Ableton Forum

I'm a keyboard player. One of my Ableton "Holy Grails" is to play keyboard while using Live to trigger drum loops in a way that is similar to the Arranger Keyboards i.e. the Yamaha PSR series.

I want to use a combination of loops and follow actions to achieve this. So far so easy. However, since I'm only playing one single audio clip at a time, I don't need to use scenes, and in fact, the amount of intro, fill, and loop clips I want to use would go pretty far past the screen and/or Launchpad.

I am using audio files. I want to arrange all my drum loops and fills, Follow actions and all, into a grid format in session view. Here some ways I thought of to achieve that and their respective issues:

1. Sync track solo button to clip launch -- that way, no matter which clip I triggered, It would be the only one playing because the other tracks are muted. How to do? M4L?

2. Use A/B crossfader mapped to a MIDI controller fader to crossfade into another track -- Workable, I can play a fill on track A and then crossfade before the downbeat of a loop in track B. but only gives me two tracks to work with, Why can't I have more?

3. "Horizontal" follow actions to go from one clip to another on a different track -- Would be the most ideal way I can think of, but pretty sure this is impossible.

pls hlp thx

You could achieve 1. plus a load more with ClyphX Pro as this gives you a lot more control than follow actions. For example, you could have a number of MIDI clips with different ClyphX Pro instructions (loop indefinitely, play for four bars and stop, play for two bars and go to specific/random clip etc.). So you could have one track with audio clips (mapped to a MIDI controller) and one track with ClyphX Pro instructions (again mapped to a MIDI controller), giving you the ability to mix and match to your heart's content.

Or if you want it simpler, you can assign ClyphX Pro commands to each clip so each clip would do the same thing each time you trigger it.

Do you need to change track?
Can you not just stay in that track and trigger new clips with the different patterns?