Ableton Forum

Hi,
This is my first post here, hello everyone!

My problem is that I've started using looper in Live 8 but it does not have 10 bars as a preset amount and when I finish playing it always calculates 8 bars.

10 might seem like a strange number of bars for a loop but "Kelly watch the Stars" by Air has 10 bars so does my piece that I'm trying to play live.

Can anybody think of a work around? I could play it with a backing click but it defeats the point of looper, which works great for some other tracks.

Many Thanks!

Hi Dombleton...

The solution i use is a complex one, use a midi loopback effect to send midi notes that are mapped to play record stop and clear out of Live and then back in via track and remote in the preferences, on a mac this is so simple with an IAC bus but with Windows you'll need something to set up a virtual midi port....

Then record/draw some dummy clips that record for the ten bars you want! Hand free operation if you map the playing of this clip to a foot pedal....

If you do a search i'm sure you'll find what your looking for, or troll over to djtechtools.com and i'll have a tutorial on how to do it coming up soon!

Cheers
D

Hi,

Thanks for the reply,

I use a modified qwerty keyboard for my foot controller to control recording and things.

If you create a 10 bar clip to start with though, won't you have to follow its tempo? My aim is to play it with looper so that it determines my tempo from my first play.

What I like about looper is that when performing live, the song tempo is set by what you play, which i feel makes it a truly live experience, as opposed to starting with a predetermined tempo (which would be the same as the album version).

Cheers

no solution, but someone enlighten me - i'm still on live 7. you can only have looper automatically calculate a certain number of bars? (like, 4, 8, 16 or something?) that seems kind of limited...

It does have a function to record 'x' amount of bars but it tends to calculate only the presets so when i play 10 it chooses 8.

Although if you use looper once the tempo is already established it will loop the correct amount of bars. Still, the idea for me was not to use a click track for the intro

Presets include: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 12 16 & X bars

could it be an easy workaround to use the 5 Bar Preset? So instead of 10 bars in for example 120 bpm,
you get 5 in 60 Bpm. If you pay all your parts Live, this makes no difference, if you use other clips,
it s easy to klich the :2 Button on them....

I did try the 5 bar but my preset drum track still didn't sound right when clicked the :2 button. Will have another bash at it tomorrow.

why don't you use a separate looper to set the tempo?

or just record 1 bar of something simple and click x2 until you have 10 bars then overdub

it might be a bit of a pain, but the easiest way to specify the length is by dragging a dummy clip to the looper, but you could use one looper (even mute the channel if you like so that it is only for getting tempo) then when you have the tempo you can manually type it into the 10 bar clip then drag it into the main looper

so for example, -
step 1: - record a clip saying "1,2,3,4" to set the global tempo but it's on a muted track so it's not heard
step 2: type the tempo it ends up being into the 10 bar clip you have already on a slot somewhere
step 3: drag it to the looper and start overdubbing

I guess that's not a lot different to using a click track though as you'd still need to hear the first '1,2,3,4' loop in headphones or whatever to play in time, but at least you could set tempo on the fly

The using a 5 bar preset sorted out my problem.

I just needed to make sure everything was doubled tempo wise, arpegiators, preset drums etc.

also any 1 bar loops had to be made 2 bar otherwise they were half a bar and didnt work

Cheers everyone for the help.