Ableton Forum

I'm using the new comping feature a lot for recording live instruments and there is one thing that bugs me a lot:

Let's say I recorded 5 takes for a certain section of my song. I spent some time choosing the best bits and pieces and think that another take might not hurt after listening to what it sounds like.

If I record said 6th take on the same track all the comping decisions I made before are lost, as Live always sends the latest recorded take to the main track.

How can I prevent that? I want to either

• disable Live always sending the last recorded take to the main track or

• "freeze" or "fix" a certain section so Live won't overwrite it with the latest take

I'm hopefully missing something here, as I already lost a lot of work when I forgot to turn off arm for already comped tracks.

I did not find a fix/workaround for that, any suggestions?

without being at my computer to check to be sure, I want to say there's a way to add take lanes manually. I believe you can add a blank take lane (or if I'm wrong about that, you could erase the content of a take you know you're not going to use), and then drag the contents of the main lane (your fully-comped take) onto it. then you may want to relabel and/or change the lane color so you know that's your comped take.

True, copying a composition to a new take lane is an option.
The origins of each part are lost then, though.

tom.luft wrote: ↑

Sat May 01, 2021 8:52 pm

True, copying a composition to a new take lane is an option.
The origins of each part are lost then, though.

again, going from memory here, but...I think you can color and/or label your clips. if your different take lanes (the original recorded takes) all have different colors/names, I think the colors pop up into the comped main track. I would assume that if you copy them to a blank lane as described, it should retain the color coding/naming already there, so you should still be able to see where everything originated from, at least.

to clarify, I think the process would have to be like this...
-record your tracks for comping
-color code/label the take lanes and clips
-do your comping (color and labels I believe will show in final comp
-create a new blank lane
-copy comped take to blank lane (should have colors and labels corresponding to take lanes used)
-do your new recording

I think that should get you a full visual record of what you did before in case you don’t end up using the newly recorded take.

Yes, that's a neat workaround, thanks!

I'd still love a feature where I could just create a new take without loosing all previous comping. Maybe in L13

This M4L device has a shortcut made for exactly this type of situation.
It automatically pushes your current "main" lane to a new take, freeing you up for a new recording.