Ableton Forum

Hi all

I have a question.

Say I have an 8 bar clip with 4 chord changes and another clip on another track with a baseline that follows that progression.

Is there a way, (without using the mute/vol) to drop in the bassline clip at it's midpoint when the first clip is halfway through? I don't want to adjust the start point as I might want to jump in at any point over those 8 bars.

I've read about legato following... I could see having an empty clip on the bassline track that 'plays' alongside the first clip and then have my actual bassline clip to trigger legato... does that do the same thing or does legato only jump to the same point in one bar, rather than 8 bars? It would still be kind of messy. Is there a way that clips on different tracks can know how far another clip is so it jumps in at the right point?

Appreciate I could have a stack of clips playing the chords that follow on from each other and loop so I could just wait for the next segment but this isn't really ideal.

I'm really looking for some setting that allows me to pair it to the first clip so I can drop in my bassline whenever I want and not worry abour whether it will be playing the wrong section.

Any ideas? I'm about to buy Ableton as I'm loving it but this is a bit of sticking point for me.

Thanks

Guy

I think Legato mode moves the play position to the current position in Live's global time, modulo the length of your clip. So if your clip is 8 bars long, then it would play from the beginning if you triggered it on the first, eighth, sixteenth, twenty-fourth, etc. bar, and would play some number of bars into the clip if you triggered it on any other.

I've never looked at it closely though, so I may be wrong. Why not try it out? It sounds like you're playing with the demo already.

Thanks Bob.

I admit I've not had a chance to try it but I'm pretty sure that legato is track-specific whereas I'm looking to go cross-track here. Besides, how would my second loop know which track's clip to pair to?

Guy

GuyH-C wrote:I admit I've not had a chance to try it but I'm pretty sure that legato is track-specific whereas I'm looking to go cross-track here. Besides, how would my second loop know which track's clip to pair to?

You are correct that it's specific to each track. But since the offsets are based on the global timer, then you can keep your clips in sync by restricting your triggerings to those specific times.

Obviously this only works if your music is rigidly structured and all of your phrases are either the same length or multiples. If you're making electronic music where all the fills and transitions happen every 8 or 16 or 32 bars you're probably okay, but if you like to throw in an occasional extra bar here and there everything will get out of sync.

The other thing you could do, which is actually what I'd personally do, is to scrap Legato mode completely, and do it a different way. Trigger your 8 bar clip with your chord changes, and your bassline clip at the same time, but mute the bass channel. When you want to 'trigger' the bass clip at the appropriate location, just unmute the track. You don't get the rigid quantization, but you might be able to rig up something using dummy clips if you really need that.

Best of luck!

Thanks Bob

Such a shame that there's no option to quantise the use of the mute/solo buttons as this would have been perfect.

I'm going to start using dummy clips but I reckon I will switch to just muting pretty quickly once Santa brings me my APC40 and I can be far more accurate with my timings.

I guess the ability to fully libk/pair two clips on seperate tracks will have to be one for the Ableton crew anyway to put in at a later date.

Regds

Guy

Yeah, I know it's not a feature I've heard of a demand for yet, but it's a neat idea. It'd be cool to (using a meta key or something) delay the change in whatever parameter(s) you're editing until the next global quantization tick.

While you're waiting for your APC you can rig up a temporary solution using either keymapping or the F keys.

You can do this with an empty clip on both tracks and all clips set to legato. So if you have an 8 bar chords clip on one track, make an empty 8 bar clip (or any even # of bars) under it and set both to legato. Do the same for the bass track. Start the chord and the bass clips at the same time. Now when you trigger the empty clip on one of the tracks it acts as a mute switch (without the undesired truncation of any reverb or delay), but continues to keep track of the progression's position.