Okay, so here’s another method for Ableton’s Session View. It does take some work to get running but it does give similar functionality to Arrangement View and you’ll only have to set this up once (depending on your set up).

Chopping Up Our Stems

We recommend laying out your song(s) in arrangement to get started. (TIP: Check out this post for laying songs out in Arrangement View). Create a blank MIDI channel and add in MIDI clips (select area and Cmd-Shift-M) that are the same length as each section. 

Then, rename the MIDI clips to their corresponding section names. (Click on a MIDi clip and press Cmd-R to rename).

The next step is to divide the stems at the beginning of each section. If you’ve got markers set up you can select all stems and click the ‘next locator’ arrow located near the top right and press Cmd-E to divide all the stems at the current locator. Repeat this until all of the stems are divided by section. 

Transferring Over to Session View

Your next step is to transfer your MIDI and audio clips over to Session View. Select all the MIDI and audio clips, click the first MIDI clip and hold, then press Tab, this will flip over to Session View. Still holding the mouse or trackpad down, hover over to the MIDI track and drop the clips onto the next available scene, then you release them. Lastly, you have the tedious task of copying the names from the MIDI clips and pasting them onto their corresponding scenes.

Getting the Song to Play

The last thing you need to do is to get the song to play from top to bottom. You do this by assigning a follow action to every scene. In order for the follow actions to work you need 2 things, 1, the action must be set to ‘next’ and, 2, it must be the correct number of bars. Check the length of each section by double clicking on the corresponding MIDI clip and typing in whatever value that is into the scene. Then set all of the scenes to ‘next’ apart from the very last, set that one to ‘stop’. Done!

Closing Thoughts

We hope you enjoyed this post, though it may be tedious, it’s a good option for those who prefer Session View. There’s a way to temporarily stop the follow actions in order to loop a section, but we’ll cover that in another post. Until next time.

Thanks for reading!