Hi everyone, I hope this question hasn’t been discussed already… if it has, sorry about that. I’m looking for a solution for the following scenario (and yes, it’s mostly a safety net for my paranoia on stage ;-)).
I need a workaround for the situation where we make a mistake in a section and fall out of the arrangement. In that case, I’d like to mute the backing track while keeping the click running, so that we can jump back into the next section than originally planned. The backing track should start again if we start that next section.
I’ve been thinking about different workarounds, but so far I haven’t found a good solution. I’d really appreciate any tips.
I can’t use Ableset’s “Solo Click” MIDI mapping, because I’m playing a few VST keys in the Ableton project, and those would be muted as well. So my idea was to add a Solo-Click section as a loop after the last section of the song. In an emergency, I could jump to that section and only the click would be audible.
However, I’m missing a unified MIDI command for “jump to last section of the song” (click only) that would work the same across all songs in my Ableton setup. At the moment, the only thing I can do is manually click in Ableset’s performance view: first on the “Solo Click” section (the backing tracks keep playing until the end of the bar) and then later again on the next desired section. This is a bit clumsy during a live performance.
Does anyone have a solution for controlling this directly from a MIDI keyboard? I hope my explanation made sense.
A simple way to achieve this in AbleSet 2 is to keep your “Solo Click” section at the end of each song as you already do, and use a global MIDI mapping to always jump there.
You can do that with:
/setlist/jumpToSection -1
When Live is playing, this command cues the last section according to your current Jump Mode.
When Live is stopped, and if you have Count-In enabled, AbleSet will solo the click for the count-in and automatically bring back the backing tracks when the section starts.
That’ll give you a consistent “panic jump” to the last section of each song, that works across all songs.
Also, if you’re open to using Ableton OSC, you could control other aspects of Live by mapping custom OSC messages in AbleSet to mute or unmute your tracks as needed. If you’re interested in that workflow, just let me know and I’ll help you set it up.
Now, if you’re using the AbleSet 3 beta, there’s an even handier approach using the mixer and track groups.
You can mute your backing-track group in an emergency, and then place a short OSC clip in a +OSC track at the start of every section:
/mixer/backings/mute false
This automatically unmutes the backing tracks as soon as you enter the new section. Replace “backings” with your actual group name.
Now I have two pads on my MIDI controller for the worst-case situation:
Pad 1 mutes the Backing Tracks group and switches the loop on automatically. So we have unlimited time to find ourselves again.
Pad 2 moves me to the next section.
The +OSC clip at the beginning of the section switches the backing track on again. The problem was only that it also activates the backing track in the click-solo loop. So I use this OSC code:
//if !looping: /mixer/samples/mute false; //endif
(Yes, ChatGPT helped me.)
It works exactly like I want, and I am super super happy.