Restart Scene at a Chosen Place

[waldorfteacher]

I rehearse a musical with my actors using scenes as backing tracks. I need to restart a scene over in the middle but can't find a way. I can start a clip at a chosen point, but all the other tracks in the scene start from the beginning. I'm using Session view.

Anyone have any solutions or any other products that can accomplish this very basic need? I'm at my wits end.

[Pitch Black]

My approach in this situation is to mute, or pull down the volume temporarily on my mixer, trigger the scene and then scroll/drag upwards on the bar counter in the top center of the screen, i.e. shuttle the transport. Then put the volume back up.

If you know in advance you’re going to want to start again mid-scene you can use this mute-and-shuttle technique then hit the spacebar to pause playback. Then unmute.

You’re now pre-cued to the right place. If you hold the shift key as you hit spacebar, playback starts from where you were paused.

TLDR: mute -> shuttle -> spacebar -> unmute -> shift+spacebar

HTH!

PS you don’t have to mute the volume as you’re doing the shuttling, but some artistes don’t like hearing it over the PA…

[waldorfteacher]

Thank you.

Some interesting quirks with this.
You have to trigger the scene to see where in the waveform you are going.
If you go back to the beginning, it stops moving and you have to re-trigger.
"0" bars is not the start of the scene but the bars elapsed since.... I'm not sure what .
Getting a reliable start position each time is time consuming.

I wish the timeline at the bottom of the Session View showed exact Minute / Second position and allowed setting it directly as I've got these marked on my sheet music and I know I want to start at, let's say, 5:50.

Better than nothing though and I REALLY appreciate you pointing this ability out. I was pulling my hair out today in practice needing to restart in the middle of a scene over and over.

[Pitch Black]

Or…. Is it inconceivable that you could use Arrange View just for rehearsals… lay all your Scenes out one after another on the timeline?

[chapelier fou]

There might be a way with max for live. Not 100% if doable and when I could do it though.

[Da hand]

Session View and Arrangement View are optimized for different types of tasks - which is normal, as otherwise you would only have one view.

If you are playing back the project parts by simply hitting "play" and letting the project parts play-out by themselves, then Arrangement View is really the view made for that. You can place locators or even move a temporary one around, to start your project from those defined points. This way it is very simple to play back all tracks of your song from any point at any time - this view is made for that.

Session View is made for live performance - meaning you are continuously manipulating something, re-triggering or jumping between much shorter segments of you songs. It is not really made to manipulate the unattended playback of your project - or easily skip around multiple clips containing long backing tracks- as Arrangement view exists for that. If you do insist on using Session View for this, then you could create multiple scenes for your each song and define a different starting point inside the set of clips of each scene corresponding to the starting points you want to rehearse.

[waldorfteacher]

Or…. Is it inconceivable that you could use Arrange View just for rehearsals… lay all your Scenes out one after another on the timeline?

No longer inconceivable. For a two hour performance with roughly 40 songs / scenes, the thought of finding a place in the timeline quickly seems difficult at best on a laptop. Plus, with every change to the layout or songs, it means syncing the change in multiple places. I wish that the two views were somehow connected including triggers and volume settings, so that I could link to the Session page.

My first experience of Arrangement Mode after adding clips and pressing play was that the music on the Session View would play even though the pointer was scrolling a (different) track on the Arrangement View. I couldn't figure out how they connected. I had to start a brand new project for it to work correctly.

But I will give it a try.

[Pitch Black]

the thought of finding a place in the timeline quickly seems difficult at best on a laptop.

You can insert Markers on the timeline and assign those to MIDI or QWERTY keys to instantly go to that position.

music on the Session View would play even though the pointer was scrolling a (different) track on the Arrangement View. I couldn't figure out how they connected.

This is expected behaviour. Clips can play from Session, Arrange or a combination of both. There is button called “Back to Arrangement” for exactly this purpose - it stops any clips currently playing from Session and plays only content in the Arrange View.

[waldorfteacher]

the thought of finding a place in the timeline quickly seems difficult at best on a laptop.

You can insert Markers on the timeline and assign those to MIDI or QWERTY keys to instantly go to that position.

music on the Session View would play even though the pointer was scrolling a (different) track on the Arrangement View. I couldn't figure out how they connected.

This is expected behaviour. Clips can play from Session, Arrange or a combination of both. There is button called “Back to Arrangement” for exactly this purpose - it stops any clips currently playing from Session and plays only content in the Arrange View.

Thank you for this. Only one crucial need for rehearsals is missing. I have my sheet music marked up with the time position. For example, if I want to restart at measure 20, I set the play head to 2 minutes 30 seconds. With Arrangement View, the timeline is cumulative. There is no way to use it. Except for the waveform, I would be searching blind. Any ideas (plugins) which would allow me to see the time elapsed since the last marker or something like that?

[Pitch Black]

You can insert as many markers as you want, and name each with “corrected elapsed time” or with the Bar numbers of each song.

Or, better still, put a set or markers in each song: Intro, Verse 1, Chorus 1, Verse 2, Chorus 2, Bridge, Outro etc etc. So if you want to go from Verse 2, just click on that marker, say “OK everybody, we’re going to take it from verse 2” and hit spacebar.

[paulmellors]

I rehearse a musical with my actors using scenes as backing tracks. I need to restart a scene over in the middle but can't find a way. I can start a clip at a chosen point, but all the other tracks in the scene start from the beginning. I'm using Session view.

Anyone have any solutions or any other products that can accomplish this very basic need? I'm at my wits end.

I would love to be able to do this. Drives me crazy.
I use Live for playback of backing tracks (multitrack stems) across maybe 12 tracks. I also use midi channels to trigger lighting and sound desk. It's a real pain to always have to play from the beginning.
I just can't find anyway around this.

[mothergarage]

could you break down a scene into multiple parts (scenes) and use follow actions to play through the original arrangement? then when you need to start in between trigger one of the scene parts.

[pottering]

Maybe Legato Mode helps?

https://www.ableton.com/en/manual/launc ... egato-mode

[Calagan]

I've got often the same issue (during rehearsals) and I didn't understand the solution proposed here.
To me it doesn't work.

Until now I didn't find any way to trigger a scene in the middle (or at some specific moment), and I'm not sure it's doable.

The only way I found is to transfer the scene I'm working on in the arrangement window, and rehearse from there (this is working if each scene is a song, for exemple, and you don't need to change scene in the middle of the piece you're working on).
- in the session view, select the scene you want to transfer
- click right, and choose "select all slots from the scene"
- then, select any clip and drag all the clips to the arrangement screen switcher (in the high-right corner)
- Live will switch to arrangement view : while still holding the clips, drop them on the corresponding tracks
- select back to arrangement so the active clips are those in the arrangement
Et voilà !

It's not perfect, and it doesn't work if you need to change scene during the rehearsal, but it's the only way I know.
My set is made like one scene = one song, so I just need to redo the process for each song (erase all the clips in arrangement view, and repeat the process).

If someone can explain me the trick discussed in the beginning of this thread, I'd be glad because to me it doesn't work at all...

[Pitch Black]

Hi Calagan, the idea is based on the fact that you can “scroll” or “shuttle” the bar counter by click+holding on it and dragging the cursor upwards.

So you can trigger a scene, then advance the transport by dragging / shuttling the bar counter to later in the scene.

If you want you could just let the scene play from where you shuttled to, or you could hit the spacebar to pause playback at that point. Then you can use Shift+spacebar to resume playback from that point.

Does that make sense?

Trigger the scene > scroll the bar-counter > spacebar to pause > shift+spacebar to resume playback from the point you shuttled to.

Hope this helps