I’m trying to figure out how to do timed talk breaks and set breaks. I’m coming from BandHelper where I could tell it how long the pause/break was and it would start an on screen timer when we got to that part of the set. Without building 20 and 25 minute breaks as songs, and building a bunch of 1 minute songs for talk breaks is there a way to do it? Another limiation of the breaks being made as songs is I’ll need to repeat them during the show. There are 4 of us each who has a defined set of talk breaks like “Guitar Talk”, “Singer Talk”, Would I be able to repeat those if I did create them as songs?
Hey @KevinP,
Great questions — let me walk you through the options.
At the moment, the setlist editor doesn’t allow adding the same song multiple times. If you want to reuse a talk break across the show, you’d need to create separate copies in your Live project (e.g. “Guitar Talk 1”, “Guitar Talk 2”, etc.), each with the same content.
Avoiding the need to build 20-25 minute “break” songs
The locator for your break doesn’t need to take up 20 or 25 minutes of Live timeline. It can be just a single bar (or shorter). You can shape how it’s treated in the setlist with a few flags in the locator name:
[nosong]excludes it from the song count and numbering. Example:Set Break [nosong].[20:00]overrides the displayed duration in the setlist. SoSet Break [nosong] [20:00]will appear as a 20-minute item in the setlist without actually taking up 20 minutes of arrangement.+PAUSEtells AbleSet to pause playback when it reaches that locator. Example:Set Break [nosong] [20:00] +PAUSE.
This way you get a setlist entry that looks and behaves like a 20-minute break, without padding your Live arrangement with empty space.
Looping the talk breaks
If you build a talk break as a short song with a section locator inside, you can loop it indefinitely by adding +LOOPFULL to the section locator. AbleSet will keep looping that section until you skip to the next song. You can also use +LOOP:N to set a fixed number of repetitions (e.g. +LOOP:4 plays the section 4 times then moves on).
As for the countdown timer, right now AbleSet doesn’t have a native feature, but you can build one using Canvas (available in Pro) with a button that you press when the break starts, which would kick off a countdown of a defined length.
If you’d like to explore the Canvas/scripting route for the timer, let me know and I’ll walk you through the setup.
I’m looking forward to your reply!
When you set the time for the song and nosong tag will the progress bar still track time? We don’t have to have a specific count down but at least a rough estimate of time. Sometimes getting musicians back to the stage is problematic
answering my own question, the song progress does follow the 20:00 tag.
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Hi, We ran our show with Ableset for the first time last night and the pauses when we reach the locator have some oddities going on.
- It pauses when we get to the break which prevens the break from loading our “Talk Break” light queue
- Despite the length setting it takes only the time on the arrangement view in ableton to scroll through and jump to the next song once I start playing.
Last, all my breaks are built at the end of my timeline in arrangement view, so once i get to the first one it will auto jump to the next break in the arrangement view, instead of the next song in the set list.
The goal of these pauses is to let the setlist naturally flow right up to the talk break, including changing the lighting to our talk break scene, then give us a count down on time spent talking. I should then have to hit a botton on the controller to kick us back into the next grouping of songs.
Other than these talk breaks and set breaks we never stop the show, song to song is super tight - the song to song part with it auto jumping to the next song is great. We have about 70 songs in the project right now, and will be adding another 25-30 ish and change our set for every show, so it isn’t tenable to go edit anything at the song level in Ableton itself.
We did grab the pro license so if we need to do some scripting we can do that.
Thanks!
Solved #1 by switching from the locator including a “+Pause” to a separate “STOP” locator, that also resolved the jumping issues.
I still need recommendations on the progress counter for the length of the break. Worst Case I can just change the breaks to be 1 minute on the arrangement which will show a progress indicator.
Kevin
I ended up creating the breaks with an actual 1 minute time spane on the arrangement view, and then I created an LRC that counted down from 60 to 0 and treat it as a lyric track. I did the same for our break time (just in minutes not seconds). Works perfectly well. I moved all the song and set break items to the very end of the project so I don’t have a big hole in the middle of my songs.
Hey @KevinP,
That’s a clever workaround, glad you got it working 
Feel free to follow up if anything else comes up!