Ableton Forum

Hello,

I'm new to live (running version 9).

When changing between clips it seems to change at the end of the bar. Where I want it to change at the end of the 4 bar (or however long) section.

If the current clip is in bar 2 when I launch the next clip it launches it at the end of bar 2 when I want it to play out the whole 4 bar phrase.

Does this make sense what I'm asking?

Thanks!

If you launch a clip, it will start to play when you launch the clip...if you want it to launch 2 bars into the future then wait two bars into the future. If you want to have it launch 2 bars into the future but you want to cue the launch at the tpresent moment....then change the global quantization setting to 2 bars...that way the clips will only launch every two bars. that's one way. the other way is two set up a follow action in the "L" menu at the bottom left of the clip view.

Ok, thanks.

Some of my clips are 1 bar, 4, 8, 16 etc.

I'll read up on follow actions.

Follow actions will work but they'll also hardwire your clip sequence, meaning you'll not have much control over clip selection without compromising your clip length requirement. Another thing to consider is either Clip quantization or ClyphX clip scripting functions. The big problem I came across with using the quantization is that it references the Arrangement position and not the clip position. So for instance if you launch a 2 bar clip (w/ 2 bar quant) and then a 4 bar (w/ 4 bar quant) and then another 2 bar clip, the last clip will interrupt the 4 bar clip at only 2 bars since the Arrangement has just hit measure 4 (2 from the first clip and 2 from the second clip). If you start with the 4 bar (w/ 4 bar quant) it will actually play to the end of the clip since it lines up to the Arrangement grid.

ClyphX is included in there because it would allow you to change the clip quantization using just the clip name. Like "[] GQ 8 bars" will set the global quantization to 8 bars. It might come in handy trying to make something work for you.

Ideally there would be another Clip Quantization value called "Clip Length" which would wait to finish the clip until the end. At the moment it doesn't exist to my knowledge.

I was about to start another thread about this as it's quite maddening that here we are on Live v11 about to be v12 and there is no way to do Launch Quantization at "Clip End".

In the Native Instruments Maschine world, you can set the launch quantization much like in Live (i.e. at bar intervals), but it also includes a "Scene" interval when switching scenes (which in Live could either apply to Clips or entire Scenes i.e. rows). It will launch the next scene when the longest playing clip in the current scene is done. And then there is another option to retrigger all the clips on scene change (so the ones that are shorter that may not finish their interval will align again once the scene change happens, i.e. go back to 1).

Why can't we have this in Live? It gets really messy when you start launching clips that are all different lengths, if you don't do it right, the timing gets all messed up and you essentially need to retrigger all the clips, or the scene/row to get everything starting on the 1 again.

It seems so simple, when I launch a clip or scene/row, just don't launch it until the longest of all the playing clips is finished, this makes more sense with Scene changes so I would settle for this on scenes only.

What you're saying about being tied to the Arranger timing seems a bit troubling if I'm understanding you right. If that is the case, I could see that perhaps their timing engine has a limitation to being set to bars on the timeline rather than the length of the currently playing clips. Maybe that's why we don't see an option like this... Hmm...

Anyone know of a Max device that will enable this sort of "end of longest clip" launch quantization?

Could you use a scene follow action and set the length to be the same as the longest clip?

Yes, you can, as you can use follow-actions to pretty much layout a whole arrangement prior to committing it to the arranger.

However, using follow actions means that it will just do that every time you run that scene, where if it was just a launch quantization type, it would be global for all scene changes (i.e. detect the longest clip in the scene playing and then perform the launch action when it's done). Then no matter when you launch the next scene, you know it will trigger at the "end" of the currently playing scene. The way it is now, you MUST trigger the next scene within the set launch quantization timeframe.

Again, this is a common feature in the Maschine software so it seems like it should be an option here considering these are both clip/scene based performance platforms. Clearly, I'm in a minority here in the Ableton userbase.

I just did some experiments with this and:
I think there is some truth to the notion that all of this is based on the arranger timing/clock, as when you turn off launch quantization and then launch something out of time, then while still playing, switch it back to 1 bar, then launch a scene while playing still, it will start at some random off time (i.e. not in the set launch quantization bars relative to the currently playing clips/scene). Probably because it's putting it back onto the arranger clock which was running on its own the whole time. It's all really weird behavior.

People probably don't notice this much because they're mostly using easily divisible clip lengths (2, 4, 8, 16, etc.). But when you start mixing different odd lengths it's a big pain...