Ableton Forum

(I have also sent a copy of this note to Ableton support)

This note is really a feature request, not a bug report, because it is about something I would like to be able to do in Live but think I can't. I would love it if you could tell me that there is a way of doing this, but from various experiments I suspect there isn't.

At the top of the Live 6 window is the global quantization menu, which lets me select quantization amounts such as quarter-note, half-note, one measure, two measures, etc. That's fine as far as it goes, but it has two problems that I find serious because I like to work with time signatures other than 4/4.

Problem 1: Suppose I'm working in 6/4 time. My choices for quantization include 1 bar, half-note, or half-note triplet. They do not include 1/2 bar! In 4/4 time, a half note is a half bar, but not in 6/4. Similarly for 6/8 time: I can choose quarter note, eighth note, or quarter-note triplet, but I can't choose a dotted quarter note. So if I'm using Live to compose a jig, which is usually notated in 6/8 time with each group of three eighth notes being a dance beat, I'm stuck.

Problem 2: I really want a "quantization offset" feature to handle pickup notes. As a good example, consider the Beatles song "Can't Buy Me Love." Each phrase of each verse begins on beat 4 of a measure (I'll | buy you a diamond | ring my friend if it | makes you feel all | right). Suppose I want a bunch of clips with a similar structure: Each one starts on beat 4 and continues through beat 3 of a subsequent measure. I don't see any way to manage it.

To solve problem 2, what I really want is a way to set the quantization to "beat 4 of a measure" (or, of course, beat 2 or 3). Similarly, right now I can set quantization to even-numbered measures, but might like to be able to set it to odd-numbered measures. Believe it or not, I used a computer system in 1968 (!) that had a way of expressing memory alignment that does just what I want here. Instead of just saying "align to a multiple of 8" I could say "align to 3 + a multiple of 8." Similarly, I think that you could say "quantize to Y plus a multiple of X" where X and Y are beat intervals.


I am not a beta tester for Live 7, and I imagine that it would be way too late to consider this feature for Live 7. However, a solution to problem 2 would make it dramatically easier for me to do what I want to do in Live, so I am hoping that you can tell me a way to achieve a similar effect (and maybe even incorporate something like this into Live .

Sorry if I'm misunderstanding your point, but I always thougt that quantizing was more of a tool to get something that you've recorded slightly offbeat to the beat, not something that does the whole thing for you. I would think that quantizing the start and end of a note to the next beat would suffice, unless you put in an eigth note and want to get two measures.
...and with the pickup notes, if you're making a loop you can just make the loops starting point a bar earlier and then select the loop itself like so:


I don't know, I might be missing your point, but then again I don't rely on quantize for anything than just getting recorded things to sound less sloppy and badly played...

If I do as you suggest, I have two choices--neither of which does what I want:

1) Set the start marker as shown in your example. If I do that, then when I launch the clip, I will have three beats of silence.

2) Set the start marker to the beginning of the music. If I do that, then when I launch the clip, the first beat of the music will occur on the first beat of the measure, even though it's intended to start *before* the first beat of the measure.

In your example, what I would like to be able to do is have global quantization set to 1 bar, and then when I launch the clip in your example, I would like it to take over playback at the start of the music from whatever clip is running now. I don't want to take over at the beginning of the bar, which is what it does.

Here is how to see why your example doesn't work for me. Take your example clip and make two identical copies of it in the same track. Set global quantization to 1 bar. Launch one of the clips. Now, while it is playing, launch the other.

What you will hear is that the first clip runs to the end, and then silence for several beats until the second clip is ready to play. What I want is to be able to say that the second clip should wait until a particular beat of the next bar (or the current bar, if we're not there yet) and then start playing there.

ah, now i see. A little misunderstanding on my behalf, sorry. What i do in that situation myself is maybe a bit tricky if you're changing between many clips at the same time, but it works as far as not to get the whole silence which comes with the overtaking and all... I have the clips on seperate midi tracks and send them both to the one that makes sound. Then I can press play a bar earlier and get the pickup note. That serves up a problem, though, with blending the last note of the previous clip, plus having to stop that one. So forget that tip... Other thing would of course be a seperate clip with the transition, set to automatically play the next clip when it's done with the follow action, which "sort of" makes it into one clip. That's probably the simplest solution. Has worked well for me.

Global quantizing settings for those purposes could be nice, though.

The problem with a separate clip for the transition is that in reality, I would like to be able to choose during performance which of several clips should follow the one currently playing. So if each of those clips has a pickup note, I would have to create a separate version of the clip that preceded it.

Ah, I see. Then I will support your cause with a bump for this as an global quantizing enhancement request.

bump

I think I have an easy way to extend the Live user interface to handle it smoothly, too: Allow a clip's time line to extend into negative numbers. The idea is that a negative number represents time *before* the next quantization point, which would happen at 0. Of course, for this to happen, the clip must be launched before the relevant quantization point; if it isn't, it starts playint as soon as it is launched with 0 still lined up at the next quantization point.