Having trouble with 'follow on' actions performing erraticly

[inhalations]

Hi guys.
Please forgive me for what's probably an awful novice question, but I've been using Ableton for a couple of years now and am at the stage of converting song stems into clips for live playback.

I import the [logic] stems into sequencer view, adjust the song bpm to match the song at hand, I insert splits across all the stems collectively at various significant points/phases in the song, then once I've chopped up the stems, I warp them.

I warp the clips in Beat Mode. I intend mostly for each song to be played at its original tempo, so I understand 'beat' is a good lossless warp option.

I then copy them all neatly as a big block into clip view.
I do not, however, loop the clips.

I'm instead using follow actions ['play next'] to trigger a chronological development of clips downwards - ie. at the appropriate point where one 8 bar scene/clip ends, the below scene/clip is then scheduled to play - 8 bars after the first clip was launched, or whatever. I also write the bpm in the title of each scene so it knows automatically at which speed to play each clip/scene at. Clip launch quantisation is set to GLOBAL on ALL clips.

I spend some time getting all the follow action numbers correct for every single clip so that the track should theoretically play through perfectly downwards, no matter which of the scenes throughout the song I launch.

However, though it might play through perfectly on one occasion, then on random occasions I'll launch a scene that's perhaps halfway into a song and the playback will spoon out - the drumtrack clip, for example, might start a beat earlier than all the other clips in the same scene. It's really frustrating; I launched ALL of the clips at the same time by pressing 'launch scene' at the side, why should this happen!? arrrrggh.

I'm sure it's something simple that I'm missing here, but it's doing my head in.

Currently, I could never trust this method for live performance [which is totally new to me].

Perhaps follow actions are not the way and I need to either instead pay attention and manually trigger each subsequent scene in a song exactly at the right moment, instead of leaving follow actions to do it, or I need to work out another way of playing all the stems synchronously but having some flexibility to restructure certain elements of the tune on the fly, then return to the original structure of the track whenever I wish.

At the moment I'm a bit lost. Is there a good way to do this?

Are there some obvious clangers I'm making here with follow actions? or maybe some wierd clip quantisation / overall quantisation issues?

I've got the latest version of Ableton Suite 8.

Thanks - and apologies if I'm being a major douchebag here.
Jules

[S4racen]

I would select my entire set of clips and change all of the launch quantiztion to GLobal, then you'll be able to adjust all of the clips at the same time to find what works best for you...

The downside of follow actions is that they are time based so if you set an individual clip to loop then you'll find it will launch the next clip when you don't want it to...

Cheers
D

[inhalations]

Not sure why it would be a beat out. I have done a tutorial on moving a song from Arrange to Session, including playing it all through using follow actions. Have a look, see if it helps.

Moving a song from Arrange to Session View

Hey bro, thanks for this. This all matches up with what I do myself really - the only slight difference might be in that you break your track up into 8bar cycles, which could in a sense simplify things for Ableton more than having scenes of different bar length as I have.

But it's still a bit of a mystery why it sometimes all flails out of synch with itself, I will keep soldiering on.

Thanks for kindly contributing some good advice

Jules

[inhalations]

I would select my entire set of clips and change all of the launch quantiztion to GLobal, then you'll be able to adjust all of the clips at the same time to find what works best for you...

The downside of follow actions is that they are time based so if you set an individual clip to loop then you'll find it will launch the next clip when you don't want it to...

Cheers
D

Hi S4racen
thank you.

I've just checked them, they're all set to Global which is the default in my setup.

I think you're right that follow on actions are in a way quite constrictive - I might need a bit of a rethink.

I'll keep searching in case I find a little gem somewhere that solves all my problems!

Thanks for helping
J

[S4racen]

If you have max4live, i have a solution that gives you the flexibility that you're looking for....

Cheers
D

[inhalations]

If you have max4live, i have a solution that gives you the flexibility that you're looking for....

Cheers
D

Cool really? yeah man please point me in the right direction, I've got Max4Live

thank you very much : )
J

[S4racen]

4th video down

http://isotonikstudios.com/modular_max4live/

Cheers
D

[madlab]

When you make any change to the follow action settings, don't forget to stop all clips then relaunch them to make the new settings to happen. This sometimes can cause timing anomalies if you don't. Not sure that is the problem for you but you should try this out.