Quantize Pattern Switching for Live Looping

Tom Auger

I've been learning that the PERFORM GRID does NOT apply to pattern switching, which is my primary way of building a song in realtime (live looping).

I'm completely confused by this - being a long-time Ableton user - I'm reading you have to create SCENES and that only scene switching is quantized by the perform grid.

In my mind, that's fine if you've prepared all your scenes ahead of time, but if you just want to be building up patterns and then maybe switching back to an old pattern temporarily etc, working in scenes is going to slow you down a lot and create more cognitive load as well,.

What do you do to have nicely quantized pattern switching in a live looping situation? Do you embrace the Scene approach? If so, what's your quickest workflow that doesn't take you out of the flow?

Note: I may have many GROUPS playing with their own patterns - another reason SCENES might cause challenges.

Eager to learn what others are doing.

D-One

This was the first thing people complained about when Ideas Mode was introduced…….. in 2016 with v2.6, 10 years later, Ideas Mode hasn't had a single improvement. 🤷‍♂️

What do you do to have nicely quantized pattern switching in a live looping situation? Do you embrace the Scene approach?

You have no choice but to embrace Scenes/Sections or embrace the margin of error that comes with switching patterns without sync. IMO, the best approach is a combination of both because some things sound fine if not perfectly on time, and others not really.

If so, what's your quickest workflow that doesn't take you out of the flow?

Maybe just duplicate the Scene/Section before making changes, you can enable Scene duping to also dupe Patterns in the settings (this can help or make your project a mess, depends). All of this depends a lot on the details of your workflow.

In some cases, using Lock-States might also be a favorable approach.