Ableton Forum

Hi y'all:

I have a rather complex Live 12 Suite session that I've been building out and tweaking for the last two months or so in preparation for a performance. I've been incorporating all kinds of new gear along the way, so I've been in and out of every setting and parameter a thousand times.

My functionality for creating live MIDI loops in Session View has gone a bit askew over the weekend, and I'm not sure what setting changed.

Before now, I could create a live MIDI loop in the usual way ... tap on a cell, start playing after the count-in, and tap the cell again to close/create the loop. I had the Global Quantization Settings set to 1/8 note. The loops worked fine, such that even if I tapped out of the cell a hair early, it would "round up" to a full bar and create a perfect loop that stayed in sync with the song.

Now, when I create the same loops by the same method, the tempo of the loop is out of sync with the rest of the grid/song. It appears to be 1-2 bpm faster. It's also quantizing weirdly -- when I play a single chord, definitively with all fingers at once, it quantizes as if one finger was slightly ahead of or behind the others, creating a 1/16 gap from one to the next. I'm not sure if it's cutting out the loops at the moment I tap them, rather than rounding up to the next full bar, but it seems to have stopped "snapping" the loops.

Obviously I can go in and quantize the loops after they've been recorded, but since this is a live performance, that's not a viable option.

I tried making a completely blank session from scratch, changing no other settings, and it works the normal way. A perfect loop that locks to the number of bars I create in live performance, no weird quantization issues. As far as I can tell, nothing has changed in terms of how I approach making the loops. But within the actual performance session, it's all gone a bit haywire.

Can you suggest some settings I check to figure this out? I'm particularly flustered by the tempo drift on the loop. There's no reason it should be faster than everything else in the session. Everywhere I've checked, the tempo is marked the same as the master tempo.

Thanks for any intel once again.

Maybe it comes from your keyboard ? Which one are you using ?

Honestly, I never figured it out, so I created a new Ableton session on a second computer and replicated the old session frame-by-frame, kick-testing the functionality along the way to make sure I had no issues. Whatever it was, I managed to recreate the session without triggering it again. (I'm using a Novation Impulse 61 with an Akai APC40 MkII.)

I had the same problem last 2 livesets.
Problem is I can;t even recall the problem at home.
Some clips just starting on the 1st beat although the global quantization setting is on 1 bar.
I thought it could be the playhead not being on a first beat when starting the set by activating a loop but when I tried this at home the playhead just jumped to 1.1.1 so no problems. Everything worked the way it should in the same project I was running at the concert.

Note that I also play with an apc40mk2

Maybe there is a problem. But how can we troubleshoot.

Ok I think I might found the problem in my set.
I just opened the file again and switched to arrangement view. There I saw a loop was on in arrangement view.
I think after the playhead reaches the end of the loop in arrangement view it jumped to the beginning of the loop which was not exactly on a first beat.
Hope you had the same issue in your set.