Ableton Forum

So, currently create a new project file for an upcoming live gig. will be using Live for predominately as the drum machine, all the other instruments are played live (synths, guitars, bass guitar etc.).

saw this in seq24 and on the MPC, they have like a grid, track mute mode as in the images shown below.





if the block is highlighted, that clip is playing, if it's not, it's not playing.
now i tried setting up something like this in ableton so i can have a big grid of clips that i could try like punching in and out etc. but two problems arise.

1) you can't have multiple clips per track playing, which makes this problematic, if you have a large number of clips and variations of patterns you want to play around with in a single song.

2) you can't mute individual clips can you? otherwise you have to manually stop them, and trigger another which gets a bit fiddly if i'm trying to use a midi controller to control all this.

any ideas?

Nice challenge, thanks for that! I wouldn't expect many people to participate though.

Here is my solution:

1. Create a Midi Clip with a total lenght equal to your longest single audio clip.
2. Fill in as many notes as you've got clips and set their length to the full loop length.



3. Setup a Drum Rack with all your clips loaded into single cells.
4. Enable the "Loop" option in each cell's Simpler/Sampler instance (right green circle in screenshot).



5. Use the "M" buttons on the Drum Rack to MUTE single pads, use the "S" buttons to SOLO single tracks.
6. Midi-Map those buttons inside the Drum Rack (left green circle in screenshot).

PS: If your single clips have lengths that are not divideable from each other then you obviously have to use a longer loop until you find the lowest common denominator.

Oh, and leave Simpler at "R"etrigger just in case.

Another Oh: You are not tied to using full loop length Midi notes, you can use any length and use that for detailed automated control on when single parts of your whole Grid should be playing additionally to the manual Mute/Solo controls.

Just to mention it: I don't think there is much to gain with this as long as you are only fiddling with upto about 16 clips/pads/tracks, because even on a 1280 pixel "small" display you can display more tracks than that without scrolling.

that's a really cool and interesting idea Crash!
nice work will play around with that. still playing around with my own ideas still.

question to anybody who has an mpc.
with the track mute mode, if you had a set of 16 sequences pulled up that you can mute in and out with the 16 pads, can you flick over to a new set of 16 on the fly and start playing around with other sequences too? or are you always limited to just the 16 sequences you started with?

if that makes sense...
cheers.

Share your ideas then!?

PS: You obviously can flip pages with the Drum Rack solution, you just have to shift the octaves of the MPC keys up/down (or Midi map Live's Octave Midi plugin) to trigger different pads of the Drum Rack.

that set up looks really interesting and i think i may try that myself

i'd like to add a thought to the OP

it seems you mentioned that your using ableton like a drum machine in a live band setting.

what if you mapped the scene up down and the track launch buttons.
load a track up with short drum loops then either turn off quantization or set it to like 1/4 or something small.
then just navigate up and down the scenes launching clips.
you could also set the loops to legato. (When a Clip is set to Legato mode (in its Launch Settings box), it launches at the current playback position of the previously playing Clip in the same track.)

i just thought of something that in theory may work too.
if the first loop launched is quantized and all the other loops are not but set to Legato mode.. even though your launching at will your meter should stay on time with the first clip.. i think i may have to check this out hehe

this seems like a simpler solution to me but i may have missed the mark.

Interesting suggestion Boson. I never cared for Legato to date, cause I had no use for it. I think one drawback of that solution is that you still can only run one exclusive clip per "vertical" track, while the Drum Rack allows any combination of rows and coloumns either exclusively or non-exclusively.

This stuff is genius! I'd never thought about Live in that context before...

@Crash - would you use that drum rack method as 'one rack per song'?

Hm, good question. I don't own no MPC and don't use that method myself at all (we prefer firing Scenes and Clips in our live setup). I just came up with a possible solution for LouisC's question out of curiosity.

Like I said before, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference wether you are building a Drumrack or simply use Tracks/Scenes/Clips in Live except for the fitting layout of the Drum Rack matching the pads on your drumpad midi controller maybe.

I'd say you either use one Drum Rack/Track per song and use Midi channels to switch between songs (upto 16 songs then) and/or use Transpose to squeeze more than one song into each Drum Rack (it offers upto 128 pads anyway aka 8 x 16). If you map Transpose to some extra buttons on your controller you could switch between songs by that or make use of more than 16 pads per song.

The combination of channels and transpose gives you 16 x 8 = 128 songs to play with a simple Matrix of 16 Tracks with one Drum Rack of 128 pads on each (assuming that each song uses 16 pads).

I'd actually still prefer just using Tracks/Scenes/Clips and muting/unmuting/soloing those. You'd have one Song per Scene then and the setup is alot easier when you need to use loops of different lengths.