Ableton Forum

Hey!

Is it possible to control the global tempo of the live set via a drums audio track?

My idea is that when I'm performing live, I can pull in the audio of the drummer to play my clips, keys and synths in time without the need of tapping the tempo all the time.

I hope somebody knows a solution, it would be great

Greets timo

P.s. Im new here, Im sorry if I put the thread in the wrong place.

There's no way to do this in vanilla Live, although I bet if you were really clever about patching Max or PD or programming something you could build yourself some software to send notes to Ableton that you could map to the tap tempo button.

You'd have to watch out for special cases though, such as when the drummer plays a fill or a sparser groove where the beat isn't as obvious.

The other thing to watch out for is that tapping the tempo would have to correct after the drummer has played, since it needs at least a beat of time to figure out any tempo changes. So your instruments' timing will always lag somewhat, and if the drummer starts playing to the lagged instruments, you might see your tempos trend downwards.

It'd be a neat experiment though - let us know if you find a cool way to do it!

Ok, thanks! I thought that'd be cool because the guys doing the light are pulling in the main mix to time their moving heads and stuff automatically, so I thought maybe it's possible in live too. But in lights it doesn't really matter if its timed to 16ths, 8ths or whatever...

So I think it will be easier to just use a second sustain pedal, map this to "Tap" button and just retap when I'm out of time. Humans are better than machines anyway =)

greets timo