And now the thrilling conclusion of yesterday’s tip by my first guest tipster, Chris Buono!
Within the confines of Ableton Live there’s more to the name
game than just track identification. As you may already know, the Master track contains Scene Launchers.
These slots can be renamed easily with the same steps used for track naming. Naming scenes not only affords you the option to label your Scenes for organizational purposes, it also gives the option to name a Scene for functional purposes. In regards to
the latter you can instruct Live to play at any given tempo and/or time signature by just launching the Scene once it’s been named properly.
For tempo commands, enter in the desired tempo followed “BPM” (not case sensitive) and make sure the letters are no more than a space apart from the tempo value or it won’t work. (You’ll know right away if you’ve named it properly because the scene launcher will turn orange – JM)
As for the time signature, enter in a meter in the form “x/y” using
whole numbers in the numerator between 1 and 99 and musically recognized beat values (1, 2, 4, 8, or 16) in the denominator.
You could even enter in both commands for simultaneous action just as long as you separate the two messages with at least one character of any kind and have no more than one space between any elements in the name. With that in mind, you can still name your Scenes with descriptive names like Chorus or Verse alongside the tempo and time signature details.
If you need more Scene slot real estate to view these long names, just place your cursor to the left of the Master Track Title Bar until it becomes a staple and then click and pull.
Now go make some properly named noise.
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Chris Buono has been an Ableton zealot since Live 4 and has
worked with the likes of Moldover, Elijah B Torn, Karsh Kale and many others. Recently Chris and Elijah B Torn along with Jon Francis Lucow formed the improv trio, trillions, et al. Chris’ Live evangelism has brought to life Live courses at the National Guitar Workshop (CT) and Ocean County College, in Toms River,
NJ. In October 2009 Chris formed the Jersey Shore User Group; New Jersey’s first and [currently] only Ableton UG. He’s currently writing Your Ableton Live Studio, his third text for Course
Technology.
