to that scene. You can then record all this to arrangement as you play (or another clip on a track) and have it continue recording while the scenes are stopped.

Hope it makes as much sense as it does in my head.

[Tone Deft]

^yep.

Session view, use a dummy clip (a clip that plays nothing, it just has FOLLOW commands it responds to) and put the dummy clip and the song's launch modes into Legato and they'll trade off the beat at your command. the Follow Actions for the Dummy Clip would be to go to 'next clip' where your song resides. I didn't sit here and try it, I could if you get confused.
https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/launching-clips/

as for one pedal doing two things, dunno, I doubt it. research here:

27.2 The Mapping Browser
https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/midi- ... e-control/

TWO pedals doing that, that should work.

today I learned what fermata means.

[SpaceJake]

Many thanks, gents. I'll give that a go tonight or tomorrow.

Two other thoughts I had before I read those:

* Map tempo to a MIDI pedal with heel down at the song BPM and toe down at some super-low BPM, basically stopped. I tried this, but it didn't work because min tempo is apparently 20 BPM. Doh.

* Use an external MIDI clock generated by some python code that effectively stops the clock while a control pedal is pressed. The hacker in me wants to try this, but ... yeah, the rest of me says that the above sounds much easier and I should do that instead.

Thanks again. I'll report back once I've actually tried it.

[SpaceJake]

Launching sessions worked great for this. I disabled looping on my pre-fermata rhythm track and made it the right number of bars so it would automatically stop at the pause. Then single pedal press to trigger the post-fermata rhythm track.

Thanks again. You two are indeed jolly good fellows.

[bobcharest]

Great example of what I love about this forum; Interesting question, cool solutions, and, a post informing of the results - Awesome!