Patrick C Randall - worship leader, music and media guy, ex-certified IBM IT consultant
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Lingering (foot/hands-free) with Ableton Live

6/7/2012

4 Comments

 
The Problem - when leading worship yourself and at the same time controlling Live's stems (or loops or tracks or whatever), its not easy to be confident of Live's lingering on a say a chorus or talky bit. Until now I've done the usual tap-dance within the last few bars to set a section repeat, then furtively looked down to make sure it's taken. Sometimes I've unknowingly hit it twice or not at all with the ensuing confusion. Live's loop facilities help a lot but what I really want is to be able to tell Live, at any time before I get there, that I want to linger in the upcoming chorus or instrumental part or whatever.

My solution - insert a MIDI "control track" that contains "skip to last locator" commands. Have this track's on/off (mute) status controlled by a footswitch (I have this footswitch bracketed by some aluminium angle so I can reach for it without stopping the song). I use Bome's MIDI translator to achieve this. I insert simple, bright green, MIDI clips into the set where I might want to linger.

Result - if I want to linger a bit, it's easy to hit the pedal to tell Live to keep repeating a section until I say move on.

To remind the band there's a section we might want to repeat, I've already highlighted that bit in the band's leadsheets and added an audio cue fro those on IEMs. As they can also see if the mute button is on or off they know whether I'm going to repeat or not.

Here's a quick video to illustrate. More detail to follow - feel free to comment or email me with any questions meanwhile.
4 Comments
Mike Blayden
5/4/2013 10:37:54 pm

I would love to know a step by step how to put this together. Can you give me more information???

Reply
Patrick
5/5/2013 10:06:04 am

Mike,
sure - happy to help but this week is bad. I'll get back to you asap.

Reply
Mike Blayden
5/5/2013 01:24:57 pm

No problem

Andy
8/18/2016 05:05:03 am

This is Great! Been using Ableton for a decade and can't believe I never thought of this.

I know this is an older post, but I thought I'd offer one tweak I did make.
Since I didn't have Bomes Midi Translator, I just routed the output of the midi track to the (built in mac) IAC driver. Then mapped to each locator and viola!

Thanks for the write up.

Reply



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