Control Macros In Ableton Live

If you’ve ever gone onstage with Ableton Live on a laptop, I don’t have to tell you how convenient Live’s realtime control inputs are. In Session mode, you can start and stop individual clips on the fly, improvising or embellishing an arrangement as the mood strikes.

But like many other music programs, Live only lets you assign one action to a given command. If you happen to want to mute track 2, switch to a new clip on track 3, and alter an effect’s wet/dry mix at the same time, you’ll have to make three separate moves on your MIDI master controller or the QWERTY keyboard. Getting them all cued up on the next downbeat may be tricky. Setting up a single scene that will include all of the desired changes is often practical but sometimes difficult.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could set up control macros in Live that would do a number of things in response to a single physical command? Or how about a tempo-based macro that would trigger one action in Live and then trigger another action (in another track) eight measures later, automatically, while your hands are busy doing other things?

While this capability is not to be found in Live’s feature list, there is a way. The trick is to send the MIDI output of a Live track back into Live’s remote control MIDI input via an external data path. Windows users will need to download and install MIDI-Yoke NT from www.midiox.com. This freeware utility gives Windows eight “pipelines” that can shuttle MIDI data from one application to another — or, in this case, from an application to itself. Mac users need to activate the Inter-Application Communication (IAC) bus in the Audio MIDI Setup box. (The rest of this column will refer to MIDI-Yoke.)

Go to Live’s MIDI preferences and switch on MIDI-Yoke NT 1 as a remote input. Also, enable MIDI-Yoke NT 1 as a track MIDI output. Your settings should appear as shown in Figure 1. Note: Don’t turn on the MIDI-Yoke input to tracks, as this would potentially create a MIDI feedback loop, which would likely lock up your computer.

Create a new MIDI track and name it “Macro.” Set its output to MIDI-Yoke, as shown in Figure 2. (Because Live’s MIDI output assignments can be given channel assignments, you can create up to 16 macro tracks if you need to.)

If you have a MIDI keyboard or other controller handy, the next step is to click the MIDI button and make assignments in the usual way, by selecting switches and tapping one key at a time. If you don’t have a MIDI keyboard, you’ll need to send one note at a time in Learn mode using your Macro track and MIDI-Yoke.

To do this, create a looped MIDI clip in the Macro track, insert a single note in that clip so that Learn mode will have something to learn, start playback of the macro clip, and then click the MIDI button and click on the desired switch. The next time the macro clip loops around, Learn mode will assign that note to the switch.

Exit MIDI Learn, drag the note up or down to a new pitch, and repeat the process. After assigning all of the MIDI notes you need to various switches, you can easily create a macro clip that will fire off the desired MIDI notes, either in a cluster or strung out across 16 bars or more.

I recommend setting the macro clip(s) to ¼ launch quantization. Having done this, you can trigger them before the fourth beat of the bar. Your MIDI note commands will then arrive reliably before the next downbeat, triggering other clips at the bar line as expected.
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A macro clip can be set to one-shot rather than loop mode — or, if the switches it’s controlling are toggles, a macro clip that loops can toggle your set back and forth between two states.

Macro clips can send MIDI control change (CC) data instead of notes, for controlling continuously variable parameters such as filter cutoff and effects sends. True, you can use ordinary clip envelopes to control the same parameters, but doing it with macros offers some advantages. You can turn a macro-clip-based controller sweep on and off while the clip that’s being affected continues to play — no need to create a separate set of clips with and without their own envelopes. By using follow actions on a set of macro clips, you can randomly or deterministically create a musical pattern that moves various parameters on different tracks. And you can add a filter sweep onstage using the QWERTY keyboard, even if you don’t have a MIDI controller hooked up.