Hey folks! :) &Applying groove live in Live?

[bobombt]

Hey folks ^^ Producer from Scotland here, ended up here after a while exploring the capabilities of Ableton with controllers and I'm pretty impressed with what it can do! I'm an instrumentalist who ended up learning a bunch of different instruments and never ended up good enough on any of them to really be professional, so it's given me an amazing way to put everything together. Came across it a few short years ago and it's been a mental learning curve, so much to take in!

One thing that's pickling the hell out of my brain is why Ableton haven't built in any way to get groove onto clips as you're performing with controllers.. I suppose it's not something that traditionally massively common in purely electronic music but still... you gotta have some groove maaaan

I did realise earlier today I could probably leave a bunch of blank midi clips with a groove on all over the session, and record everything overdubbed - which I think would work, but it's far from an ideal setup.

Buuuuut, i'm kinda sensing that someone here might just have a solution to this...? I'd be eternally unbelievably grateful, as it would really open the doors for me to make the kinda music I wanna be making

Peace n light, all the best

[Stray]

Welcome to the forum. I'm not aware of a solution for doing this completely and directly from a controller. Live's UI and backend don't provide appropriate methods unfortunately. However, you could possibly create some clips with the grooves you want, store them such that they're easily accessible from the browser and then use them as templates when creating new clips that should utilize those grooves. Still not very ideal, but perhaps a bit better than having to add a bunch of clips to every Live set.

Personally, I've never used grooves in Live. If they were more accessible I might, but currently find it much quicker to just play the parts the way I want them. The only time I use any sort of quantization in Live is when I want a hard quantized (non-human like) sound. For me, this allows for a very quick workflow. Of course, that requires practice, but I think it's worth it due to the workflow advantage and the fact that it works with any DAW and even old school multi-track recorders/sequencers.

Sorry for not having a better solution for you.