When using Ableton Live’s Arrangement View for playing live shows you want the transport to do an automatic stop and jump to next locator. This way you don’t need to hit or press stop and navigate to the next song. Just use my “Stop after Song and Go to Next Locator” Max for Live device to take care of that. The right song would be lined up and you could just fire the next song when you are ready. It is easy to set up, you just need to set up a locator for all song start cue points and set up a few MIDI clips.
How to set-up an automatic stop and jump to next locator
MIDI Track
Just place the Max for Live device on an empty MIDI track. Make sure to set the “MIDI From” to “None”.
Set Up Song Start Locators
Each song start cue point needs to have a locator. The “Jump to Next Locator” action jumps FROM the currently selected locator to he next. This means you only should have locators at the beginning of your songs. If you have more locators e.g. for each song part, you would need to set up more jumps than only one. In theory this is possible but makes it a little more complex. I would recommend to use a MIDI track with MIDI clips as markers for different song parts instead of locators.
MIDI Clips with notes to stop and jump to next locator
You have to set up MIDI clips on this track with certain MIDI note pitches. Those MIDI notes will trigger certain actions:
- “C-2” – the lowest note pitch there is in MIDI. This note will trigger the transport in Ableton Live to STOP
- “C#-2” – will trigger a JUMP to the NEXT LOCATOR
- “D-2” – will trigger both of those actions
Set Clips to point for the Automatic Transport Stop
Just set up the MIDI clip(s) with the dedicated notes for the actions you need. You could give the locators a colour coding and name them accordingly.
You now just have to place the MIDI clips on the time points in Ableton’s Arrangement View where the actions should be triggered.
By loading the video, you agree to YouTube's privacy policy.
Learn more
