Song Medleys

General
1

Hello! I have the following situation and I’m not sure if there’s a better way to handle it. In my Ableton project, I have several medleys of songs. For example, “Rock Medley.”

In this medley, there are songs like “Basket Case,” “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and “Highway to Hell,” all with transitions between them.

Currently, I just have a single song marker named “Rock Medley.” However, I can’t label the individual songs with locators, because AbleSet would then recognize them as separate songs rather than one connected medley. Is there a way to “group” songs in AbleSet so that I can have song markers for each track while keeping them grouped into a single medley?

2

Hey @Saschpak!

That’s right — if you create multiple song markers, AbleSet will treat them as separate songs.

Best practice here is: 1 song = 1 medley, and the individual songs = sections.

Option A – Sections as locators

Create one song locator at the start:

Rock Medley

Then add section locators using >:

> Basket Case
> Livin’ on a Prayer
> Highway to Hell

You can read more about AbleSet’s Cue Notation here.

Option B – Sections via MIDI clips

The first step is the same, placing a locator at the start of the song (on the 1st beat).

Then create a MIDI track named Sections (or any name + +SECTIONS) and place empty MIDI clips where each section starts, named like:

  • Basket Case
  • Livin’ on a Prayer
  • Highway to Hell

More on this here.

AbleSet will read those clips as your sections, and you can freely navigate and/or loop any of them.

Hope that helps!

3

Thanks! Yes, that’s how I understood it as well. So far, I’ve always created sections and named them after the song + song part. Then it looks like this. However, I find that a bit confusing and was hoping I could make the individual songs stand out visually more. Or that I could collapse and expand them, like with the song markers.

Bildschirmfoto 2026-01-07 um 21.45.00
Bildschirmfoto 2026-01-07 um 21.45.00803×934 20.1 KB

4

Hello ! Maybe you can make it clearer with color ?

For example : All the In the end section in blue, then all tanz aus der reihne section in red ect…

You can put color with square bracket

Example : IN THE END PART 1.1 [blue]

2 Likes
5

Hey @Duthis, welcome to the forum!

That’s a great suggestion! Color coding is a very solid approach, especially for medleys, to visually group sections that belong to the same song.

And @Saschpak, if you’re already defining your parts using a Sections track, you can also add the +CC flag to the Sections track name. This lets you color the section clips directly in Ableton Live, and AbleSet will automatically translate those clip colors into its own color palette.

That way, all sections belonging to the same song in the medley can share a color — or even just the headings if you prefer — both in Live and in AbleSet, without having to manually tag each section name.

This usually makes long medleys much easier to scan and understand at a glance.

1 Like