Hey guys,
I’m kinda new to AbleSet and just discovered the Lyrics feature. For specific parts of the song I have tabs instead of chords/songtext in my lyrics, so I use 1 line of lyrics for 1 string of my guitar per bar. But that means every bar makes the tabs jump one line and it’s difficult to read the tabs.
Is there a way to “fix” the lyrics just for specific sections? I know about the anchor feature, but that requires manual enabling and disabling with keys, which is not useful for me.
Hey @PhilG, welcome to the forum!
There are a few ways to approach this:
Lyrics clips support manual line breaks with the \ character, and every line inside one clip gets highlighted at the same time. So instead of six clips (one per string) advancing bar by bar, you can make one clip that spans the whole tab passage:
e|---------------| \ B|---------------| \ G|---------------| \ D|---------------| \ A|---------------| \ E|---------------|
The whole block stays in focus for as long as that clip lasts, so nothing scrolls while you’re reading it.
Two attributes that help a lot here, both added to the lyrics track name:
[mono] gives you a monospaced font so the tab columns actually line up[nozoom] and [nofade] stop AbleSet from zooming and fading the surrounding linesYou can also see this in action in the official tutorial: https://youtu.be/GFtRvTMddVQ?t=252
If your tabs are longer than a few bars, images are usually the nicer route. Create a Lyrics folder inside your Ableton project folder, drop the tab in there as PNG or JPEG, and name a clip:
[img:tabs/solo-1.png] [full]
[full] makes it fill the screen, which is what you want for notation. There’s also a Lyrics Image Generator on the AbleSet website that turns a PDF into images: Image Lyrics Track Generator – AbleSet
The anchor is exposed as an OSC command, so you don’t have to use the ⇧M shortcut:
/devices/setLineOverride all toggle
On Pro, you can fully automate it with an OSC track. Add a MIDI track named Anchor +OSC, then place a clip named /devices/setLineOverride all true where the tab part starts, and a clip named /devices/setLineOverride all false where it ends. Each clip fires its name as an OSC command when the playhead reaches it, so the pinning happens on its own.
On Standard, you can map the same command to a footswitch: Settings → MIDI Mapping, OSC & Scripting → Edit MIDI Mapping, add a mapping for your pedal, set the action to Custom OSC, and paste the toggle command above. One switch pins and unpins, which is a lot easier to use mid song than the keyboard shortcut.
Two things to keep in mind:
true or toggle pins whichever line is current at that moment, so an automated clip has to sit just after the first tab line has started, not before it. If you’re on AbleSet 3.2 beta you can also pass a line number directly (/devices/setLineOverride all 12), which is more predictable.all targets every connected device. If only your screen should freeze, replace it with your device’s name, for example /devices/setLineOverride gtr-ipad true.Would that work for your use case?