Changing several clips at once

[dintymoore]

Here's something that took me awhile to stumble upon. Here's the song "Genius of Love":

If you click and hold where I've got the green X, and then drag to left it will select all of the clips in that horizontal row, like this:

Then if you click the arrow in the lower right hand corner:

You'll see this:

See how it says "12 Clips" in the upper left hand corner? Well, anything you do to this screen will affect all the selected clips! Happy New Year!

So you can change the text (red arrow) in the clips (I usually delete it so it looks better), the color (green arrow) of all the clips or any of the other parameters in this box. Where it says "Follow Action" is where you decide if the song will continue or what. Where it says "16" below that is the last bar in all of the clips.

When you drag a Standard Midi File to Ableton, if the clips aren't the same length it can present problems, so I make all the clips the same length in that box, plus the Groove and Signature.

Other times Ableton has magically changed some tracks in a SMF to be in 1/4 or 3/4 while all were saved on Cubase as 4/4. So I always check each clip to make sure they are the way I want them to be.

There is no way I know of to make a tempo or time signature change within a clip in Ableton. Or program change. These appear to be a major flaws that hopefully they'll fix... maybe around 2023 when the MIDI "Star Trek" Transporters come out.

 

[mikemorgan]

That's good stuff. I'm right behind you, but you're definately leading the way.

Where the hell is everybody?

 

[atwoodmk]

Are you by chance using Max for Live? I was also bummed by the fact that you can't send a program change at a specific time within a clip, so I wrote a M4L patch that allows you to convert a continuous controller to a program change message. That way you can use any CC of your choosing to spit out program change messages at any time. I just tried attaching the.asd file as a .zip but it won't let me. If you would like a copy send me an email. Or if you know of a way I can post it, please let me know. I will also post it in the downloads section of my website.

I also wish you could set start times on multiple clips that way. This would be very useful in the production type work that I do where I import multiple contiguous tracks into Ableton. That way it would be very easy to set up sections of a song as a scene. Until then, it's one clip at a time. oh well...

mike@mat4live.com
michael.atwood@cirquedusoleil.com
www.mat4live.com

 

[atwoodmk]

oops

OK. I'm gonna stop posting until I read this entire forum. I didn't see your post re: MIDI pipe to change CC to Prg Chg. I haven't heard of that but it looks very cool. Oh well, I guess I didn't need to write that patch but I did learn something from it, I guess.