Question Regarding Song-Specific Count-In and Cue Workflow in AbleSet

General
2

Hey @Sayak_Munshi, welcome to the forum!

This is a great use case and it’s very doable. Let me go through your questions one by one.

1. Section-specific count-ins

There are two separate count-in mechanisms, and it helps to keep them apart:

  • Click pre-roll (Section Count-In): This is the one that places the playhead a few bars before a section and gives you a click pre-roll. It lives in Settings → Section Count-In:

    • Enable Section Count-In
    • Solo the Click Track during Count-In
    • Count-In Duration → 2 Bars

    This is a global setting (1, 2, or 4 bars).

  • Spoken cues: This is the verbal “1, 2, 3” cue, and this one can be customized per section.

So for your vocalist’s 2-bar click pre-roll, enabling Section Count-In at 2 bars with the click soloed is exactly what you want.

2. Restarting a song from a specific section

With Section Count-In enabled, just select the Verse section while playback is stopped. AbleSet places the playhead 2 bars before it, solos the click, and shows a queued/glowing state. Hit play → you get the 2-bar count-in → the Verse comes in seamlessly.

So your live flow becomes: stop for the singalong → tap the Verse section → play.

You can also see this in action in the official tutorial.

3. Hearing your Kontakt cue during the pre-count

The reason it’s muted is that the click track is soloed during the count-in, so everything else gets silenced. Two ways around it:

  • Quickest (works on the current version): add the +CLICK flag to your Kontakt cue track’s name. Tracks flagged +CLICK are also soloed during count-ins, so your cue will be heard.
  • More integrated: use AbleSet’s built-in spoken Cues. You can supply your own audio by creating a “Custom” folder inside the “Cues” folder of your project’s AbleSet folder, and dropping in mono WAV files named after the phrase (e.g. your “1, 2, 3” count). AbleSet will play those instead of generating them.

4. Recommended pro workflow

The cleanest setup combines Section Count-In (click pre-roll) with the Cues feature (spoken count-in). Spoken count-ins are landing in AbleSet 3.1 — currently in beta, so you can try them now if you’d like.

With Cues you get per-section count-in notation that you add right to the section (or song) locator:

  • [c:2] → 2-bar spoken count-in for that section
  • [c:1] → 1-bar
  • [c:0] → disable it
  • plus extras like [c:halftime], beat numbers on/off, etc.

You can read more about Cues notation here.

Would that work for your use case?