Ableton Forum

Ok can Live do the following?

I want to have Arrangement mode play a few full song length tracks play in the back ground. this would play as is for a few minutes until I activate tracks in session mode. At this point session track swill be playing together with the arrangement tracks. Then at any time I like I could some how disengage the arrangement track so that all music will be looping indefinitely with the session view. This way i could have a sort of "solo" using the various session tools. And when ever I feel like it, I could reintroduce the arrangement tracks at a precise position and continue my set where i left off.

A similar example of this would be to literally set up looping points in a song. As the song is playing the "loop" would be Active so once it reached the looping points it would stay there until the "loop" was released. The problem with this is 1 I dont think it is possible to set up multiple looping areas 2 I dont want to have to use a mouse to create looping points on the fly and 3 sometimes literal looping points can be cpu intensive.

Maybe there are some kind of quick keys or string of command i could use to pull this off.

I am not apposed to serious rewiring or programing to do this.

well you will defintely hear "RTFM" on this one...
here's a clue: in session view on the far right are scene triggers. you can use those to trigger scenes while the record button is enabled.

That kind of eliminates the need for anything to be in Arrangement at this stage of the writing process... but if you already have stuff there, consolidate all of the tracks, and drag them back to session to trigger along side the others.

Ok so maybe I wasnt clear. This is not for the purpose of composing. This would be in a live situation.

The point would be to have areas in my LIVE set in which I would be primarily playing live keys/drums/vocals along to back tracks in the arrangement area and [[other times in the set where I would mainly manipulate loops in session view]] BUT!!! have the ability to jump back to a particular point in the arrangement when I WANT to. OR maybe just the ability to stop and start the arrangement while the session continues to loop.


Maybe there is some easy way of doing this that just isnt jumping out at me.

the idea is to have the same control that a band does when a member decides to go into an extended SOLO

delete stop buttons / back to arrange button / locators / arrangement loop

Care to expand on that? Please.

dr.wackler wrote:delete stop buttons / back to arrange button / locators / arrangement loop

Please explain what this means.

Oh Btw I should also point out that I want to do thins multiple times throughout an hour long set. So just setting up loop points/let it loop and then pushing the release loop button wont work
This loop point idea I mention will get the results I want but I cant reproduce the same thing throughout an hour long set w/out getting in and drawing loop points with a mouse as the set travels along.

torrentexpress wrote:

dr.wackler wrote:delete stop buttons / back to arrange button / locators / arrangement loop

Please explain what this means.

- Delete the Stop buttons from the Tracks that you want to play from Arrange, so you are free to add any Session preformance..
- Set Locators in the Arrange at points that you want to jump to or that you want to loop ('loop until next locator' command)
- Loop in Arrange whenever your solo time has come, hit Stop button on the tracks that play from Arrange, or mute them.
- When your solo is over, release the loop and hit the Back To Arrange button. Additionally you could jump to any locator.

torrentexpress wrote:I cant reproduce the same thing throughout an hour long set w/out getting in and drawing loop points with a mouse as the set travels along.

You can. Add an empty MIDI track at the top of your Arrange and create empty MIDI clips wherever you want to have your loop points. Now all you have to do is select the appropriate clip and hit the loop command.

torrentexpress wrote:Ok can Live do the following?

I want to have Arrangement mode play a few full song length tracks play in the back ground. this would play as is for a few minutes until I activate tracks in session mode. At this point session track swill be playing together with the arrangement tracks. Then at any time I like I could some how disengage the arrangement track so that all music will be looping indefinitely with the session view. This way i could have a sort of "solo" using the various session tools. And when ever I feel like it, I could reintroduce the arrangement tracks at a precise position and continue my set where i left off.

A similar example of this would be to literally set up looping points in a song. As the song is playing the "loop" would be Active so once it reached the looping points it would stay there until the "loop" was released. The problem with this is 1 I dont think it is possible to set up multiple looping areas 2 I dont want to have to use a mouse to create looping points on the fly and 3 sometimes literal looping points can be cpu intensive.

Maybe there are some kind of quick keys or string of command i could use to pull this off.

I am not apposed to serious rewiring or programing to do this.

you can do all of this already.

Hit play and the arrangement plays.

Whenever you want you can play clips in session view.

You can use the stop buttons on each channel to stop the arangement clips playing.

Whenever you want you can have the arrangement to come back by pressing the "back to arrangement"-button.

You can jump at any position in the arrangement with oyur mouse or using location markers.

Arrangement markers are also midi assignable. So you can jam in session view as much as you like, then hit BTA button and relevent marker key to jump to a selected part of the arrangement.

Ok so i sat down and tried out all of your recommendations. Thank you BTW.

Through your help I came up with a variation of what you suggested.
Here is what i did.

I created 2 locator's with an arrangement loop connecting them. I placed this at the very end of my set by it self with no clips near it. I also created multiple Locators that are place in strategic places through out my set that i will jump to "out of the Loop."

I inserted a bit of silence between my tracks in the arrangement. As the arrangement tracks fade out, and into the silence the session tracks play along side until session tracks are the only tracks playing. At this point I Hit an assigned midi key that jumps to the locater "loop" at the end of my set. So now my session tracks loop. after I mess around in session view, I jump back to one of the other locater's spread out through out the set. Then the arrangement loops fade back in and the set continues where it left off from.

The are two issues I foresee happening though. 1 I have had issues with the cpu glitching or even crashing from jumping around the arrangement with locator's, transport bar and loop points. The other issue that may be a problem is with Midi 'OUT' (as in- midi I use to control external hardware from Ableton). For what ever reason when I jump around the arrangement My midi Tracks dont want to send out there commands. They just stop.

Well we will see. Im not really convinced this is the best way to do it.

Maybe someone has a better Idea.

Why not just bring the backing track into session view and make things easy on yourself?

Moody wrote:Why not just bring the backing track into session view and make things easy on yourself?

Thats definitely something I thought about. There are a few reasons why I thought it wasnt the best Idea.

Maybe Im wrong...please correct me otherwise.

1 I think that the cpu handles longer tracks in the arrangment
2 I have more flixibility to alter my music (ie automation)
3 it took me forever to get my Midi Out (to external hardware) to sync with my set I am reluctant to go through that again only to find worse issues in the session view. Again, this may not be true but I figure that the midi would jjust be more reliable in arrangement mode to begin with.

My wish is that i could stop the progress of the arrangement while continuing to output from the session.

torrentexpress wrote:

Moody wrote:Why not just bring the backing track into session view and make things easy on yourself?

Thats definitely something I thought about. There are a few reasons why I thought it wasnt the best Idea.

Maybe Im wrong...please correct me otherwise.

1 I think that the cpu handles longer tracks in the arrangment
2 I have more flixibility to alter my music (ie automation)
3 it took me forever to get my Midi Out (to external hardware) to sync with my set I am reluctant to go through that again only to find worse issues in the session view. Again, this may not be true but I figure that the midi would jjust be more reliable in arrangement mode to begin with.

My wish is that i could stop the progress of the arrangement while continuing to output from the session.

I don't think there is any validity to what you are worried about. Session View's original intent was for DJing (working with audio clips) which means long tracks and a bunch of them.

Envelopes are your answer to automation.

Midi is midi but, maybe somebody else can chime in if they have found issues with midi in session view that were sorted by switching to arrangement view. Though I doubt that one.