Hi everyone,
hope you had a great weekend and a good start into the new week!
As a party band, we have a much bigger repertoire than what we actually play at a specific gig. That’s why some kind of banking or grouping feature in the setlist would be really useful for us.
Coming from PC Live Player, we used this all the time. I can also imagine that many other cover bands are in the same situation: bringing over a hundred songs to a show, but only playing a part of them depending on the crowd and how the night develops.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be available in Performance View. Even having it in Canvas would already help a lot. Maybe similar to the existing dividers, but with the ability to group songs underneath them.
A few ideas that came to mind:
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Color-code complete banks/groups
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Jump directly to a bank via a button
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Show groups as (collapsible) sections in the setlist
Just an idea from our day-to-day workflow. Really loving AbleSet so far and appreciate all the work you’re putting into it!
Greetings from Munich,
Max
Hey @Basstor,
Thank you for your feedback! I’ll pass the idea along.
In the meantime, tags get you surprisingly close as a workaround:
1. Tag your songs by bank
Append tags to your song locators in Ableton, e.g. Song A #uptempo #rockset or Song B #ballads. A song can carry multiple tags, so it can belong to several “banks” at once.
2. Pull a whole bank into the setlist at once
In the Setlist Editor, hit the + button (or ⌘K), search for your tag, and click “Add all songs with #tag”. That drops the entire bank into your setlist in one go, no adding them one by one.
3. Color-code and save per crowd
Color-coding lives in the Setlist Editor (three-dot menu → Song Color), so you can visually group your banks once they’re in. And since saved setlists store their own song selection, colors, and order, you can pre-build a few named setlists for different crowd types and load whichever fits the night.
It’s not a live “jump to bank” button or collapsible groups, but for building shows from a 100+ song repertoire it covers a lot of the same ground.
You can also see this in action in the official tutorial.
Would that work for your use case?
Hi Agustin,
I am currently scrolling to big colored blocks, that’s my way how to bank. But to collapse the banks would be such a cool feature! Together with potentially importing a single song more than once, this would be a crazy powerful and resource saving tool - especially for partybands!
best,
Max
Oh, and adding:
Tags unfortunately are not possible for us. We are playing our instruments, while scrolling. Also using the onscreen keyboard is out of scope 
Best,
Max
Hey @Basstor,
That’s totally understandable. That said, there is an OSC-based approach that gets you switching banks live with zero typing.
As of now, there’s no OSC command to add songs to a setlist on the fly by tag. But there is /setlist/load, which loads a saved setlist by name. So the workflow would be:
1. Pre-build one saved setlist per bank
Do this once at home with a keyboard — build a setlist for each scenario (e.g. Rock Set, Ballads, Party), and save each with a name (⇧S in the Setlist Editor).
2. Switch banks live via a button — no typing
Trigger this OSC command to load a bank instantly:
/setlist/load "Party"
You could trigger that from a Canvas button (OSC button type, one button per bank, tap to load) or a MIDI mapping (map a footswitch or pad to a Custom OSC action with the command above), or any OSC-capable controller (Stream Deck, etc.)
For example, a Canvas OSC button’s Command on Press would just be:
/setlist/load "Rock Set"
just keep in mind that loading a setlist replaces the current one rather than appending to it, so this treats each bank as a full setlist you swap into, rather than stacking banks on top of each other.
Would that work for your use case?
Hi Agustin,
unfortunately not. I fear, that the currently playing song gets messed up or that we only can load a new setlist, when playback is paused, right?