Ableton Forum

Hey guys,

I'm fairly new to Ableton and I have a question about the clip viewer and the timeline viewer since it's becoming extremely frustrating.

I have started arranging various clips that I made inside the timeline session/viewer. How do I switch back to the clips session/viewer and play around with the clips without hearing everything that i have arranged on the timeline being played back.

I have looked in the manual and it seems the answer is the "Back to arrangement" button, however my problem is... I click it and it refuses to light up and it will only light up when I play with one specific clip. Light on or off it still doesn't stop everything I have arranged on the timeline/session viewer to play back.

Thanks for the help in advanced.

just move the current measure marker beyond the length of your arrangement, into the blank territory...

When you click 'play', you're somewhere on the timeline. That's always true, even if you're currently looking at Session View clips. So you can, like simmerdown said, just move the playhead to somewhere on the arrangement view without any audio data.

But the other thing you can do is use the fact that anything that happens in Session View overrides the arrangement. So if you trigger a clip in the Session, you'll see the clips on the arrangement 'grey out' for that track only. So if you trigger the 'stop clips' button, it'll stop all clip playback for that track. And there's a 'stop all clips' button, so hitting that will stop all clip playback in all tracks, and you can experiement as you please.

Keep in mind that you'll still experience any automation that you've programmed on the timeline, as track automation is separate from clips. Combined with the loop brace, this can be really useful if you want to try triggering clips through parameter changes.

Best of luck