Ableton Forum

Hi everyone,

I'm a musician and sound designer and have been using Ableton for almost a year now (transitioning from using Reaper for the last 10).

Some context
I'm loving session view and what it offers me in my sound design work. It does require me to think about things differently sometimes, but that's ok!

I'm currently working on a play and completing my first sound design done and operated completely in Ableton.

There are a number of cues in this show that are ambient-ish noise. Sometimes certain parts of them have noise that is immediately identifiable (a child laughing, a gun shot, etc) and some are more drone-like.

The ask
I need a solution to fade clips that have already started playing using a 1-button solution as I will not be operating the show (the stage director will and there isn't time to teach her how to use Ableton... especially considering I'm already going against the grain by insisting on Ableton instead of industry-standard Qlabs). It can be simply to launch another scene (in fact, ideally it would be that). If there's a way to do this with a single clip, that would be amazing.

In fact, if there were some sort of way to say "hey clip, when I press this button again, fade for 3 seconds/3 beats" that would be great.

I used to get around this kind of thing in Qlabs by doing a crossfade to the target "ambient sound" and it worked pretty well (but was a PITA to program repeatedly).

Right now the work around I've found is to copy + paste the scene and have the 2nd instance of the clip act as a "fade". But it's causing an issue on certain cues where the jump between cues is audible and problematic. I need to be able to adjust to the timing of the actor on stage, so a static clip of audio doesn't really work either.

Any solutions on how to get this done (ideally in session view so I don't have to rebuild the entire show for arrangement view) more elegantly than how I'm going about it now?

Thanks in advance!

Info on my system just in case:

2015 MBP 2,5 GHz Intel Core i7 4-core running Mac OS 11.6
UAD Apollo Twin (though this will not be operating the show)
Ableton 11 Suite (but any solution would have to work with the theatre's "standard" licence).

The answer is... Dummy Clips!

Have a look at this thread. I use this all the time for theatre shows and its works perfectly:

viewtopic.php?t=58490

There's a step-by-step explanation in my first post, and in a post further down there's a picture that helps to illustrate the process.

If you have any questions, feel free to post back!

EDIT: Here's an example project, trigger each subsequent Scene in order to crossfade back and forth. This is a more "DJ" oriented example but it uses the Dummy Clips technique: https://www.mediafire.com/file/uqnxkrq6 ... t.zip/file
You can copy/paste the tracks from this project into your own showload and adapt to your needs. You'll probably want to change each clip's Launch Quantization to None so that everything is instantly responsive.

Brilliant!

This is exactly the kind of behavior/magic trick I was looking for, but couldn't wrap my brain around doing properly.

If there's some way I can "buy you a beer" (or whatever you fancy), let me know!

Thank you so much!

You're welcome Dugrok! Happy to be of help.

Drinking a virtual beer now. I assure you it's delicious!