Hi - have looked through the forum to see if someone had answered this and didn’t really find anything. Did a quick search on Perplexity to see if it was possible, and got really confused so thought it worth anotherr ask:
I’d like to use Ableton as a long sample player but use Digitakt as the main driver of my live set. So as I navigate through different banks and patterns on DTK, I’d like to send a midi message to switch to a specific Ableton scene (or even just next scene if this isn’t possible). ideally all in sync, so longer samples play out over the course of each pattern / song.
So it does look as though you can midi map scene controls, and then trigger them by sending midi messages from DTK. I need to be able to send Ableton to a specific scene number, which it looks like you can do by sending cc messages targeting the specific scene.
It’s been a while, but I sometimes used DT encoders to control Ableton stuff. I just went to MIDI map in Ableton, selected the destination and moved the DT encoder. DT was connected via USB, no OB needed I think.
So you should be able to select scenes in the MIDI map destination and then just press a trig on DT so you get 16 trigs to launch different scenes when you press trigs 1-16.
That’s what I would do, although it sounds like you want to program that stuff into the sequencer, which might be more complicated. A quick idea on that: when I use my Faderfox and map it in Ableton, it appears that certain FF knobs/buttons are recognized by Ableton as certain notes and can just be mapped to anything. So maybe you could check if you can define some notes for scenes you want to trigger, go into the Ableton mapping menu and hit that note when assigning scene launch. If it works, you could just program these notes into DT sequencer so you have exact control over when which scene will launch.
Mapping midi notes to the clips or scenes should work . Dedicate a track on the Digitakt to act as the ‘sequencer’ for your clips/scenes. Could get a bit messy. I might actually try this out myself after work.
I almost had it working just now. But making sure the trigs send the message at the right moment is fiddly. and also to do this for a whole set might be a bit of a head twister…
I’ve also been looking at other sample players (like Simpler or Koala) to do the same thing - but I’m struggling to figure out how to get the sample to stop when I need it to. So for example, I have a sample that’s - say - 2 mins long that I want to play as I build up tracks in a single pattern. Then when I move on to the next pattern, I might (or might not) want the sample to stop. That’s why I thought Ableton scenes would work well, because I could remove the stop button on the clip…
Yep! A dedicated MIDI track on your DT, sending out a single note (1st COND) that you map to a scene slot will work just fine.
Each pattern on your DT can use a different note (C3 for ptn 1/scene 1, C#3 for ptn 2/scene 2, etc…), or you can use the scene up/down and play buttons that appear within MAP mode (they’re hidden outside MAP mode). You can even map one of DT’s encoders (on the MIDI machine) to scroll through the scenes by mapping to the Scene Select number box.
Disable the quantization in Live (next to the metronome icon, click ‘1 Bar’ and change it to ‘None’).
You can also map the Scene STOP to the DT’s stop button - but you need to double tap it to map it.