Another method we can use in Session View, I learned from Ian McIntosh. Essentially, you have a scene that starts at the top of the song and plays all the way through. The next scene would start from the following section and so on and so forth. Most performers follow a certain arrangement and the idea is that even if they take a detour, they’ll eventually come back to the original arrangement. So you can jump to whatever section you want and continue from that point onward. So let’s get started.

Setup Up MIDI Markers

There are a number of ways to accomplish this and, similar to our previous post, I recommend laying the track out in Arrangement View first. (TIP: Check out this post for laying songs out in Arrangement View) 

Then, add in MIDI clips as markers for your song sections. (Select area and Cmd-Shift-M) that are the same length as each section and label them accordingly. 

Moving Over to Session View

Set the start and end points of the loop brace to the start and end points of the song, then click on the loop brace to select all of the stems inside the loop brace. Then select the first MIDI clip, click and hold, then press ‘Tab’ to go over to Session View. Simply drop your tracks in the next available scene. Your next step is to tab back over to the Arrangement View and drag the start of the loop brace to the start of the following section in the song. Then click drag the MIDI clip of the corresponding song section and tab back over to the Session View. Repeat this process until you’ve gone through the whole song.

Lastly, copy and paste all of the names on the song sections from the MIDI clips to their corresponding scenes, and the job is done.

Closing Thoughts

So this method is probably the easiest Session View Method to set up and, in our opinion, is the least likely to have issues on stage, but there are a few downsides.

1. You cannot edit arrangements
2. You cannot easily change time signature mid-song
3. You cannot easily change tempo mid-song
4. You cannot spontaneously loop sections unless they’ve been pre-programmed to do so.

If any of these reasons pose a problem for you, stay tuned, we’ll be dealing with them in later posts. We hope this has been helpful and we’ll see you soon.

Thanks for reading!