Beat Box: Leading (or Following) by Action- An Underrated Ableton Feature
Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 10:46PM 
One of the biggest benefits of working in session mode in Ableton Live is the ability to allow the computer itself to trigger the playback of different clips that are set up within an individual channel in a project. The use of lead and follow actions in Ableton actually seems to be a feature that many users overlook in this program, most likely because of the fact that most traditional DAWs do not have this capability. However once you learn about lead/follow actions and how simple they are to set up, it can easily become a ubiquitous part of the production process!
In a nutshell, lead and follow actions are established by creating multiple clips in an individual (audio or MIDI) channel. When activated, you are sending Ableton instruction to play these clips back in either a pre-determined or completely random order, depending on how you choose to set them up.
Lead/follow actions are great to use if you are looking to create subtle variations within a drum or synth loop in a live performance to keep the song interesting. When double clicking on an individual clip, in the inspector window at the bottom you need to click the little “L” bubble at the bottom left corner of the window to open the Launch window which allows you to control these parameters.
The main controls we will concern ourselves with here are the ones in the bottom half of the launch window. Under “follow action”, the first set of 3 adjacent boxes controls the duration (in bars) as to how long it takes to trigger the next action. For example, setting this to 0, 0, 1 allows the action to take place each individual beat, 0, 1, 0 it takes place each measure, etc.
In the middle window we can establish two different actions, and in the bottom window we determine the ratio of how often the left one happens as opposed to the one on the right. In the picture above, our ratio is 1:1, so when I start the song there is a 50% chance the clip below the one I start with will play, and a 50% chance that ANY clip within the channel will play. Now each clip can have it’s own custom actions set, so if I told the second clip from the top of the channel to stop and set the chance to 100%, as soon as this clip is triggered it will stop as soon as the clip plays through.
A great exercise to familiarize yourself with lead and follow actions is to create 4 or 5 different clips of the same drum loop in one channel. Use slightly different envelope settings to distinguish them from one another. In the example above, I made a version of the loop that has a very slow attack on each hit, where the others had much quicker attacks and very short durations/fast decay. Then select all of your clips and set your follow action to “any”. You have instantly created infinite variations and fills of a simple drum pattern! Try experimenting with other parameters as well, such as transposition, volume, and detune settings on pads.
Check out the video below to see a nice live demonstration on lead and follow actions!
Reader Comments (2)
awesome post nick. every producers worst nightmare is the dreaded loopy track. what a great way to add variability and texture. thanks for sharing!
Hey Mike- check out the new Computer Music Monthly special edition on Ableton Live that just hit the shelves in the bookstores this week. I've only scratched the surface of the book but there's a ton of useful info/tutorials in there, including the very first proper one I've ever seen on Collision (the new instrument bundled with the v8 suite). Sample DVD isn't half that bad either!