Ableton Forum

I made a small single track loop it in ableton endlessly while I think of what else to add to it. It's basically just Analog with LFOs turned on and a bunch of Effects added after.

I've noticed that the volume slowly fades as it loops and I can't figure out why.
I'm using Analog, so I set the envelopes sustain to 100% and turned on Legato, and turned off retrigger for the LFO's
I did this because it's just meant to be 1 endless note, not a looped note.

After about 3 loops it's noticeably quieter and I can even see the levels slowly decrease. If I restart the track, the volume jumps back up to the starting volume and begins fading again.

I thought making it legato and 100% sustain would make each note trigger just reinforce the note being played.
Is there a way to fix this? Or perhaps a better way to achieve this?

I don't want to stretch a note out endlessly because there's automation involved, so it's better to duplicate the small section out to xyz bars

When using Legato, the envelope levels do not change when a new note is triggered. So whatever level the EGs are when the loop ends, they will be the same as the loop restarts.

Make sure that the MIDI note lasts the full duration of the loop. If the EG enters the release stage before the end of the loop, then the EG level will have already decreased a bit. That could cause what you are seeing, that each iteration of the loop decreases in volume.

Thank you for the reply. I fiddled around with this more and found that it didn't matter if I looped it or just duplicated the bar out several dozen times - the volume slowly fades out.

I disabled Legato mode after reading your comment, and found that the volume would jump back up to the start on looping. So that explains why it would fade to nothing over time. I made sure that my note lengths are fitting the entire duration.

Finally I noticed that disabling the LFO stopped this fading behavior entirely. I'm not totally certain what would fix this 100%, but for now I've found that by just disabling Legato and duplicating the loop out (instead of looping it) works well enough.
The volume still fades very slightly, and has a slightly abrupt jump back to the starting volume, but it's small enough that it's hard to hear.
It almost feels like the LFO is mis-timed with the bar, but I have the LFO set to work in 2 divisions of the bar, not Hz.

Wish I had a better answer for anyone else that runs into this issue, but it's 'fixed' enough for me, for now.